National Repository of Grey Literature 150 records found  beginprevious131 - 140next  jump to record: Search took 0.00 seconds. 
Contemporary culture vs. Irishness in the plays of Martin McDonagh
Pichrtová, Lenka ; Pilný, Ondřej (advisor) ; Wallace, Clare (referee)
Thirteen years ago, in 1997, the theatrical community around the world was for the first time amazed by the new emerging persona of European drama, Martin McDonagh (1970), who made a spectacular debut by his play The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1996. This work was followed by three more pieces in quick succession, further confirming McDonagh's status as a rising star. The author has to date publicly produced seven plays which quickly found their way from Great Britain and Ireland into the whole world and enjoyed tremendous success everywhere they were performed. The appearance of a new persona naturally invited a large amount of attention and sometimes very heated criticism; the core debate focuses mainly on the most prominent and shocking aspects of McDonagh's plays - namely violence, emotional vacuum, authenticity and alleged misrepresentation of Irishness. In its introductory contextual part, this thesis would like to illuminate McDonagh's status as an Irish writer, try to place him within the Irish dramatic tradition and provide a comparison with some of his predecessors, namely J. M. Synge and his Playboy of the Western World. This chapter of the thesis will equally concentrate on major themes and means of representing Irishness in the plays and on features connecting McDonagh to other Irish...
Depiction of media in British dystopian fiction
Bakič, Pavel ; Clark, Colin Steele (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee)
The purpose of this thesis was to trace the depiction of media in British dystopian fiction, or rather some of its most prominent landmarks. In its course, however, a need of eclectic approach became apparent, as each novel invited a different framework of interpretation, at least partly: H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes fuses mythological elements with very current exploration of self-definition in the world of freely circulating media images, A. Huxley's Brave New World presents electronic media as dangerous to the proper balance of individual faculties of the human mind, G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four prophesizes the destruction of an individual by ever-escalating state control of media, made possible by technological progress. A. Moore's and D. Lloyd's V for Vendetta adopts and re-imagines all these concerns in a post-modern, self-reflexive and metatextual manner. A more extensive selection of primary texts could possibly yield a clearer line of the theme's evolution throughout the 20th century, or at least succeeding or competing trends in its treatment, but the current, narrower choice bespeaks the considerable individuality of vision in the represented authors' works, even as they often address similar issues and engage in a dialogue by means of shared motifs and concerns.
"Within un-, sub- or supernatural forces": establishing the world of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead
Krtička, Filip ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee)
The atmosphere of Stoppard's tour de force is one of confusion from the beginning to end. Guildenstern is confused about the outcome of the coin tossing and, thus, about the ruling principle of the world, Rosencrantz is confused about Guildenstern's role-playing practice of questioning Hamlet, everyone is confused about which one of the pair is Rosencrantz and which one is Guildenstern, and they are in turn confused about everyone else. Determinism is confused with absurdity, fate is confused with chance, reality is confused with fiction, and art with life. All this is because of the coin, because of all the duality and duplicity of and in the play. When it is announced at the end that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet, all are dead, the reader or the audience are confused about what they have read and seen. "Clearly, Stoppard is transgressing well-defined literary boundaries, and doing so in such a way that his own characters suffer the consequences of his manipulations."287 Stoppard's drama, a hypertext, is situated at the fringes of texts. He thematizes the textual relationships of Rosencrantz's hypotexts. By doing so, the confusion of his protagonists is brought about by the (con)fusion of texts: "That duplicity of the object, in the sphere of textual relations, can be represented by the old analogy...
Translating titles: strategies in translating the titles of American fiction into Czech
Hanžlová, Jitka ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee)
The position of the title of a literary work within the context of the whole work is undoubtedly a special one; consequently, its translation is no less important. The aim of this BA thesis is to focus on the strategies that have been used in translating the titles of American fiction into Czech since 1945. Attention is paid especially to the titles in which some kind of shift in comparison with the original version may be discerned. The work is divided into two parts; the introductory section is theoretical and concentrates on the general characterization of a title, on the way it is structured from the grammatical, formal and stylistic points of view, and on the functions that are attributed to book titles in general. In the following chapter, the standards expected to be fulfilled while translating a book title are described at first. Furthermore, the factors that influence the final shape of the titles in the target language are divided there into two basic groups - objective and subjective. Within the first category, causes such as discrepancies between the two language systems, for example question tags, gerunds or conversion, differences between the aspects of American and Czech life and institutions, and the influence of literary tradition can be found. In the latter category, translating strategies...
Samuel Beckett: the process of impoverishment in his theatre plays
Kmoníčková, Vendula ; Pilný, Ondřej (advisor) ; Wallace, Clare (referee)
Samuel Beckett's early plays are usually regarded as part of the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd, while his later plays are largely considered to be minimalist. As there is no direct relationship between these two styles, they have never been put into perspective. Nevertheless, Beckett's drama for the stage tends towards progressive reduction regarding a number of aspects of the plays, due to which minimalism in Beckett is a logical development of Absurdism. The Theatre of the Absurd, such as Waiting for Godot, already meant reduction when compared to traditional drama. As Martin Esslin described, it lacked developed characters, plot with development and suspense, and dialogue as a means of dialectic exchange. The works that followed intensify the process of impoverishment, leading to mere static poetic images. Plays like Not I and That Time are valid examples of literary minimalism as described by Enoch Brater, Ulysse Duthuit, Leo Bersani, or John Barth.
Gerald MacNamara and the Northern Revival
Diaz, Michael ; Pilný, Ondřej (advisor) ; Wallace, Clare (referee)
English Abstract Nationalist movements often utilize aspects of mythology and history in their attempts to create a nationalist ideology. Through a selective emphasis and narrow interpretation of historical events, nationalist groups strive to create a national mythology. In this regard, the nationalist movements in fin de siècle Ireland are no different. This thesis attempts to show how the work of Gerald MacNamara, an Irish nationalist writing from Unionist Belfast during the periods of Revival and partition, was able to utilize the dramatic forms of parody and satire to create an oeuvre that critiqued both nationalist and unionist ideologies and nationalist movements as a whole.
John Millington Synge and Irish mythology - Deirdre of the sorrows
Pecovová, Petra ; Wallace, Clare (referee) ; Pilný, Ondřej (advisor)
This thesis is focused on the relationship between the mythological tale of Deirdre and John Millington Synge's play Deirdre of the Sorrows. It concentrates primarily on features, such as characters, themes and motives, which distinguish Synge's Deirdre from the previous versions of the tale. The first part lists all the versions that are echoed in Synge's play, which include the 12th century version from the Book of Leinster, the medieval version from the Glenmasan Manuscript and the versions by Synge's fellow writers and dramatists from the Abbey Theatre. It briefly outlines similarities and contradictions between the earlier versions and Synge's approach. The second chapter deals with the role of fate, its representation in the different texts, and how it affects the central themes and motives in the tale. The last part of the thesis analyzes female protagonist and questions her role as a heroine. The aim of this work is primarily to show that portraying realism was essential to Synge, even when dealing with a legend that is comprised of the exact opposite. The most important passages of the thesis are those which uncover the conflicting representations of characters and motives, because they indicate that Synge's fusion of the heroic and peasant world was not successful. Even though he managed to...
Violence and formal challenge in the plays of Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp
Strnadová, Klára ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee) ; Wallace, Clare (advisor)
Both Crimp and Kane are genuine innovators of the dramatic form. The issues dealt with in their works are related; they share similar concerns about the dangers of nowadays' society - and, with it, theatre. This might not be apparent at first sight because of the divergence of styles. Crimp's style is language-centred, hyper-realistic at times, drawing a lot from the theatre of the absurd. He provides a characteristic mixture of satirical edge, ironic detachment and hidden threat. While Crimp works exclusively with the contemporary sensibility, Kane's proximity to the tradition of tragedy can be seen in what she employs in her plays - the big passions, "love, hate, death, revenge, suicide."1 Kane differs from both modernists and postmodernists by her refusal of detachment and by her requirement of emotional involvement. Both the playwright and her characters are absolutist, truth-seeking and provocative. Crimp prevents emotional identification even in the plays that at first sight seem realistic; in the experimental dramas, the distancing device of having stories narrated rather than just shown "allows Crimp to mix acerbic satire with rapid shifts of tone and focus,"2 asking intellectual questions in a convincingly dramatic form. The intense emotional content, which in Kane is delivered by the explicit,...
(Post)Modern Inferno: Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman between modern and medieval netherworlds
Ruczaj, Maciej ; Pilný, Ondřej (advisor) ; Armand, Louis (referee)
I have discussed earlier Noman's hallucinatory experience of "woodenness" spreading across his whole body - "a dry timber poison killing me" (119). It provides another stage in the consistently allegorical construction of the motif. Noman's moment of enlightenment, the possibility of the discovery of an allegorical meaning, is of course immediately distorted by the fact that Noman is already dead and - if his dwelling-place is hell - there is no possibility of further degradation, he is all "wood" by now. "Woodenness" he correctly associates with death, yet as always he misses the point as it is primarily a "spiritual" death that is signalized here.
Troubles on stage: theatrical representation of the conflict in Northern Ireland
Kristenová, Lenka ; Pilný, Ondřej (advisor) ; Wallace, Clare (referee)
The objective of this thesis was to provide a detailed analysis of three modern Irish plays which share one common feature - the portrayal of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Apart from the common background of the Troubles, the plays focus on different aspects of the conflict which also demands different theatrical design. Furthermore, each play was analysed from three social perspectives - religion, gender and locale - in order to examine the ways in which these notions were influenced by the conflict as well as on the ways in which this influence is manifested on individual people. Attached to each play are short conclusions to their respective analyses. Despite their difference, the analyses of the plays also revealed several interesting similarities. Firstly, in the issue of gender, there is a certain discrepancy between the officially proclaimed and recognised division of gender roles and the reality of everyday life. Whereas officially the women are in an inferior position to men, and are expected to be an element of passivity, the three plays suggest that it is rather the men who represent passivity. The plays also point out how the position of men and women in society is further determined by the sectarian conflict. In all three plays, women prove to have stronger characters than men: in Tea in a...

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