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Emerging Voices: The Portrayal of Minorities in the Work of Willa Cather
Plicková, Michaela ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The thesis seeks to explore the portrayal of the othered, marginalized individuals in the fictional work of Willa Cather. The primary focus of the text is the first-person narrative of My Ántonia (1917). Other complementary primary sources are Cather's remaining two prairie novels - O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915) - and two books of the author's later artistic creation - Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). The former two books function as a preliminary mapping of Cather's concerns developed in My Ántonia, the latter two texts present Cather's later reflections of otherness. The thesis focuses on Cather's incessant examination of the workings of the white, male, heteronormative discourse in the context of modern American nationhood: by her "queer" writing, she aims to unearth and subvert the coercive social mechanisms, and give voice to those who were eclipsed from the project of the rising economic empire: ethnic others (African Americans, Native Americans, European immigrants), and gendered and sexual others (women, homosexuals and lesbians). The identity of modern American society reposes on the construction of the social other and the artificial category of normality. Cather, on the other hand, examines the difference - sexual, racial,...
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The Quest for Identity within the Reality of Plantation Memory in Eudora Welty's Short Fiction
Plicková, Michaela ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Matthews, John Thomas (referee)
The present MA thesis discusses Eudora Welty's short fiction and the author's engagement with the plantation memory. The introductory chapter defines the concept of plantation memory as a flux of the normative plantation binaries, the plantation mythology obscuring the ante-bellum Southern reality, the linguistic and phenomenal evidence of the prevailing oppression, and the ability of the text and its creator to subvert the official narratives and to liberate the individuals' silenced voices. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, the thesis examines the processes in which the particular selves are confronted with the plantation order and in which their identities are consolidated, either resisting or crumbling under the social pressure. The three analytical chapters of the thesis discuss nine of Welty's short stories that were selected from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty on the basis of the typology and criteria outlined in the introduction. Without claiming that the nine stories present the sum of Welty's artistic achievement, the texts attempt to demonstrate general tendencies and narrative strategies that the author applies in her short fiction, writing about and within the plantation memory. The selection includes as many different texts as possible and contains three stories and three...
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Emerging Voices: The Portrayal of Minorities in the Work of Willa Cather
Plicková, Michaela ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The thesis seeks to explore the portrayal of the othered, marginalized individuals in the fictional work of Willa Cather. The primary focus of the text is the first-person narrative of My Ántonia (1917). Other complementary primary sources are Cather's remaining two prairie novels - O Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915) - and two books of the author's later artistic creation - Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). The former two books function as a preliminary mapping of Cather's concerns developed in My Ántonia, the latter two texts present Cather's later reflections of otherness. The thesis focuses on Cather's incessant examination of the workings of the white, male, heteronormative discourse in the context of modern American nationhood: by her "queer" writing, she aims to unearth and subvert the coercive social mechanisms, and give voice to those who were eclipsed from the project of the rising economic empire: ethnic others (African Americans, Native Americans, European immigrants), and gendered and sexual others (women, homosexuals and lesbians). The identity of modern American society reposes on the construction of the social other and the artificial category of normality. Cather, on the other hand, examines the difference - sexual, racial,...
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