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Literary, cultural and historical influences in the works and beliefs of Oscar Wilde
Lorenzů, Alex ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Quinn, Justin (referee)
The thesis deals with the cultural and literary influences that can be traced in the works of Oscar Wilde. Its aim is to map out and elucidate some of the important motifs of the author's work and aesthetics in their own context as well as in the wider cultural-historical one. The methods used will be comparison of relevant materials, analysis of certain expressions typical of the author with their connotations, explaining the intertextual allusions in Wilde's work, and historical sources. The requisite attention will also be paid to Wilde as a representative of a subversive element of Victorian society and how this relates to his sexuality; that is to say, exploring the issue of the tabooing of non-heterosexuality, which may have been a decisive factor in Wilde's criticism of the conventions of his era and to his search of positive role-models in the ancient tradition both for his art and for his personal philosophy. Keywords Ancient Greece, ancient Rome, fin-de-siecle, homosexuality, intertextuality, l'art pour l'art, LGBTQ*, Marius the Epicurean, metatextuality, non-heterosexuality, Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Victorian era, Walter Pater.
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Images of a city
Vlková, Jana ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The thesis provides three distinct perspectives on the representations of urban spaces in poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. While they are dissimilar in terms of poetic style, employed literary devices and concepts and themes they explore, one important aspect is shared: the images of the city serve to discuss themes that transcend the urban domain. Ferlinghetti uses the city as a framework for his reflections on subject matters that have been categorized as follows: intertextuality, memory, critical urban discourse. The first perspective regards the city as a text and an intertext composed of various sorts of texts such as architecture, visual arts, literature, sculpture or music. These texts may enter the relation with the urban text when they are "read" in the context of actual physical location. A juxtaposition of two dissimilar texts may trigger production of new meanings, which has the character of continual process: it is the intertextual flux. As a result, the perception of one or both codes suffers modification; one text contaminates the other. The examples of these influences and interferences between urban and other texts are analyzed on the background of the study of intertextuality in reception and critical theory. The second perspective presents the city as a mnemonic space where both...
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Fictional political mirroring in Two novels by Vladimír Nabokov
Šindelářová, Martina ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
The focus of this thesis is to closely analyze two novels by Vladimir Nabokov, namely Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, and on the basis of close reading as well as detailed examination of critical literature enlighten the circumstances of their creation in the course of author's life and the influences and experiences that might have imprinted in the novels. Although validity of biographical approach may be subjected to question, it proves to be a rather insightful approach concerning the central topic of the thesis and it also provides wider perspective for more accurate understanding of the novels, as it directs the reader from politics towards more philosophical and aesthetical concerns. The thesis should also summarise the main points of Nabokov's artistic theory and clarify what was the main concern of Nabokov's literary works. Invitation to a Beheading, one of the last works Nabokov wrote in his mother tongue, a "dystopian fable" which appeared for the first time in a Russian émigré magazine Sovremenniya Zapiski in 1938, follows the last days of Cincinnatus C., a prisoner sentenced to death for his deviation from the common transparency of his fellow citizens in a world which is a grotesque parody of an absurd political regime, but at the same time this exaggerating portrayal depicts the...
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Struggles in Ken Kesey's novels One flew over the cuckoo's nest and Sometimes a great notion
Čížek, Filip ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Quinn, Justin (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to explore the theme of struggles in Ken Kesey's most acclaimed novels One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. The two books were written only two years apart, and despite the major difference in form and style, I was struck by the amount of conflict around which they both revolve. The conflicts are very visible and explicit, they form the basis of the plots, they condition what kind of characters appear, and introduce the idea of various types of opposition. Being novels from the sixties written by an important countercultural figure, this is not all too surprising. The point I wish to illustrate, is that the characters' internal struggles hold at least as much importance as those that are exhibited on the outside. These internal strivings have a very essential nature, because they are struggles for identity, and also for survival, which leads me to believe the novels situate conflict at the very core of human existence. It is first necessary to clarify what exactly is understood by "struggles". Webster's Third New International Dictionary offers these definitions: the verb to struggle means "to make violent, strenuous, labored or convulsive exertions or efforts against difficult or forceful opposition or impending or constraining circumstances." The noun is...
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Abstract expressionism and Raymond Roussel in the poetry of John Ashbery
Peková, Olga ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Armand, Louis (referee)
Expressionism and Raymond Roussel in the Poetry of John Ashbery John Ashbery is the epitome of the postmodern poet and he reflects in his writings a variety of influences. These are an inherent part of the understanding and appreciation of his poetry but also informative about his attitude to the literary canon: more precisely, they are testimonies of his attraction to avant-gardes and minor and marginal authors. Two representatives of these have been selected for detailed comparison. The first is the second generation of Abstract Expressionists associated with the 1950s New York School of poetry of which Ashbery became a prominent member. The second is the French obscure proto- surrealist Raymond Roussel. The thesis compares several formal aspects of Ashbery's poetry with their respective techniques with a view to elucidate the workings and attitudes behind Ashbery's singular style. Abstract Expressionists were chosen due to Ashbery's long engagement with visual arts criticism and the already-mentioned fact of their shared milieu of the New York School. The comparison, based on Charles Altieri's 1988 article "John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts," distinguishes two main parallels between the visual and linguistic material: a treatment of language similar to collaging...
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Elizabeth Bishop: Translation as Poetics
Machová, Mariana ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Hilský, Martin (referee) ; Costello, Bonnie (referee)
The dissertation thesis is based on the concept of translation as an aesthetic stance not limited to translating from one language to another, but informing a certain type of original creation. In order to speak about this aesthetic stance which shares some of its features, methods and values with those often found in the work of a translator the term "translation poetics" is proposed. The American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is presented and examined as a representative of this poetic type. A study of her lifetime work as a translator creates a context and background for the formulation of the basic characteristics of Bishop's "translation poetics", and, consequently, for the reading of her poems. The detailed chronological examination of all her translations (from Ancient Greek, French, Portuguese and Spanish) is followed by an outline of the main poetic principles which lie both behind translation and the original creation, and these are exemplified by detailed close-readings of a selection of Bishop's poems. The key features of Bishop's "translation poetics" (the interest meetings and borders; tensions between domination and submission, and between the insider and the outsider position; sensitivity towards the plurality of voices and of perspectives; a stress on dialogue and interaction;...
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Shapes of writing in modern American poetry and art: Ashbery, Andre, Twombly
Hovorka, Jakub ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Quinn, Justin (referee)
The three artists/poets brought together by this thesis are radically different from one another not only in their vocations but also in their ways of writing and making. It is hard, and perhaps impossible, to unite them on a single plane. John Ashbery is a poet and his poetry as it is here presented in terms of its relation to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art is one of disjunction, disorientation and dislocation, a space where relationships and orders are subjected to destruction and erasure. Carl Andre is a sculptor but also a poet whose works are characterized by repetition of basic materials and words in simple patterns, seemingly renouncing any creative role of the artist, and instead foregrounding the textures and shapes of things and words. Cy Twombly is a painter whose paintings and drawings employ writing and texts visually as shapes that carry meaning by their arrangement on paper or canvas. Unlike Andre and Ashbery, whose poetry is characteristic for materialism and impersonality, for being located in the present, Twomblys works distinguish themselves by classicism, romanticism and symbolism. Nevertheless, as I have tried to show, all three of these artists and poets take words and writing into close proximity of art, they re-conceive the process of writing poetry by analogizing it with...
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Affinities beween the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Paul Valéry
Vančurová, Karolína ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
Affinities of the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and Paul Valéry ABSTRACT Author: Karolina Vančurová This thesis deals simultaneously with the poetics of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and Paul Valéry (1871-1945). More precisely, it deals with the poetry and thought of Stevens and with the texts concerned with art and poetry of Paul Valéry; the poetry of the latter is considered only marginally. This is done with the aim to discover the nature of the influence of the French poet on Stevens, who called the former "the prodigy of poetry" at the end of his own life. This influence has shown to be real but still to a great degree invented on my part because I could neither glimpse into the Huntington Library to see what books Stevens possessed and read nor could I trace all the movements of his mind. Nevertheless, it is clear from the way Stevens wrote about having the chance to study Valéry closely when he was preparing his two introductions to the American edition of Valéry's dialogues, that the French poet's oeuvre represented an irresistible lure for him. In order to bring the two poets, who were contemporaries but never met on one identical platform in real, together I focused, first and most importantly, on the various ways in which Stevens could have approached or encountered the thoughts of Valéry. In the first...
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Representations of the female in the work of Charles Bukowski
Mecner, Michal ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
Women. Coincidentally and yet not coincidentally the title of a Charles Bukowski novel and the main subject of this thesis. Charles Bukowski (1920 - 1994) was a German-born prolific American writer whose poetry and prose revolve about the underground life of Los Angeles. His characters were drunks, hustlers, prostitutes, losers, and social misfits. As inspiration he had countless dead-end factory jobs, love-hate relationships, or afternoons spent in the racetrack. After a hard day's work he cracked open a beer, put on a classical record, and began composing poems until his fingers "began to bleed" from typing or until the police came on account of the neighbors' complaint about his disturbing the peace. Bukowski's work in general is centered around the antithesis of the traditional American dream but to be more precise we should say that Bukowski was largely ignorant of the conventional way of living and the American go-getter ideal. Among the low class which became the most frequent subject of Bukowski's writing there is no such thing as daydreaming and the nights are too wild to be spent on dreaming either. There is simply no place for dreams in the lives of lower classes; there is only the rough reality of life at the bottom of everything. No wonder the author chose "Don't try" as his epitaph, often...
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Philip Larkin as a love poet
Rejšková, Tereza ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Tobrmanová, Šárka (referee)
This thesis has tried to show that most of Philip Larkin's poems have something to say about love. However, whether it allows us to call Larkin a love poet or not is difficult to say. Perhaps Larkin did not write enough about love to be called a love poet; or perhaps he wrote too much. He did not write enough in the sense that there are no long (or short) lists of poems about a beloved person or about being in love. And he wrote too much in the sense that love is so important in the poetry that it cannot be isolated only in a few love poems. Larkin did not treat love as a special category of occurrences which could be separated from everything else that belongs to people's lives (and deaths). Therefore one could not speak of Larkin as of a love poet as well as one could not speak of Larkin as a nature poet or as a poet of deprivation. Larkin diligently escapes all such simplifying categories by his rich and complex body of work. The only thing one could say without any further specification is that Larkin is a poet, and the greater poet for escaping all the limiting categories. We certainly can be glad that "poetry chose [him]" (RW 62).
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