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Czechs, the heroes of the Wild West
Hecková, Lucie ; Quinn, Justin (referee) ; Procházka, Martin (advisor)
I would like to thank the following people who helped make it possible for this thesis to be completed. First of all, thanks to my supervisor at Charles University in Prague, Prof. PhDr. Martin Procházka, Dr.Sc.,, whose advice and experience added to a more concise focus in the work as a whole. Through his gentle guidance my intellectual powers were stretched. Also, I want to thank my friends and great Iowans, Lloyd Dunn and Mark Yates who provided me with their scholarly skills, candid opinions and endless optimism. Last but not least is my husband John, who contributed to the source of my interest in Midwestern U.S. History, and whose constant support and encouragement helped me finish this work.
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Metaphors and symbols of states of mind in Poe's poems, short stories and essays
Martináková, Iva ; Quinn, Justin (referee) ; Procházka, Martin (advisor)
Working on this project has been a valuable and enlightening experience, as I had the exciting opportunity to explore Edgar Allan Poe's work in greater detail and attempt to reveal its many intricacies. Connecting Poe's works with metaphors and symbols has made this project all the more interesting, for it has added another dimension to my research, and I hope that it will help others gain some insight, or perhaps deepen it, in the relevant subject area of Poe's work. I would like to thank, above all, my supervisor, Prof. PhDr. Martin Procházka, CSc., who has been very helpful and inspirational throughout the development of this project, and whose input I greatly appreciate. In conclusion, I would also like to thank my family and others who have been encouraging and supportive.
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Dylan Thomas as a love poet
Mečířová, Eliška ; Armand, Louis (referee) ; Quinn, Justin (advisor)
The aim of the following BA thesis is to discuss and analyse the poetry of Dylan Thomas as love poetry. Thomas's relatively short literary career ended prematurely and the reception of his work was inconsistent from the very beginning. Some praised him as one of the best English poets and others condemned his poetry as empty rambling. Thomas led the life of a prototypical Bohemian poet and in his speech in Rome in 1947 he proclaimed about himself: "One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women." Thomas's poems very much reflect his attitude, his love of life; the main themes they deal with are procreation, birth and death, sensuality, love and religion. Only a few of Thomas's poems do not contain the word "love", yet the range and the meanings of love are multiple in his work. Thomas includes the notion of love in all of his collections. His love for Wales and human race in general merges with his love for women and also for men, his love of God as well as the senses is reflected in his poetry.
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The speech of nature and objects in the poetry of Medbh McGuckian
Skálová, Alena ; Wallace, Clare (referee) ; Quinn, Justin (advisor)
Before analysing the poetry of Medbh McGuckian, Michael Allen mentions different ways of reading poetry and suggests that in order to perceive the subterranean ways of imagery, "a complete understanding of a poem is not necessary".101 At that stage of reading, however, McGuckian may seem wilfully obscure, and only a reading aimed at the meaning of the poems proves the contrary. In closer readings Allen argues that we realize her "way of distancing us fruitfully",102 her sense that "dreams are part of reality", her "riddling translation of life into artefact, artefact into life"103 and other constraints for readers' interpretation of her poems. From Allen's point I wish to develop the link between the obscured meanings in McGuckian's verse and different ways of reading her poetry and conclude thus my observation of her work. During the introduction of my thesis I explained that I will not concentrate on individual themes within the poetry, but on the author's concept, her treatment of them, on her perception of the world. With different approaches to reading poems, the question about their meanings arises. Where should we look for the meaning of a poem, or should we strive to reach it at all? Answers to this question are different for different poets and different time. In McGuckian's case, I perceive the...
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Robert Frost: the village and beyond
Mecner, Michal ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee) ; Quinn, Justin (advisor)
Robert Frost (1874 - 1963) was a prominent American poet, teacher, lecturer, scholar, public figure, American symbol and thinker of the 20th century. As Archibald MacLeish emphasizes, Frost was not only a poet of his time, of the American nation, but - much like William Shakespeare - a poet of the English language itself (MacLeish, 439). Frost's command of colloquial speech and the New England dialect is considered by the critics to be outstanding. Depiction of rural life is dominant in Frost's poetry and Frost himself took the life of a farmer-poet. And, as MacLeish reminds us, Frost was city-born, town-bred and his story is rather one of a stranger who falls in love with New England and makes his life in it (MacLeish, 442). However, there is a gap between the traditional pastoral poetry and Frost's oeuvre which is modernistic in many ways. Nature clearly dominates Frost's verse but it is arguably not its central theme. Rather, it serves as a shifting background for the portrait of man, for the experience of what it means to be human. The merit of Frost's poetry lies in the dramatized relationship between the character portrayed and the environment surrounding him. Rather than depicting the dominance of one over the other (e.g. of man and technology over nature or the submission of man before nature),...
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20th century haiku in English
Roubíček, Jan ; Houskova, Mariana (referee) ; Quinn, Justin (advisor)
For a reader or author residing in the West, the haiku journal scene is, owing to the Internet and to the many published printed journals, abundantly rich, and from the research we have done, we see that there is also a large number of authors in the English-speaking world who submit to these journals. The Internet also offers the option of blogspots, which some authors make use of; scholarly articles on haiku are readily accessible through journals and through other web pages. This situation allows for a dialogue, where the judgment about a haiku's quality is never simple. In the conclusion to this paper, we will sum up what we consider to be the important features of haiku, and we will discuss the prose-poetry dichotomy, as it seems to have relevance for haiku. The Japanese tradition still plays a crucial role in shaping modern haiku, as can be seen in the issues of Shamrock and elsewhere; there is a clear awareness, in the haiku community, that English is a different medium, with its rhythm and sound specifics, and that the same applies for other languages.
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Frustrated sensibilities in the context of the conventions of the New York elite of Wharton's fiction
Křenková, Markéta ; Quinn, Justin (referee) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor)
The following essay examines Wharton's fiction within the context of a set of societal conventions in which her writing is framed and the ways in which these conventions work to frustrate the natural development of the individual life-narrative. The frustrations depicted in the following works here looked at result from the specific societal conditions in which her characters find themselves. The old New York aristocracy to which Wharton's parents belonged, with its conventional morality and inflexible standards of "scrupulous probity in business and private affairs", 1 is represented by Wharton as having a numbing effect on the moral and sexual development of her female protagonists. The foregoing will form the focus of my analysis in the sections dealing with frustrated moral integrity and frustrated femininity. Also to be found in this chapter is an examination of the specific manners on the basis of which this society operated, and the way in which these manners, as the physical manifestations of strict conventions, compound these individual frustrations. The social elite of New York changed with the impact of a newly emerging industrial society in the 1880s. Wharton focuses on the transitional stage between the merging of these two societies and exposes the damaging consequences of the materialism that...
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Narrating history, constructing identity: the postmodern turn in William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury and Go down, Moses
Žebrowska, Barbara ; Quinn, Justin (referee) ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor)
The gradual and contestable transition from the modem to what has come to be labeled as the postmodern era has been characterized as unnerving. This transition, it is said, has unsettled and is still in the process of disquieting all areas of human enterprise and knowledge. The term postmodernism encompasses a disputable set of ideas and features; its time frame and applicability to different subjects are also questionable. It is this very aspect of questioning that most aptly delineates the process by which postmodernist outlooks approach the contemporary world. At the core of this questioning lies an incredulity toward any reality and truth. Rather, reality, postmodernism says, is constructed and defined solely by language. This fore grounding of language before the existence of external reality casts a new light on the creation of meaning and identity in the postmodern world. The modernist endeavor to find the essential core in one's identity disintegrates in the postmodern understanding of identity as a cultural construct that is determined only in relation to its surroundings. Without these relations, be it familial or societal, identity - and for that matter all meaning - bears no substance and faces the perpetual threat of becoming lost. A sense of loss informs postmodern philosophy, and it entails...
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Blindness and Obsession: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Laughter in the Dark
Rychnovská, Tereza ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee)
Many books and essays have been written on the works of Vladimir Nabokov, of which my bibliography contains only a tiny fragment. Yet, most of the studies make comparisons within either Nabokov's Russian works or his American works, while the comparison of the two novels I have chosen, Lolita and Laughter in the Dark, is very rare. Most novels by Vladimir Nabokov display the themes of obsession, blindness, manipulation, freedom, and morality. Most of them also are about games, including language games, and the love of language in general. Nabokov switched from writing in Russian to English and experienced a great deal of pain in relinquishing his native tongue, becoming a phantom in his own prose, as if, he said, he had created the person who wrote in English but was not himself doing the writing. 1 Bearing this in mind, it is also important to state that he had translated two of his Russian novels into English (Laughter in the Dark and Despair) . This split in Nabokov's life into two periods is also why it was of great relevance to me that I should compare two of his novels that were written at different times, in different languages, and with different backgrounds. It might seem more natural to compare two novels originally written in Russian that have quite similar plots and characters, Laughter in the...
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