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William Faulkner's Light in August: constructing race in the community
Jelínková, Karolína ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
When William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, he entered the times of the high tide of racial extremism that marked the post-Reconstruction era and the beginning of the 20th century. The small domestic world of the Falkner family William lived in as a small boy also afforded him contact with racial differences, most memorably through the servant of the Falkner family - Caroline Barr. This was a harmonious contact. The Falkner boys called Caroline "Mammy" Callie; "she cooked, she cleaned, and she cared for them but most of all the boys liked her stories - of animals in the woods, ghosts, and the 'Old Days' of slavery. The boys loved her dearly" (Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History 153). However, William was soon confronted with the other side of the racially divided world. This must have happened most powerfully in the year 1908, when Oxford, Mississippi witnessed the lynching of Nelse Patton, "a black convict, but also [ ... ] a 'trusty'" (Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History 157) who was allowed to run errands all over the town. He killed Mattie McMillan, a white woman, to whom he delivered a message, but refused to leave her house. She attempted to draw a pistol, but he stopped her and "drew a razor blade across [her] throat [ ... ], almost severing her head from her...
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Ethics of the self as an aesthetics of existence in Wharton's "The house of mirth" and "The age of innocence"
Černá, Pavlína ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Rhoads, Bonita (referee)
Most Edith Wharton scholars have argued The House of Mirth1 (1905) and The Age of Innocence2 (1920) to be naturalist novels interwoven with and based upon socio-economic determinism. Feminist critics, such as Judith Fetterley and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, have depicted Lily Bart in The House of Mirth as a victim of patriarchal society; meanwhile, Marxist critics like Wai-Chee Dimock have been preoccupied with the omnipresent power of the marketplace in the novel. In the case of The Age of Innocence, the criticism has often focused on Wharton's usage of the tribal world of manners as the determining and inescapable force in an individual's life.3 This thesis will engage in reading The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence as naturalist novels with an emphasis on the notion of human conduct and ethics.
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Kurt Vonnegut and His Humor in Three Literary Works and Their Cinematic Adaptations
Samková, Jana ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
This bachelor thesis compares three different cinematic adaptations of three novels by an American writer Kurt Vonnegut and focuses on the way they translate the humor of the three novels. The novels discussed are Mother Night (1962), Slaughterhouse Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973). The cinematic adaptations analyzed in this thesis are Slaughterhouse Five (1972) directed by George Roy Hill and based on a screenplay written by Stephen Geller, Mother Night (1996) directed by Keith Gordon and based on a screenplay written by Robert B. Weide and finally Breakfast of Champions (1999) directed by Alan Rudolph who also wrote the screenplay. The analysis as such is divided into four chapters. Chapter 2 introduces Kurt Vonnegut as an author as well as a person. Several key theories about humor are presented, mainly those articulated by Paul Lewis, Daniel Wickberg and Sarah Blacher Cohen. The phenomenon of cinematic adaptation is introduced in the same section and the theoretical background provided is based on works by Timothy Corrigan, Brian McFarlane and Seymour Chatman. Chapter 3 discusses the novel Slaughterhouse Five and its adaptation, focusing on its structure, themes, characters, time frame and humor. In Chapter 4, Mother Night is discussed in terms of the successfulness of Gordon's...
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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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Fictional paths to a larger truth in american new journalism
Chamonikolas, Kryštof ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
Truman Garcia Capote (1924 - 1984) and Norman Kingsley Mailer (born 1923) were renown in the 1960s as both novelists and journalists. In two of their best-known and often most valued works, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965) and The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel- The Novel as History (1968), they attempted to combine their novelistic and journalistic skills to a yet unprecedented degree and create what Capote himself termed a "nonfiction novel". They wrote book-long texts which 'read like novels', but were simultaneously well-researched and highly accurate journalistic reportages on real events. Originally started as magazine assignments, they both established themselves as landmarks of the 1960s American novel and as central works of the American new journalism, a literary and journalistic movement and genre attempting to blend literary writing techniques with journalistic factuality and accuracy. Despite their common aim and status as "nonfiction novels", however, In Cold Blood and The Armies of the Night represent radically different, even antithetic types of both novel and reportage. A more detailed analysis and critical assessment of their differences and their relationship to other similar works, which I will attempt in this MA thesis, should...
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White city, 1893, technological, commercial, cultural wonder; Against the Day, 2007, Thomas Pynchon
Létalová, Michaela ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Robbins, David Lee (referee)
Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day presents an extreme challenge to the reader's knowledge of sciences and arts as well as to his reading skills. The age of information overload the contemporary society lives in requires fast adaptation to the continual tide of data, products, stress, and to all what civilization calls conveniences and labor saving devices of the modern age. Pynchon's books play the role of the "simulation of the disorienting overload of modern culture".1 All of Pynchon's texts tend to be "long, rambling, multilayered, underplotted, quasi-unfinished monsters. But with this one [Against the Day] there is the feeling that the magician has fallen in love with his own stunts, as though Pynchon were composing a pastiche of a Pynchon novel, says Louis Menand."2 Further according to Menand, Against the Day is imperfect in the sense of "What was he thinking?"3 In order to successfully approach any of Thomas Pynchon's texts the reader needs to be either extremely well educated in all fields of human knowledge, and able to discern between the science part and the fiction part of the text, or capable of a swift use of the computerized body of knowledge - the data stored on the internet, besides the still fairly high required level of education. Knowing as little as we do about the author himself,...
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Vertiginous relations in Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra
Landerová, Petra ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Wallace, Clare (referee)
The recurrent theme of inter-human family relationships in a state of loss and decay in plays authored by Eugene O'Neill arises in part from the author's own traumatic relationship with his parents and with his brother James. Trying to deal with his torturous memories, O'Neill seeks answers through his cursed characters, who partly derive from the writer himself, yet also offer a universal portrayal of humankind as a victim of his own mental being and system. Given O'Neill's profound interest in psychoanalysis, the plays mostly take place in the life process of the individual minds of the protagonists and of the animating effect they have on others who populate the play-texts; therefore it is essential for the understanding of the play-works under critical consideration to look at the inner lives and worlds of these enigmatic characters, and to evaluate to what extent they act on their own will and where, conversely, unconscious forms of desire from other characters, memories, wishes, objects and so forth are instead determinant. The canonical plays Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra offer an intriguing blend of the forms and of the contents of the classical-traditional and of the modern stage play, as they extend the heritage and the lineage of ancient Greek tragedy, although situated in...
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Myth in American Advertising after 1945
Linhart, Marek ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
This thesis is designed as a comprehensive analysis of the advertising discourse within some pre-set constrains. Specifically, the main area of interest is the realm of American print advertising after 1945. Within these limits, advertising is understood as a mode of language, the chief semantic unit of which is a form of Barthesian myth, a superstructure divorced from reality that supersedes de Saussure's semiotics of the sign. The bulk of this thesis is then a diachronic analysis of the development of these myths and their role as both mirrors and catalysts of a whole range of stereotypes, value hierarchies or fixed ideas firmly embedded within American collective consciousness. The primary materials for this analysis are then various specimen of the advertisements themselves, carefully selected because of their representativeness, influence or significance within the advertising realm. The main theoretical framework rests on Marx's understanding of the commodity as a certain type of fetish, Barthes's description of the structure and social function of the myth, Baudrillard's and Debord's theories on such notions as the society of spectacle, the reign of simulacra and hyperreality, Benjamin's understanding of the uniqueness of representation and its aura and finally McLuhan's detailed accounts of...
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"Henry James & His Stance towards Aestheticism and Decadence"
Mackal, Jan ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Robbins, David Lee (referee)
This M.A. thesis focuses on the problematic relationship between Henry James and Aestheticism and Decadence on the example of his two masterpieces-The Portrait of a Lady () and The Golden Bowl (). The main task is to document the evolution of this relationship and to point out that despite his lifelong preoccupation with these two artistic movements in his literary works, James refuses to assume a concrete stance toward them. Before the literary analysis of the two abovementioned novels, the author devotes the first chapter to a brief historical survey as to the nature and purpose of the work of art, to the development Aestheticism and Decadence in Europe and Britain, and to James's relationship with some of the proponents of British Aestheticism. The rest of the thesis is devoted to the literary analysis of the two novels through the optics of Aestheticism and Decadence. Keywords: James, Henry; Aestheticism; Decadence; literary analysis; transatlantic studies
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The Comic in Henry James' Fiction
Kudrna, David ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Robbins, David Lee (referee)
The subject of this thesis is the study and interpretation of the interlacement of the world of comedy in several works of Henry James and the reflection in these fictions of certain specified problems and challenges of modern society which assist to bring forth the social ambience therein. In the author's opinion, the comedy in the said works of James, on the fundamental level, criticises and pokes fun at the evils of modern society and the characters who pay homage to them. The thesis argues that the comedy in the analysed works of Henry James satirizes several challenging, problematic socio-cultural and economic developments of contemporary modern times through the ridicule and stigmatization of the mostly despicable characters who, under the sway of these developments, perpetrate their negative influence on the lives of other characters in the selected works. To substantiate this argument the thesis looks at the following works of James: The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, "The Turn of the Screw" and "The Beast in the Jungle." At the outset, the thesis outlines briefly several critical approaches to the comedy in James's works, comments on their validity, reveals the author's views, and points in the direction of the critical opinions and approaches...
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