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Edward W. Said: postcolonial studies and the politics of literary theory
Machátová, Bibiana ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
I first heard the name of Edward W. Said in a university seminar two years ago. His name was mentioned by one of my American teachers and not many of us knew who Edward Said was. After trying to find out who he was I was amazed that I had never heard about one of the most widely known and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. I was very surprised that this influential author within the fields of literary theory, post-colonial and cultural studies is so little known within the Czech academic sphere. One of the most striking facts is that as of September 2007, there were only five entries by Said in the Czech National Library!. Similarly, only three of his brief essays were translated into Czech? Thus the purpose of this thesis is to grant appropriate attention to Edward W. Said and present an interpretive overview of his work which is necessary before one can begin to place Said in proper perspectives as the individual whom many have claimed as a centrally important twentieth century figure. It will explore Said's contribution to many disciplines ranging from literary theory and criticism to cultural history to postcolonial studies, as well as the literary, cultural, social, and aesthetic roles he has played as an academic intellectual. It will also attempt to interpret the key moments in...
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Living Europe: the alien impressions of Henry James and Lambert Strether
Manire, Damian Peter ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
Lambert Strether's position in The Ambassadors is, in my view, a metafictional allegory for James's techniques of authorial perspective. As Donald Stone notes, "It was James's contribution to fiction that [...] he not only codified the subjective nature of the novelist, but transformed the hero of fiction into a limited [...] observer."170 James effectively expresses his authorial consciousness in a novel that courts a more complicated delegation of positional plays between reader, author, and subject. Thus, I disagree with William Stowe's assertion that The Ambassadors' theme of "how life can and ought to be lived" presents problems for which neither the novel's subject nor author "has a solution, problems that challenge the reader to [sic] reexamine the very valuation of European experience which the texts seems also to be promoting."171 Considering James's formal virtuosity, it becomes clear that James has more to express to the reader than the "valuation of European experience."172 Indeed, I hope it has been made clear over these last pages that "the solution" for how "to live" is fixed in Jamesian aestheticism. James broadcasts a double perspective that simultaneously engages the aesthetic along the social fissures of modernity, producing "masterpieces of presentational technique"173 to cite Malcolm...
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Copy, imitation, forgery as an artistic principle in the novel Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd
Labanczová, Johana ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
In the first chapter a question was posed: whether the original and the derivative represent a classic binary opposition in Chatterton. The wide usage of repetition in the novel was revealed to highlight the textuality (in the sense of Waugh's 'condition of artifice'1), intertextuality and self-intertextuality of Chatterton - in particular through references to other texts, the novel's self-referentiality, but also the applying of the means of visual representation (as it was shown in the third chapter). By showing its dependence on particular artistic and textual representations, repetition calls attention to the fact that for example also history could be considered a textual construct. Going back to the initial discussion of the opposition between the original and the derivative, it should be mentioned, as John Frow states, that it is exactly the metaphor of textuality what has a power to overcome 'the dichotomisation of the real to the symbolic, or the base to the superstructure, or the social to the cultural,'2 or the original to the derivative. The subversiveness of embracing the metaphor of textuality goes beyond the one of a forger, counterfeiter or plagiarist. Their works, as Ruthven puts it, 'exhibit a carnivalesque irreverence towards the sanctity of various conventions designed to limit what is...
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Representations of the Female Voice in US Prose Fiction
Landerová, Petra ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
The present MA thesis explores the concept of a female body and voice and their transformations as presented by various American writers. The chosen male authored works include Washington Square by Henry James, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, for these writers delineate their heroines Catherine Sloper, Lady Brett Ashley, and Oedipa Maas in a turbulent period of their lives when they attempt to break with the obsolescent roles of passive and obedient daughters, partners, and wives. These fictional agents use different kinds of resistance, but as women, they are, nevertheless, mediated through the dominant male and masculine discourse that pervades the fictionalized societies in which these female agents appear. As for fictional work by female writers, without the assumption that the gender of the writer makes any literary work more or less "feminine", I have chosen The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, a short-story "Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor, and Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker. The female heroines of the selected literary works bear a number of traumas women have had to endure under the patriarchal order and this thesis will address those traumas, their manifestation in the female psyche, and how...
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Modernity and the Changing American South: Alienation in a Selection of Fiction by Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty
Halášková, Lucie ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to explore the theme of alienation in selected fiction by Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, taking into consideration the geographic as well as ideological positions from which the two authors write, contextualizing their work in its portrayal as well as critique of the South. Firstly, the insular nature of the South is examined vis-à-vis ethnic and racial othering. The exclusionary social politics of Southern communities are satirized and subverted, as the two authors pit the xenophobic and racist tendencies of their provincial characters against a cultural landscape that fails to accommodate their narrow- minded world view. The gap between the Southern ideology and its contemporaneous reality can be partially accounted for due to the rise of consumer culture, which is discussed in its impact on race relations and social mobility as well as religion. The following chapter, entitled "Commodity Culture and the Americanization of the South," explores the conflation of religious and consumerist ideologies, negotiating the proclaimed adherence to Protestantism in the South with the rise of consumer behaviour as supplanting spirituality. The impact of a ritualistic adherence to capitalist structures is analyzed as promoting a culture of hyper-individualism, narcissism and alienation,...
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A Rite of Passage: The Transformation of Anglo-American Comic Books in the Post-World War II Era
Hushegyi, Ádám ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
1 Abstract The subject matter of the bachelor thesis is the evolution of Anglo-American mainstream comic books in the post-World War II era, with principal focus on the epochs that have transformed this art form the most during the past seventy years. The thesis aims to present Anglo-American comic books as a medium with substantial storytelling potential that had to struggle with harsh censorship and the unforgiving dynamics of the entertainment industry in order to maintain its position in Western popular culture. The continuous efforts of comic books to remain socially relevant and to connect with audiences are explored though an overview of key decades in the medium's history, which are accompanied by the analyses of select works. The contents as well as format of these works show that comic books are a remarkably adaptive art form that can not only operate within a wide array of genres but also merge with other forms of popular entertainment, transcending the boundaries of traditional media. The first chapter contains a brief overview of the origins and post-war development of comic books, while the subsequent passages offer a more detailed analysis of three crucial periods in the medium's history. The first era discussed are the 1950s, during which socially conscious mainstream publications refusing...
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The disappointment of the Western intellectual in the twentieth century (in Saul Bellow's novels Mr. Sammler's Planet and Herzog)
Slováčková, Hana ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
Saul Bellow's main characters are frequently persons who convey their experience with reality in the contemporary Western society. The concrete phenomena - their individual experiences fold up into a more conclusive reflection and lead to the comprehension of reality on a general level. And it is disappointment that best characterizes the resulting knowledge. The novels I selected for the thorough analysis, Mr.Sammler's Planet and Herzog, both depict and encounter of man with reality. The reflection of this encounter is presented by scholarly men, Mr. Sammler and Moses E. Herzog. Despite the fact that they are fictitious characters, their knowledge of Western thinkers makes them 'real' intellectual critics of the contemporary time. They connect through their theoretical scholarship and their personal lives, observations and experiences. The outcome is an account of the state of the contemporary Western society in the light of a broader understanding of its development. The course of that development or transformation can be analyzed with the help of works of influential Western thinkers for their reasoning always arises from the conditions of their present time. Their works containing novel concepts have impact on the future development but also inevitably reflect the past development. This is the reason...
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The depiction of the changing consciousness of women in three novels of the turn of the century
Potočková, Kristýna ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
The aim of this work is to document how the substantial change in the social status of women that took place at the turn of the twentieth century is reflected in three novels of that period, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, and in the lives of the authors. The essential and common themes of these texts are marriage and motherhood, the two institutions which reflect the most the changing consciousness of women. The historical background of the period provides evidence for the division of roles in the marital institution, which was strongly established in the preceding centuries, and for the unequal position of women in general, resulting from the male superiority, mostly fortified by men's financial dominance. The heroines, akin to the authors, come from the upper or upper-middle classes which were the most active in the feminist movement because these classes had time and education to assess the situation and propose transformations. Art and sexuality are in various ways essential to the process of self-realization. The creative and sexual drives can be both an opportunity for a woman's liberation as well as an incentive for rejecting to submit to men that is enforced by men's habit of collecting works of art (inclusive of women) or...
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Not Quite a Juggler of Identities: Joseph Brodsky's Translations within the American Literary Tradition
Tkacheva, Elena ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
This thesis discusses the difficulties in bringing Joseph Brodsky's poetry in English. It also attempts to locate Brodsky's poetry in relation to the multilingual American literary tradition by considering the factors that resulted in Brodsky being exceptionally successful in English, and the negative criticism of his translations and the original English poems. This research explores translation by considering the linguistic, literary and cultural factors involved in the transition of the poems from Russia (and Russian) to America (and English). It raises a set of broader issues connected with questioning the authority of the native speaker, the nature of the American literary tradition, and defining a good translation. Yet, it also considers the particularities of the literary niche of the exiled writers, the extend and the approaches to the transformations of English done by the authors-representatives of ethnic minorities, the appropriateness of Brodsky's manipulations with English and the connotations of certain elements of prosody in English and Russian. The thesis approaches the subject by discussing the difficulties of poetry translation specifically in the context of the Russian poetry translated into English with the main focus placed on Brodsky. It provides the overview of the debate around...
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