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Mythical Method in T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
Straková, Kateřina ; Quinn, Justin (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
By the use of mythical method, T. S. Eliot created a pattern of archetypal imagery in his poem The Waste Land (1922). This work focuses on the various interpretations of The Waste Land written from the perspective of archetypal criticism. Eliot's critics frequently interpreted the poem as a modern cultural artefact testifying to the ritual of death and rebirth. Examination of the approaches towards archetypal imagery contained in Eliot's work enables an exploration of the main thematic concepts of this literary composition - namely the lack of vital energy and longing for renewal. The poem incorporates archetype-based images into its symbolic frame, and at the same time exposes the sources of these variations on primal ideas. Vegetation myths and the Arthurian legends are recognized by the archetypal critics as the main references for the thematic structure of Eliot's poem. The archetypal analysis of Eliot's work was prevalent in the 1950-70s. Critics expanded upon the idea of the desired renewal of productive forces expressed in the poem. They identified this concept as anthropological in its origin, and traced the influence which James G. Frazer's theories about primitive ritual had on The Waste Land. Eliot coined the term "mythical method" in his essay on James Joyce "Ulysses, Order, and Myth"...
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Rethinking the Animal: Post-Humanist Tendencies in (Post) Modern Literature
Gridneva, Yana ; Vichnar, David (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee)
This thesis posits post-humanism as a philosophy that engages directly with the problem of anthropocentrism and is concerned primarily with the metaphysics of subjectivity. It studies five literary texts (James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Flush, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Brigid Brophy's Hackenfeller's Ape and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons) that challenge the humanistic or classical subject through critical engagement with what this subject traditionally saw as its antithesis - the animal. These texts contest various fixed assumptions about animality and disrupt the status-quo of the human. Breaking with the tradition that treats animals exclusively as a metaphor for the human, they attempt to see and understand animality outside the framework of anthropocentric suppositions. This project aims to describe the strategies these texts employ to conceptualize animality as well as the methods they apply to delineate its subversive potential and to disrupt the human- animal binary. Its theoretical framework combines the work of thinkers belonging to the new but thriving field of Animal Studies with the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is this project's great ambition to contribute towards the development of new post- humanist ethics defined by its...
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The Language and Subjectivity of a Portrait
Dudešek, Štěpán ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce shifts away from the traditional objective narration to a more subjective mode of writing. The reader can experience the story and the characters not only through what is actually written but also through how it is written. Joyce employs various language techniques to show different styles that create the feeling of different voices. Four major registers can be distinguished: a child's language, 19th century lyricism, the language of the Catholic school and the more complicated style of the last chapter. The prevalent techniques suggesting a child-like usage are manifested through repetition, childish expressions, use of modality and questions. Lyricism then draws on Byronic and other 19th century parallels, for instance the overuse of adjectives, elevated metaphors and frequent occurrence of standard poetic tropes. The language of the Church is reflected in sermon-like repetition, archaic words, biblical expressions and heavy diction. The language of the last chapter tries to use precise technical terms in an imitation of Thomist and other scholastic texts and manages to incorporate many of the previous elements as well, although often in a self-mocking way. All these techniques and devices in part substitute the traditional objective narrative and help to...
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Authority and Authorship: James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as a Work of Fictocriticism
Childs, Morgan ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
viii Abstract This thesis uses James Agee's 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to examine the role of so-called fictocriticism in emphasizing the immutability of an author from within a text. The thesis argues that the fictocritical text accounts for the impossibility of extricating the author from writing. Although its precursors date back several centuries- perhaps most notably to Michel de Montaigne-the term fictocriticism was coined in the mid- to late twentieth century to describe texts existing at the interstices of ostensibly fictional and factual genres of writing. Agee's text, borne out of a journalistic assignment for Fortune magazine, blends elements of long-form magazine journalism with lyric poetry with the author's famous sprawling, diaryesque prose, calling the reader to question which elements of the text are rooted in fact and which are simply the author's fabrications or, indeed, whether such a distinction can be drawn. The term can be applied only anachronistically to the 1941 book, yet as defined in these pages it is a befitting description of Agee's otherwise unclassifiable text. Fictocriticism lacks a singular definition, so the examination of Agee's Famous Men as a fictocritical work rests on a thorough revision of the term's history and its lexical implications, both of which...
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Brophy, Deligny, and Guattari: the Avant-Garde as Subsumption and Stratification
Sabitova, Valeriya ; Armand, Louis (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
The thesis considers Felix Guattati's notion of transversality, Fernand Deligny anti-pedagody, and Brigid Brophy's novel In Transit (1969) to argue that the terms of subsumption and stratification have the potential to address the conceptual apparatus of the avant-garde to avoid certain foreclosures concerned with the rhetoric of revolutionary transformation traditionally associated both with vanguardism in a politico-ideological sense and with the avant-garde as an aesthetic and critical project. To unlock the critical potential of the terms of subsumption and stratification in regard to the avant-garde, the theoretical framework of Félix Guattari and Fernand Deligny developed as a result of their clinical experience with psychotic and autistic patients, respectively, is used to foreground how subsumption and stratification are inherent in the notions of transversality, group subjectivity, assemblage of enunciation, signification, schizoanalysis, tracing, and mapping. Using these, the thesis argues that in order to address the theoretical foreclosures associated with the notion of the avant-garde, the latter should be viewed in the light of the complementary operations of subsumption and stratification. To substantiate the argument, the thesis juxtaposes Félix Guattari's notion of transversality,...
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Parasitic Voices and Prosthetic Selves: Detecting the Post-Lyrical Subject in the Works of Contemporary Digital Literature
Suchánek, Tomáš ; Vichnar, David (advisor) ; Armand, Louis (referee)
This diploma thesis explores subjectivity in the domain of so-called digital writing, that is, in texts of largely experimental nature generated by computer algorithms (or with their assistance). In order to do so, the thesis briefly covers the history of digital writing, its mediatic specificities, poetics as well as various theoretical and philosophical conceptualizations. Most importantly, it undertakes an analysis of a post-lyrical subject, a concept devised by Janez Strehovec, that is common to all cases of generative writing under focus. For its comparative analysis, the thesis deals with the recent works from contemporary creators who approach algorithmic textuality from variegated perspectives, incl. Nick Montfort, Allison Parish, Stephanie Strickland, Li Zilles, and Jörg Piringer. Texts generated by programs are conceived of as expressing a new, parasitic and prosthetic, genus of cyber-textual subjectivity that defies the traditional lyric and expands its pool "by other means," as Marjorie Perloff would say. Such a tendency results in conceptually as well as formally complex literary corpus "infected" by - to further exploit the suggested metaphor - parasitic voices and prosthetic selves. Unlike in generic lyric, the post- lyrical subject surpasses the confines of poetry as genre; it is...
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Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain and René Daumal's Mount Analogue: From Pataphysics to Power
Kulbashna, Darya ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
The thesis departs from the undetermined relation between René Daumal's unfinished novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing (1952) and its alleged adaptation, Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film The Holy Mountain. The thesis discusses the two works from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, specifically, through the lens of the so-called Borromean knot that represents the three functions of the psyche: the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. The structure of the thesis supposes the following: the first chapter concentrates on the relevant terminology and aims to define such concepts as language and ideology for the purposes of the present thesis; the second chapter discusses the method of analysis that will be applied to Daumal's Mount Analogue and Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, namely, it explores the possibilities of psychoanalysis and considers the 'unscientific' approach of pataphysics that favours the particular over the general; through the concept of the sinthome the aspect of action is emphasized in the analysis of Mount Analogue, while the fourth chapter analyses The Holy Mountain from the perspective of the 'hypertrophied' Symbolic and simultaneously stresses the importance of the element of balance in the film; the final chapter,...
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The Search for Meaning in Donald Barthelme's Work
Kupková, Tatiana ; Vichnar, David (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
The Search for Meaning in Donald Barthelme's Work Abstract Donald Barthelme is known for his fragmentary, disjointed and collage-like narratives centred around bizarre and surreal situations. Mostly associated with the American metafictional tradition prominent from the 1960s, Barthelme's work is often self-conscious, aware of its own status as fiction, examining not only the boundaries between different ontological levels of fiction and reality, but also questioning the boundaries between meaning and its absence and subsequently contemplating the status of the literary work itself. Focusing primarily on the short stories from his collections Sixty Stories (1981), Forty Stories (1987) and the novels Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1975), the aim of the thesis is to examine three different levels of Barthelme's texts which are concerned with meaning or its absence. On the level of content, Barthelme's characters often search for a meaning and try to interpret the fragmentary, often absurd and surreal experience they are confronted with. The intentionally awkward language often saturated with clichés seems to be deteriorating and losing its referential quality. The characters, unable to interpret signs and to find meaning in the fragmentary experience, find themselves feeling the sense of...
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Experiment in Richard Brautigan's Fiction
Sokolova, Alina ; Vichnar, David (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
Richard Brautigan's works are short, imagistic and self-reflexive. His status in American literature is of an underrepresented symbol of the 60s counterculture. However, his works offer a wide range of postmodern experimental notions that challenge the conventional norms, perception of reality and stance on everyday experience. They open up problematic topics of a person's existence, of the validity of norms and rules in art and literature, of shifting views of what is commonly seen as beautiful and true, and of the inconsistency of language as a medium to record one's experience. Looking for answers on questions both metaphysical and mundane, Brautigan explores life in an unconventional way - through the rejection of the familiar expectations about the narratives, imagery, and style. In doing so, he adopts numerous postmodern notions, for instance, those of recombination, metafiction, and fragment. The proposed thesis will approach such works as In Watermelon Sugar, Trout Fishing in America, So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away among others in order to show the ways the experiment is used and the effect that it creates, recontextualizing Brautigan's position from the contemporary viewpoint.
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The Influence of James Joyce on Bohumil Hrabal: Stylistic Experimentation and Epiphanies of the Everyday
Mullen, Zachariah Devereaux ; Vichnar, David (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee)
English Abstract: This thesis investigates the degree to which James Joyce's writing had an influence on Bohumil Hrabal. I investigate the historical context of both, as well as the movements, such as surrealism, and figures, from André Breton to Adolf Hoffmeister, that connect the two authors. I utilize Renato Poggioli's The Theory of the Avant Garde as a platform from which to analyze the general stylistic elements in Joyce's and Hrabal's writing, while also divulging their social aims. The principle overlap for the pair is their mutual position as observers who are keen on revealing the epiphanies of the everyday. The writing of Henri Lefebvre helps clarify this term "everyday" and confirms its value. From this central focus, three questions arise with respect to what to do with such awareness in writing. First, how do we perceive what is around us and how can the imagination work with perception? Second, what should the narrative approach be with respect to telling stories in light of trying to reveal that awareness or consciousness? Third, what is the actual method of putting together stories and how exactly should language be used or manipulated? Each of the chapters analyzes one of these questions with respect to several texts. In the case of each chapter I contextualize these texts with respect to...
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