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Semiotic Specifics of Media Contents
Podzimek, Jan ; Bednařík, Petr (advisor) ; Dvořáčková, Věra (referee) ; Ducháček, Milan (referee)
This dissertation explores specifics of media semiotics as a method of media content analysis. The main research sample consists of mediasemiotic studies, in the second place of studies within other applied semiotics and methodological publications on the subject. The research method is a discourse analysis, done on all levels from micro- to macrostructures, specifically on levels of language, intertextuality, narrativity, discussions, discourse models and discourses. The analysis also took into account interdiscoursive relations between media semiotics and media studies, theoretic semiotics, and other related disciplines, as well as the question whether bringing concepts from these fields into media semiotics involves some transformations of these concepts, and how are these transformations related to the nature of the given discourses. The main contribution of this dissertation is introduction of the principle of modularity. It is a specific way of employing analytical functions into an analytical engine, which was present in all researched media semiotic studies, but also in the studies which belong to other applied semiotics (movie semiotics, anthropological semiotics, semiotics of law), and to discourse analysis as well. The modularity is an autonomous principle which must be, in case of the...
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Czech Ethnography in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At the Crossroads of Slavic Studies, Regionalism and Heimatschutzbewegung - an Attempt at an Insight into a Seldom Researched Topic
Ducháček, Milan
The aim of this contribution is to map the dilemmas that Czech ethnographers were facing in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. With the end of the Czech-Slovak consensus on co-existence in a common, unitary state, the étatist, and later defensive ethos of Czechoslovak ethnography of the 1930s lost its foundation and argumentation basis. Similarly, too, after the Munich Agreement 1938 and quite definitively after the Nazi occupation, the notions of unity, purity and distinctive character of the ‘Slavic’ culture of ‘Czechoslovak state nation’ faced its ideological and methodological limitations. The present study emphasizes the continuity of problems that plagued the interwar Czechoslovak ethnography, including understaffing of Czechoslovak ethnography due to limitations of university policy at Czechoslovak universities in Prague, Brno and Bratislava. The article presents an analysis of institutional and academic foundation of ethnography after the closing of Czech universities on 17 November 1939. It describes both the conceptual and personnel continuity of care for regional cultural heritage in the 1930s. It also touches upon the ambivalent nature of documentary activities of the Ethnographic Commission of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts. Alongside with the orientation on general anthropology, including its racial aspects, the activities of Czech ethnographers during the occupation tended to focus on documentation of vernacular architecture. In this regard they also joined forces with architects and urban planners on projects that linked the idea of modernization of the countryside with efforts aimed at preserving its ‘traditional’ character in the spirit of the German Heimatschutzbewegung. This direction, as well as other impulses and motifs from the Protectorate era, were then further developed in the ethnographic ‘revival’ of the second half of the 1940s, which - paradoxically enough - resonated both with ‘new Slavic policy’ after 1945 and, to some extent, even with the subsequent Sovietization of the field.
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From Summer Homes to the Labourer's Canteen. The Pragmatization of the „Mental Worker's” Leisure Time from Jaroslav Goll to Aleš Hrdlička
Ducháček, Milan
The work focuses on teh transformation of Leisure activities fot he Czech academic intellectuals at the end of the 19th century. It does not stake a claim on authoritative theses. It only attempts to use a sample of a few Czech researchers from the field of culture studies to capture the signs of the transformation of the way leisure was percieved. Here, we turn from the traditional overlap fo work with dolce far niente (Jaroslav Goll, Josef Pekař) to signs signalling the arrival of technology (Lubor Niederle) and systematic rationalisation of leisure activities according to the Anglo-Saxon, mainly American way (Aleš Hrdlička). The idea of how academics and intellectuals spent their free time at the end of the 19th century was based on standard contours of work and idleness of an educated and better-situated Cisleithenian member of the bourgeoisie as part of the „idle class“. Mental work and leisure often overlapped here and were indistinguishible. The end of the century however, was already announcing the arrival of Americanisation and pragmatisation of the daily schedule. Based on the memoirs of ethnographed Karel Chotek, who visited Czech-American antrhopologist Aleš Hrdlička at the Smithsonian institution in Wahington DC in 1919 and spent a brief study internship there, on gets an idea of the daily schedule of the Humpolec-born Hrdlička who worked his way up as a wage laborer in the United States to having an influential research position at the prestigiois scientific institution. Hrdlička´s working rhytm, which differed when working in the field and in the office, and included moderate eating habits and standard level of activity within the working schedule, can serve as an example of a surprisingly systematic separation of working hours from time spent on mental relaxation. In the inter-war period, the question of purposeful leisure and the rationalisation of working hours in Hrdlička´s tradition became not only an inspiration for his pupils but also the subjekt of deliberations of sociologists such as Innocence Arnošt Bláha on the effective model of the „intellectual“ life style.
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The Age of Draci doupe: New Concept and Commercialization of Leisure Activities during the Early 1990s.
Houha, Libor ; Storchová, Lucie (advisor) ; Ducháček, Milan (referee)
In my Master's degree thesis I'm dealing with the phenomenon of role-playing games in the Czech republic in the first half of the 1990s. Role-playing games came to the Czech republic in the form of a game called "Draci doupe" with an active community of players being established immediately. The main aims of this study are analysis and contextualisation of subculture of these players in the first half of the nineties and also publisher "Altar", who released "Draci doupe" at the end of the year 1990. "Draci doupe" and commercialization were inherently bound together. In my thesis I'm dealing with the description of development of publisher "Altar" with regard to his commercial strategy and influence on the subculture of role-playing game players. The rest of the study is dedicated to the community of players with the focus on development, form and spreading through fanzines (non-professional and non- official publication produced by community of players), magazines and community conventions (called "cons"). Struggles in the community of players regarding commercionalization of this leisure activity are analysed further in the study. These struggles led to degradation of the whole community of players. The view of public is added to the thesis to complete the whole picture of analysis of subculture...
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The Age of Draci doupe: New Concept and Commercialization of Leisure Activities during the Early 1990s.
Houha, Libor ; Storchová, Lucie (advisor) ; Ducháček, Milan (referee)
In my Master's degree thesis I'm dealing with the phenomenon of role-playing games in the Czech republic in the first half of the 1990s. Role-playing games came to the Czech republic in the form of a game called "Draci doupe" with an active community of players being established immediately. The main aims of this study are analysis and contextualisation of subculture of these players in the first half of the nineties and also publisher "Altar", who released "Draci doupe" at the end of the year 1990. "Draci doupe" and commercialization were inherently bound together. In my thesis I'm dealing with the description of development of publisher "Altar" with regard to his commercial strategy and influence on the subculture of role-playing game players. The rest of the study is dedicated to the community of players with the focus on development, form and spreading through fanzines (non-professional and non- official publication produced by community of players), magazines and community conventions (called "cons"). Struggles in the community of players regarding commercionalization of this leisure activity are analysed further in the study. These struggles led to degradation of the whole community of players. The view of public is added to the thesis to complete the whole picture of analysis of subculture...
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Václav Chaloupecký Czechoslovak historian and archivist (1882-1951)
Ducháček, Milan ; Čornejová, Ivana (advisor) ; Kvaček, Robert (referee) ; Mervart, Jan (referee)
The aim of the presented PhD thesis is to deal with the historiographical legacy of Czech historian Václav Chaloupecký (1882-1951), the pupil of Josef Pekař and Jaroslav Goll. During the First Czechoslovak republic Chaloupecký kept the professorship of Czechoslovak history at the newly established Comenius University in Bratislava. His historiographical work has its basis in mediaevistic studies yet it also deals with the questions of contemporary history. The roots of his creativity, however, lie in poetry. Chaloupecký's work is often marked as "czechoslovakist" and positivist and due to this fact usually viewed as methodologically and ideologically obsolete. The aim of this thesis is to rethink Chaloupecký's historiographical legacy from the non-nationalistic and ideologically open minded point of view. The core of this critical approach is to show the stereotypes bound with Chaloupecký's name and last but not least to reveal the specific ideological background of Chaloupecký's work, its roots based in his individual experience with the Czech and Slovak cultural horizon and mainly in the marriage with the Slovak modernist poet Ľudmila Groeblová. The result should show a picture of life and work of a historian which was interrupted due to three breaks - The Great War, Second World War and the...
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