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Memory and Storytelling in Selected Works of Joy Harjo
Šimková, Karolína ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
This bachelor thesis analyses the themes of memory and storytelling in the work of the American Indian poet Joy Harjo and argues that memory and storytelling are portrayed as indispensable means of survival and perseverance. A great emphasis is put on the detrimental effect of losing connection to one's culture as it jeopardizes the prospect of preserving one's life and culture. A renewed link promises the hope of survival and provides a way of overcoming the negative consequences of the past, of affirming one's identity and of persevering. The importance of memory as well as the crucial role of storytelling in ensuring the continuation of one's culture and people are examined in poems from the 1980s and 1990s poetry collections She Had Some Horses (1983), In Mad Love and War (1990), The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994), and A Map to the Next World (2000). Memory and storytelling are introduced as key concepts in Harjo's poetry. Harjo's Creek (or Muskogee) heritage and her experience as an indigenous person in the United States influence her artistic relationship to memory. Memory includes ancestral knowledge and oral tradition; remembering becomes a way of reconnecting, of ensuring the continuance of the indigenous peoples and their cultures. Storytelling is examined as an essential traditional...
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Voices of Native American women: the life narratives of Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa, Maria Campbell and Leslie Marmon Silko
Nováková, Tereza ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to explore the genre of Native American women autobiography by concentrating on its four significant representatives. In the opening part, the work presents the genre providing its several definitions and tracing its origins. Further, it briefly summarizes the history of autobiography with a special focus on American literature and it introduces the genre of Native American autobiography and explains its particularities. Because the work deals with Native American women, the beginning also discusses their past and present social position and their first literary VOICeS. The central part of the thesis investigates four distinct autobiographical narratives written by Native American women at different times and it surveys the main themes that dominate the genre ofNative American woman autobiography. Although all discussed books are labeled as the autobiographies, they m1x together a number of various areas and genres such as history, sociology, mythology, ethnography, political documents, and many others. Native American oral storytelling forms the fundamental base in the analyzed texts, but it is the most experimental autobiography of Leslie Marmon Silko that is wholly constructed as the process of storytelling when her stories carry formal characteristics of Indian oral tales such...
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Identity and Displacement in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction
Olehlová, Markéta ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Franková, Milada (referee) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
English summary The main objective of this thesis is to present some key issues relevant for postcolonial field of study with respect to two basic areas of interest: concepts of identity and place, respectively displacement in contemporary postcolonial discourse and their reflection in fiction, too. The thesis should provide the potential reader with basic theoretical background based on the most fundamental sources and by means of selected literary works it should support (or disclaim, if necessary) conclusions reached by the most notable theories. This dissertation work consists of three major parts. In the introduction, apart from providing the motivational, theoretical and literary objectives of the thesis, I cover some basic difficulties that may occur when dealing with the postcolonial field of study. The central part of the thesis can be divided into two parts, each of them consisting of two further sections. The first one, "Identity in Postcolonial Discourse", is focused on one of the key terms in all of postcolonial theory: identity and other concepts related with it. I cover the basic development of theoretical reflection concerning this concept, drawing primarily from secondary sources dealing with it. The theoretical part on identity is succeeded by a chapter "Reflections of Identity in the...
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Women in the English Drama of the Orient
Němcová, Nikol ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
The subject of this BA thesis are plays set in the Orient, a new genre that started to gain popularity in the Restoration period. These plays, commonly inspired by the popular travelogues to the Orient and historical accounts, are characterised by their collection of stock characters, repeating topoi and orientalised images that represent the Orient more as a conception created by the West than an actual place. Nevertheless, in analysis of some of the plays I shall argue that these works also offer possible commentaries on the British society of the time and that they can be used as arguments criticizing or reinforcing the contemporary perception of women by dealing with such otherwise rather inaccessible themes as women stepping out of their social boundaries, femininity or female sexuality. In order to advocate my thesis I plan to use four different tragedies with Middle-Eastern settings, specifically Rhodes, Morocco, Turkey and Colchis (located mostly in present-day Georgia and Turkey). All these plays were written between 1663 and 1696 and might be considered some of the most representative examples of the genre. They include William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1663), Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673), Mary Pix's Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks (1696) and...
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Family ideal and real: the change of the image of the family in selected works of Mexican American authors
Sládková, Magdalena ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
The fact that in the twenty-first century Latinos became the largest ethnic minority in the United States is inevitably mentioned in any recent publication on Latino population in the U.S. l People of Mexican origin form the largest percentage of the Latino group, 58%, according to the 2000 U.S. census.2 Mexican Americans have a long history of settling in the United States, nevertheless, their disadvantaged position in the American society is evident. They are usually located among the working-class, have low income, and also low educational attainment. Some social scientists, whose works will be mentioned in this thesis, believe that it is the Mexican American culture that prevents this population from success; others attribute it to discrimination and negative stereotypes of Mexicans that are perpetuated in the American society. In the 1960s and 1970s the Mexican American civil rights movement, known as the Chicano Movement, decided to end the discrimination and other social problems by supporting Mexican American nationalism. One of the ways to increase their national pride was to point at the Mexican American family as a source of strength and a symbol of unity of all Mexicans in the United States. The Chicano Movement asked artists to create works of art that would represent the Chicano family as an...
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Japanese American experience in the works of Nisei authors
Dušáková, Hana ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
Presenting this diploma thesis as a general overview of one group of writers, perhaps only a few words would suffice for the explication of my choice. Putting aside any emotional or personal involvement of mine in this topic, which stems from my ongoing interest in Japanese culture and the study of this language, I regard Japanese Americans and the literature they produced as unique in several respects. Considering their often contradictory reception and the turbulent historical shifts they were subjected to, one has to view this group as a generation of paradoxes. Being born in America, yet all their lives contending with the label of "exotic" or "oriental," struggling to conform, but only to discover that this effort (if it brought them closer to their peers) distanced them from their immigrant parents, writing literature in a language that was usually not their original mother tongue. These are attributes and dilemmas that would pertain probably to any recent group of immigrants to the United States. But what singles out the Japanese American experience among the countless other immigrant histories, is their collective experience in the years 1942-1944, when the nation they long aspired to be a part of suddenly crushed these hopes in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack by considering them an enemy and...
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Representing Slavery in Black British Writing
Bartová, Nikola ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
This thesis is concerned with black British literature which deals with the issue of slavery. The chosen authors are of a Caribbean or an Afro-Indian (though, an American novelist was used for needs of comparison) origin and belong to the black diaspora in Britain. The issue of slavery in the Caribbean is central to the forming of and creating an identity and defining the concept of home in the works debated. The aim of this thesis is to determine the impact of the past of slavery on the identity of people in the black British diaspora as well as to determine the approach and aesthetic choice most appropriate for representation of such traumatic past. The first part of this thesis concentrates on theoretical background of the topic of slavery in the Caribbean in order to define terms such as diaspora, cultural identity, memory and the difficulty of not only artistic representation of slavery but also its remembering. It also includes the historical background of slavery and slave trade in Britain and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century in order to be able to judge the accuracy of the works and to comprehend the cruel reality of slavery. In the following chapters, the authors are introduced individually and their background information serves to determine their standpoint and...
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Features of the gothic novel and Southern Ontario gothic in the works of Robertson Davies
Kyselová, Mariana ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
The gothic novel, albeit not considered high literature, counts among the most distinctive literary genres. The literary form was at its prime in late 18th century, although its days of glory have past elements of the Gothic can be found even in contemporary literature. Over the centuries, several sub-genres of the gothic novel have developed, including Southern Ontario Gothic. This branch of the Gothic is characterized by criticism of social attitudes towards race, politics, gender and religion specific for that region, in combination with elements of the supernatural, magic realism and satire. Robertson Davies, whose novels belong to the most significant works of Southern Ontario Gothic, is considered to be a Canadian literature classic. The aim of this paper is to compare the elements of a classical gothic novel with the elements of Southern Ontario Gothic in Robertson Davies' TheDeptford Trilogy. The initial chapter covers the theoretical background to the problematic of the Gothic and defines the commonly used terminology. The term "gothic" is used in many contexts and fields, and therefore can carry various meanings. The chapter also introduces Southern Ontario Gothic as an acknowledged sub-genre. In the second chapter, some common themes that occur in Canadian culture are introduced....
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The Reflection of the Exclusion Crisis (1678-1683) in Contemporary Literature
Hoblová, Kristýna ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Kolinská, Klára (referee)
The Reflection of the Exclusion Crisis (1678-1683) in Contemporary Literature Kristýna Hoblová abstract This work of literary history analyses the reflection of the Exclusion Crisis (1678-1683) in contemporary literature across genres. It is based on the theory of the rise of the public sphere by Jürgen Habermas and on the theory of Michael McKeon, understanding the ideology of the late Stuarts as a last remnant of aristocratic ideology. The Exclusion Crisis is presented here as a period of unsettling negotiations between the declining Stuart ethos and the Whig ideology of the rising mercantile classes. The interpretation of chosen texts serves to discover creative transformations of the political discourse of the newly emerging political parties of Whigs and Tories, stressing the negotiations between genres, individual authors and political ideologies. The first chapter offers a brief overview of the socio-historical context, Habermas's theory of the rise of the public sphere and Michael McKeon's conception of aristocratic ideology. It also introduces the Tory political theory defending the Stuart divine right of kings on the basis of Robert Filmer's patriarchal household-state analogy and the Whig defence against absolutist tendencies of the Stuarts through asserting the priority of Law over the Royal...
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Neo-Pagan Features in Boyden's "Three Day Road"
Bohal, Vít ; Kolinská, Klára (advisor) ; Jindra, Miroslav (referee)
In the thesis for my upcoming bachelor's paper I aim to analyze the topic of religion in Joseph Boyden's novel Three Day Road (2005). More specifically, I aim to defend the hypothesis that within the spectrum of religious dialogue present within the novel, there is an overwhelming undertone of neo-pagan ideals. These ideals are presented as being positive, in the sense that they are life-supporting, rather than life-hindering. The main contention that I will draw will deal with the aspect of taboo, and how it is adressed throughout the novel. Contrary to Sigmund Freud's ideas (Freud's book Totem and Taboo will serve as the basis for my arguments) of taboo being a life-hindering, neurotic framework of belief, the views expressed by the two main narrators of the novel are in favor of taboo, and the narration itself draws a tragic end for the character who consistently defies these taboos. There is a moral aspect to the story expressed within the relationship of the two main characters, Xavier Bird and Elijah Whiskeyjack, and is based on this very adherence, or lack thereof, to taboos. The main taboo consistently appears to be that of cannibalism associated with the infamous Algonquin mythological figure of the windigo, which is the most frequent metaphor used within the narrtaive and is the most productive...
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