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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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The rise of African American radicalism and the fall of the African American-Jewish coalition in the United States
Urban, Daniel ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee) ; Calda, Miloš (advisor)
This work aims at examining the origins of the civil rights coaiition between African Americans and American Jews, its achievements and its fall following the rise of radicalism among African Americans and other historical developments in the late 1960s. It is clear that the abolition of slavery alone did not bring about social, economic and political integration of African Americans. Black codes and unwritten discriminatory customs prevented them from securing their rightful and equal place among white Americans. In order to fight racism and discrimination and support integration more effectively, African Americans started to organize in a number of organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). However, because they lacked leadership, funding as well as organizational skills, they needed an ally and American Jews proved to be a dexterous one. There were a number of things that African Americans and Jews shared at that time: no ne of the two ethnic groups had a homeland in the sense that for example Italian Americans did before World War II. African Americans recognized and understood the fact that Jews had been living in poor conditions and under a constant threat to their lives in Europe. Furthermore,...
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William Faulkner's Light in August: constructing race in the community
Jelínková, Karolína ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee) ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor)
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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In search of Afro-American identity: Zora Neale Hurston and race politics of the Harlem renaissance
Koucká, Magdalena ; Procházka, Martin (referee) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to explore the phenomenon of the Harlem Renaissance as not only an artistic but also a socio-political movement in American history. I shall try to trace its historical conditions, its ideology and accomplishments. Introducing its main intellectualleaders--scholars as well as men of belles-Iettres, I will take an insight into the ambience of cultural events and discussions that they created and comment on the diversity of attitudes toward the role of the African American in American society that they launched. Among the most prominent and influential intellectuals who fathered the Movement were Alain LeRoy Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson and Charles S. Johnson. The second target of this thesis is to examine one of the outstanding literary voices of this period. Out of the many artists who began their career during the Harlem Renaissance-and one should name at least Langston Hughes, Countee Cull en, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer--I chose the personality of Zora Neale Hurston as a representative of the unconventional black female artist of this time. In my focus were Hurston' s artistic aims to ground the Black identity as opposed, and sometimes even parallel, to some of her contemporaries. Hurston' s former friend, later a rival, Langston Hughes would probably be her...
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Atheism in America
Koranda, David ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
This diploma work analyzes the contemporary rise of the number of atheists in the United States of America, basing this presupposition on numerous nation-wide surveys, primarily conducted by Gallup Poll and Pew Research Center. It goes into depth on the definition of atheism and strictly delineates the meaning of this word and the use of its alternatives in the work. Given the fact that the thesis is written by a Czech author, it also provides necessary background covering the differences between Czech atheism and American atheism. Since the work is purposely not one of literary analysis but rather of socio-political and cultural nature, reasons for this decision are given in a separate subchapter analyzing Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood. History of atheism in America is touched upon in the beginning of Chapter 3, but since the fundamental focus of this work is on the contemporary state of affairs, the roots of modern atheism in America are sought after mainly in the twentieth century. In particular, the greatest causes of the weakening of church's power and the rise of secularism (or atheism, for that matter) are given as following: Madalyn Murray O'Hair's fights against church's influence in public schools and against its public funding; the argument about the non-scientific nature of belief...
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Neither Old, Nor New: The Southern Belle Archetype in Lillian Hellman's Birdie Hubbard from The Little Foxes and Tennessee Williams's Blanche Dubois from A Streetcar Named Desire
Soukupová, Markéta ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
The aim of this BA thesis is to describe the origins of the Old South's archetypal feminine ideals and how they were altered in the course of time. In what follows, I will attempt to explain how the Southern Belle myth became (re-)defined, enacted and/or maintained throughout the era of the Antebellum, Post-Bellum and New South perspective. The thesis will employ literary theory, namely in respect to relevant archetypal definitions that will be applied to the specific Southern Belle figures, as well as historical, social and cultural studies. Finally, feminist and gender theories will be utilized in order to demonstrate how the cultural archetype of the Southern Belle served as a socially constructed norm enforcing women's passivity and submission to patriarchy. After the introductory chapter, which will present the American South and its inhabitants as a distinct cultural entity, chapter two will discuss the aims and methodology of the thesis and the basic terminology that is essential for the Southern Belle concept. Chapter three shall afterwards briefly introduce the specific constructs of the Post-Bellum (Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes) and New South (Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire) Belles in relation to their concrete socio-historical contexts. Chapter four will then consist...
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Narrating history, constructing identity: the postmodern turn in William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury and Go down, Moses
Žebrowska, Barbara ; Quinn, Justin (referee) ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor)
The gradual and contestable transition from the modem to what has come to be labeled as the postmodern era has been characterized as unnerving. This transition, it is said, has unsettled and is still in the process of disquieting all areas of human enterprise and knowledge. The term postmodernism encompasses a disputable set of ideas and features; its time frame and applicability to different subjects are also questionable. It is this very aspect of questioning that most aptly delineates the process by which postmodernist outlooks approach the contemporary world. At the core of this questioning lies an incredulity toward any reality and truth. Rather, reality, postmodernism says, is constructed and defined solely by language. This fore grounding of language before the existence of external reality casts a new light on the creation of meaning and identity in the postmodern world. The modernist endeavor to find the essential core in one's identity disintegrates in the postmodern understanding of identity as a cultural construct that is determined only in relation to its surroundings. Without these relations, be it familial or societal, identity - and for that matter all meaning - bears no substance and faces the perpetual threat of becoming lost. A sense of loss informs postmodern philosophy, and it entails...
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No pain, no gain. A study in narratives of suffering. Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster & Lauren Slater's Lying
Libovická, Barbora ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
"The experience of suffering both provokes and resists narration. It is at the hearl of many of the world's great stories (the Odyssey, the Book of Job, the Gospels, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost) and yet absent, in a fundamental way, from every story. Because intense suffering takes language away, retrospective narration can seem futile, even falsifying. Moreover, it often raises more questions than it answers. (Who or what is responsible for suffering? Is it merited? What ends it? How can it be made commensurable with the rest of ones's life? What is its meaning? How does one cope with it?) In spite of all this, sufferers continue to tug at the shirls/eeves of passersby, and passersby continue to stop, listen and fall into the sufferers's story. Why?" My opening paragraph is a description of a course that I discovered in the Bard College Course Catalogue for the fall semester 2001 - the year of the falling towers. I was immediately intrigued by the description, having myself experienced great loss, and suffering from it again despite a long passage of time and coping. The course was called Narratives of Suffering, drew on literature from the American literary canon, and proved to be very enriching and inspiring. Starting chronologically with short stories of captivity and shipwreck narratives, we later...
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Městský úřad:působnost, organizace a činnost (na příkladu města Černošice)
Ulmanová, Hana ; Svoboda, Karel (advisor) ; Postránecký, Josef (referee)
Diplomová práce se zabývá některými základními aspekty fungování městských úřadů. Obce jsou základními územně samosprávnými celky. V České republice je užíván tzv. smíšený model veřejné správy. To znamená, že obce kromě vlastní samosprávy vykonávají také státní správu v přenesené působnosti. Výsledkem druhé fáze reformy veřejné správy bylo vyčlenění obcí s pověřeným obecním úřadem a obcí s rozšířenou působností. Cílem diplomové práce je provést analýzu postavení, působnosti a organizační struktury městského úřadu obce s rozšířenou působností včetně přiblížení jeho činnosti. Zmíním se také o metodách, které napomáhají zlepšovat činnost městského úřadu. Zvolila jsem Městský úřad Černošice jako konkrétní příklad pro zpracování vybraného tématu.
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