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The Strange Case of Don DeLillo, the Postmodernist Modernist
JOZOVÁ, Dominika
This thesis explores DeLillo's four novels - White Noise, Libra, Underworld and Falling Man with regards to the difficulties surrounding their placement within post/modernist poetics. The analysis is preceded by a theoretical introduction devoted to conceiving of DeLillo's work and its position on the borderline between modernist and postmodernist poetics. Furthermore, it attempts to define the basic concepts of modernism and postmodernism with special regards to the theory of such literary critics as Brian McHale and Linda Hutcheon, and such theoreticians as Jean-François Lyotard, Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard. In connection with these concepts the work deals with such topics as history, identity and medialisation in connection with the changing developments in post-war USA. The theoretical framework sketched in the theoretical introduction is drawn upon within the analysis of DeLillo's novels in the rest of the thesis, and applied to a critical examination of his difficult placement within the postmodern canon. Based on a close and critical reading of DeLillo's four novels, a detailed analysis of their (post)modernist features, the thesis documents the ambiguity facing every effort to co-opt DeLillo's fiction for either movement, displaying his work as a rather strange case of hybridity and non-binarity.
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An Outlaw Journalist's Journey through an Era Decadent and Depraved: Hunter S. Thompson in the context of America of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Stárek, Jiří ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The thesis aims to explore the artistic personality of Hunter S. Thompson, one of the most distinctive cultural figures of post-war America, and his genesis as an author, journalist, and a counterculture idol of the 1960s. The era is now widely regarded as a turning point in contemporary American history as its deep-rooted values and norms were, over the course of a decade, gradually transformed by the young generation of social and political activists toward allegedly a more tolerant and liberal kind of community. Crucial in such an endeavor was the role of the countercultural movement that produced some of the most capable intellectual minds of the time, including Thompson. The paper thus analyzes the role and nature of the alternative culture in America as perceived by one of its most observant participants. Also, the thesis focuses on the author's role in establishing a new genre called New Journalism which can be linked with the era's countercultural efforts as well. In general, Thompson, in his texts, examines various phenomena surrounding the counterculture and provides us with a distinctive portrayal of the era's zeitgeist. However, unlike some of his contemporaries, he also remembers to examine numerous flaws and fallacies existing within contemporary American society, the American Dream...
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Reading Don DeLillo (Sociological Interpretation of Postmodern Literature)
Stehlík, Martin ; Paulíček, Miroslav (advisor) ; Balon, Jan (referee)
The relation between sociology and literature opens up a broad field for discussion because of their closeness. The diploma thesis pursues a rather uncommon approach to literature that searches for manifestations of sociological thought in literature in order to use them within contexts of thematically similar sociological theories. A considerable attention is paid to definition of this approach, especially in relation to standard methods of sociology of literature, and to subsequent formulation of its methodological starting-points. Sociological reading as introduced in the text interprets a literary work in the perspective of selected sociological theories to which the interpretation is reversely related in the following step. In the thesis the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo, a classical work of American postmodern fiction, is taken as an object of such interpretation. The theme of effects of the mass media in contemporary society marked out widely in the beginning is specified by selected theories of Jean Baudrillard and Niklas Luhmann. In the case of Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality and simulation, changes in relation between reality and representation, respectively disappearance of their traditional opposition, are concerned. Luhmann's social systems theory is used to explore the...
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An Outlaw Journalist's Journey through an Era Decadent and Depraved: Hunter S. Thompson in the context of America of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Stárek, Jiří ; Robbins, David Lee (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The thesis aims to explore the artistic personality of Hunter S. Thompson, one of the most distinctive cultural figures of post-war America, and his genesis as an author, journalist, and a counterculture idol of the 1960s. The era is now widely regarded as a turning point in contemporary American history as its deep-rooted values and norms were, over the course of a decade, gradually transformed by the young generation of social and political activists toward allegedly a more tolerant and liberal kind of community. Crucial in such an endeavor was the role of the countercultural movement that produced some of the most capable intellectual minds of the time, including Thompson. The paper thus analyzes the role and nature of the alternative culture in America as perceived by one of its most observant participants. Also, the thesis focuses on the author's role in establishing a new genre called New Journalism which can be linked with the era's countercultural efforts as well. In general, Thompson, in his texts, examines various phenomena surrounding the counterculture and provides us with a distinctive portrayal of the era's zeitgeist. However, unlike some of his contemporaries, he also remembers to examine numerous flaws and fallacies existing within contemporary American society, the American Dream...
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