J.D. Salinger's "Hapworth 16, 1924," his last published work, is notorious for the initial critical silence it received, as well as the subsequent general consensus that it was a text to revile if not avoid. This thesis proposes that while "Hapworth" is a difficult and perplexing piece, there is a good deal about it that deserves if not outright praise, then a close critical re-examination. Assuming the "author" of the story is not the seven-year-old version of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" suicide Seymour Glass, as the story purports, but his grieving younger brother Buddy, who has spent the years since his brother's death trying to come to terms with it. "Hapworth" is Buddy's final--and perhaps finally successful--attempt to do so.

This dissertation studies the fictional and non-fictional responses of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers to their felt anxieties about the vitality of literature in contemporary culture. The intangible nature of literature's social value marks the literary as an uneasy, contested, and defensive cultural site. At the same time, the significance of any given cultural artifact or medium, such as television, film, radio, or fiction, is in a continual state of flux. Within that broad context I examine some of the cultural institutions competing with literature for public attention, as well as some of the cultural developments impacting the availability of public attention for literary concerns. With Wallace, I study his efforts in fiction and essays to establish an anti-ironic mode of literary rebellion, in opposition to the culturally pervasive tone of self-protective irony modeled by television. Franzen opens discussion about the transience of cultural authority, a situation in which the imprimatur of the academy, for instance, confers a cultural significance different in kind but not degree from the imprimatur of a popular televised book club. My study of Franzen in particular demonstrates the impact of proliferating sites of cultural authority, addressing the emergence of middlebrow culture and audiences from contested space to authoritative cultural arbiter. The chapter on Franzen also examines the increasing role of corporate interests in the production of cultural artifacts with an eye toward their financial viability more than their cultural impact. And finally, my study of Powers focuses on the animosity between the sciences and the humanities. Powers produces fiction that serves as an indispensable tool for communicating between disparate and otherwise isolated disciplines, and for helping those specialized fields synthesize their information with others.

This dissertation studies the fictional and non-fictional responses of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers to their felt anxieties about the vitality of literature in contemporary culture. The intangible nature of literature's social value marks the literary as an uneasy, contested, and defensive cultural site. At the same time, the significance of any given cultural artifact or medium, such as television, film, radio, or fiction, is in a continual state of flux. Within that broad context I examine some of the cultural institutions competing with literature for public attention, as well as some of the cultural developments impacting the availability of public attention for literary concerns. With Wallace, I study his efforts in fiction and essays to establish an anti-ironic mode of literary rebellion, in opposition to the culturally pervasive tone of self-protective irony modeled by television. Franzen opens discussion about the transience of cultural authority, a situation in which the imprimatur of the academy, for instance, confers a cultural significance different in kind but not degree from the imprimatur of a popular televised book club. My study of Franzen in particular demonstrates the impact of proliferating sites of cultural authority, addressing the emergence of middlebrow culture and audiences from contested space to authoritative cultural arbiter. The chapter on Franzen also examines the increasing role of corporate interests in the production of cultural artifacts with an eye toward their financial viability more than their cultural impact. And finally, my study of Powers focuses on the animosity between the sciences and the humanities. Powers produces fiction that serves as an indispensable tool for communicating between disparate and otherwise isolated disciplines, and for helping those specialized fields synthesize their information with others.

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Diploma thesis Translation's of Edgar Allan Poe's Poems in the Context of the Czech Literature maps Edgar Allan Poe's influence on Czech culture in the context of Czech literary science. It analyzes chosen theoretical essays and on their basis constructs a continuous picture of understanding of Poe's texts and his personality in specified period of time since year 1945 until today. The thesis' goal is to depict the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and Czech culture, to state the changes in understanding throughout the different time periods and to reflect on its importance. The whole work is divided into two parts, the first one reminds results of preceding research, whereas the second one expands on them. Bibliography on Poe's work and personality and the list of all Poe's works published in Czech language represent also important parts of the work.

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The study of young adult literature has become widespread within Children’s and Young Adult Literature specifically and literary studies as a whole. However, the term “young adult” which defines and focalizes both the literature itself and the ostensible readers for whom it is produced remains a poorly-examined area. The present study examines the creation of one branch of what we now call “young adult literature” from its roots in the United States in the early twentieth century to its emergence as a dominant literary form in the mid-to-late 1960s. In doing so, it seeks to reconcile emerging professional, psychological, sociological, pedagogical, cultural, and ideological discourses concerning adolescence and young adulthood with works of fiction prepared specifically for their consumption. It also seeks to position the changing role of adolescent subjects into the larger framework of American Studies by examining how these texts reflected, tested, and reinforced dominant paradigms of thought surrounding how adolescents would become actualized American subjects. At the same time, it broaches concerns within these dominant paradigms that have been overlooked in constructing historical approaches to the development of young adult literature, and it suggests a few methodologies by which to recover these undiscussed threads.

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The objective of this work is the overall analysis of imaging the literary figures of journalists who appear in contemporary detective and crime novels in North America. Result of work is the creation of basic typology of literary figures journalists - detectives (men), who dominates in these novels. In the first part the author deals with the problems of literary characters and its analysis. Author presents a basic overview of the most significant literary figures of journalists who appeared in the literature across the provenances and history. In the second chapter Helena Eliášová deals with the history and main characteristics of detective and crime fiction. The third chapter is focused on the position of journalists in North America and briefly outlines the North American media system and the dominant elements in it. The fourth chapter presents the basic typology of journalists - a man in the contemporary criminal detective novel of North America. In the fifth chapter, the author deals with the problem of creating and eliminating myths of journalist as a detective character. It focuses on displaying his physiognomy and abilities and characteristics. In the final chapter, the author focuses on the stereotypes that are associated with the figure of the classic journalists and shows the variations...