The theme of the dissertation is the reception of the Classical Antiquity in the Czech Literature between 1880 and 1910. The aim was to analyse the ways in which Czech culture related to the Classical Antiquity in the period of increased concern with Classical topics, motifs and forms. The first, largest part, methodologically inspired by the demythicizing perspective of Vladimír Macura and Jiří Rak, concerns with stereotypical views of the Classical Antiquity particularly prominent in the contemporary discourse: the antithetical image of noble Greece and corrupted Rome, the topos of bright Hellenic Sun and clear Sky, the ideology behind the common opinion that Ancient sculptures were all white (and the reactions to the discovery that they were, in fact, polychrome), the topos of a Greek athletic body and its employment in the policy of the Czech sports movement 'Sokol' (Falcon), and last but not least the topos of a man unspoilt by civilization and living in accordance with the Nature. Separate chapters are also devoted to two then important intermediaries of reception, grammar schools and translation. In the second part, attention is drawn to the representation of the Classical Antiquity in dramatic plays by Jaroslav Vrchlický, especially the dramatic trilogy Hippodamie, and their reception in...

In his Defence of Poetry (c. 1580), Philip Sidney argues that poetry—a category in which he includes all imaginative fiction—aims at the education of its readers. Archepollycyes studies the attempts of a loose group of sixteenth-century writers around Sidney to write fiction that lives up to this aim, in order to understand the methods they developed to educate readers and the relationship between this education and the politics of the monarchical state. Sidnean fiction demands long study on the part of its readers because it aims to transform their mental habits and create new internal resources for right action. The works of fiction I study here—Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, George Buchanan’s Baptistes, Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and A Discourse of Life and Death, and Fulke Greville’s Mustapha—were products of their authors’ experiments with genre, narrative, translation, and style as tools to achieve this aim. Through the reading experience these works invite, readers exercise their judgment in the interpretation of fictional examples and reflect explicitly on the mental habits of generalization and application that inform decisions about how to act in new circumstances. Readers also come to see these habits of judgment as shared with others and experience the act of reading as participation in both real and imagined interpretive communities. I argue that these interpretive communities are best understood as loose political institutions, networks of organization and affiliation whose members could think and act together through common habits of judgment and the mutual resolution that results from recognizing this commonality. I adopt the term “archepollycyes” from Gabriel Harvey in order to describe the role of such institutions in monarchical politics. Harvey coins the term to describe the foundational forms of political knowledge, action, and organization, in contrast to the day-to-day work of government and the business of political rule. “Archepollycyes” hold a political community together in spite of changes in its ruler or government; understanding and creating such institutions was thus a means of responding to the escalating crises of succession, absolutism, and civil war that confronted early modern monarchies. By reading and writing fiction, I argue, Sidney and a broader network of writers aimed to act at a distance from contemporary political conflicts by founding “archepollycyes,” loose institutions capable of acting independent of the monarchical state and outside of existing structures of government, but on behalf of the long-term stability of a political community. In this way, I offer a new way of thinking about fiction and political institution in relation to the contested emergence of the modern sovereign state.

This dissertation claims contributions on two fronts. First, it aims to contribute to the theory of reception with a practical model of reading postclassical texts that substantially engage ancient ones. In the second place, it contributes three individual readings of three important works of literature on which nothing has been written by anglophone classicists working on classical reception: José Watanabe’s Antígona, Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon, and Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost. This dissertation’s contribution to the theory of reception is the proposition of a practical schema of reading, which is a figure upon which the imagination can operate. Simply put, it posits a schema as the place where meaning is construed. The schema calls attention to the constructedness of meaning and to the act of construction and organizes different moments of “reception”: that of the postclassical text receiving the ancient one (which the schema imagines as a vertical line) and that of the scholar receiving that particular instance of reception, the “I” of interpretation, which is theorized as one of two axes of transcendence of the schema (the other one being the world of/to which the schema speaks and means). Furthermore, the schema puts the “where” of meaning in the relation of (at least) two texts, but the “of” of meaning belongs to the postclassical texts. The postclassical text receiving ancient text(s) is proposed as a complex work, simultaneously in relationship with texts from the past as well as other texts from other periods. The relations of the postclassical text with each of these texts are different and need to be differently traced or theorized. The relation with the ancient texts is properly textual and thus the primary way of tracing it in the schema is a vertical line that first and foremost pays attention to form, with the tools of structural analysis and philology. Then, the theorization of the vertical line is made thicker with the operation of concepts upon it. As each of these texts (the classical and the postclassical) mean in relation to webs of texts that are relevant to the vertical relation, the schema imagines an additional dimension to the vertical one: the horizontal. Each of the horizontal lines traced for both the classical and the postclassical texts are in one way or another “historicist” readings, they trace contexts for the texts, but the way that context is understood in the theorization of the horizontal dimension of the schema is plural and never saturated. While this horizontal aspect of meaning is understood as textual, the schema also imagines for it an axis of transcendence, the world on which writers write and in which the reader is situated. The first chapter’s primary goal is to provide a reading of José Watanabe’s Antígona using the schema to illuminate the ways in which this text makes meaning in relation to Sophocles’ Antigone and part of the body of texts that have come to form part of that name. This reading counters the predominant approach to this work (and to many a work in classical reception), which reads it allegorically, as a commentary on a particular moment in the history of Peru. That predominant way of reading not only ignores the vertical orientation of the text in relation to its avowed ancient source, it also limits itself to one way of tracing the horizontality of the postclassical text, construing “context” in the most immediate and literal sense. The chapter contributes a reading that opens up Antígona to much more than allegory, highlighting its powerful affective and aesthetic dimension, as well as its intersection with recent feminist readings of the Greek tragedy that turn towards the figure of Ismene and the politics of sisterhood. The second chapter sets itself to the analysis of the complex role that ancient texts play in Christine Brooke-Rose’s radically experimental novel Amalgamemnon. This novel has not been the focus of attention of any work by a classical scholar, and those scholars who have written about it in other fields have failed to analyze the importance that Herodotus’ Histories and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon play at both the structural and the thematic levels. Tracing the vertical line, the chapter shows how these two texts are essential to the novel’s writing and themes. In the horizontal dimension, the schema situates the novel’s engagement with those ancient sources in the context of contemporary feminist discourse, especially as it concerns the question of the possibility of a feminine discourse and an outside of the phallocentric system of signs. That intersection illuminates both how Brooke-Rose is reading the ancient sources as well as what are arguably some of the limitations of her writing in contrast to the ethical commitments of feminisms. Finally, the third chapter is a reading of Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, a text that is perhaps better known than the texts treated in the previous two chapters, at least in the Anglophone world, but which has nonetheless been fairly disregarded in the scholarship. The chapter provides a rigorous analysis of the “work” of this text, of what it does and how it does it, as the scholarship on Carson’s work has failed to posit or satisfactorily respond to the important questions regarding what constitutes the undeniable originality of her writing. In this particular book, which combines academic and poetic discourses into a new form that partakes of both, Carson proposes a comparative mode of making meaning that cannot be captured with a structural analysis of inter- or -trans- textuality, as the previous two chapters construed the vertical dimension of the schema. Instead, the theory of metaphor developed by Paul Ricoeur provides the appropriate tool to imagine the vertical dimension of the schema and analyze Carson’s exercise in bringing an ancient and a modern author together. This particular construction of the schema brings into the terrain of classical reception the possibility of interpretating comparative works that do not fit nicely within the theoretical margins of this subfield of classical studies. Finally, the chapter provides the occasion to trace another aspect of the schema, its other axis of transcendence, which is the “I” of interpretation.

<p>The epic hero Diomedes is, in my opinion, considered a marginal hero, as he is relegated to a backbench in ancient Greek thought and ideology. I examine why this is the case, considering his role and impact in Homer's <em>Iliad</em>. Greek society valued its epic heroes beyond the words of the poets, yet some heroes received much more attention that others as central characters in tragedy and iconography, consequently regarded as favourites by mass audiences. I believe that examining a marginal hero like Diomedes is important in order to understand why Greek culture generally disregarded some warriors in favour of others, especially in the case of Diomedes, who displays heroic virtues more evidently than several other heroes who have received more attention. Overall Greek attitudes toward him offer an intriguing perspective on the epic heroes and the ways in which the Greeks idealized them. An examination of Greek literary, visual, and religious spheres of influence effectively aid in determining the reasons behind this phenomenon. In summary, this work attempts to understand Greek attitudes towards a hero who has received very little scholarly attention. The concept of the epic hero requires analysis of even the most neglected characters; one cannot understand Odysseus, Achilles, or Hector without examining Diomedes, who has a notable role in the very same tradition as the aforementioned heroes.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This dissertation is an attempt to study and comment upon the text of Aeneid 11. In so doing it has been necessary to trace the literary origins of the characters concerned in the hope that this would give some consistent direction to their characterization.</p> <p>Since the world's first historians had been Greeks who had associated history with epic poetry,considering that "history owed its technique and its very existence to Homer and other Greek poets" and that "Athenian tragic drama in the fifth century B.C ... also influenced Greek historical writing" (M.Grant. The Annals of Imperial Rome,10), history and poetry were inextricably woven together as Virgil's Shield of Aeneas clearly indicates (Aeneid 8.626 ff.). That this rapport would have some bearing upon Vergil's work is an aspect noted by a number of scholars who see the Aeneid in terms of allegory,a point of view which I have attempted to explore in treating Aeneid 11.</p> <p>In assessing Vergil's major heroes and his heroine Camilla,it was necessary to evaluate both descriptions and behaviour patterns of other major characters throughout Vergil's epic.As a result of this,my awareness of Vergil's knowledge of ambiguous writing techniques grew and it seemed to me that a subtle manipulation of mythology and Roman history would provide an excellent vehicle for both characterization and narrative of outstanding personages of Vergil's own era.</p> <p>Vergil's deliberate yet sensitive treatment of his major characters,his variatio in the use of typology,his highlighting of motivation and interests,of the horrors of war in which the young and frequently the innocent suffer on both sides,his recording of public debates between prominent politicians and pen portraits of regal furiosae,all find their counterparts in the period of civil strife which ensued after the assassination of Julius Caesar. The sympathy and humanitas of Vergil for all concerned,mirrored in his generally successful attempt to write aequo animo,might be summed up in Aeneas'desperate groan as he views the battle-scenes and carnage depicted on the walls of Juno's temple at Carthage: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt (Aen.1.462).</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation investigates the life, writings, and reception of Marcus Tullius Tiro, a Roman freedman who had formerly been enslaved to Cicero. Its five chapters employ literary and historical approaches to analyze extant sources and to discern what they are able to tell us about Tiro. Chapter one offers a literary reading of Ad familiares 16 that demonstrates how this book of letters tells a story of Tiro’s rise from enslavement to becoming a successful Roman citizen. This analysis of Ad familiares 16 suggests that its letters present a curated portrait of Tiro, which may skew the reliability of this book as a straightforward historical source. Chapter two therefore turns to comparative evidence, particularly Epistulae ad Atticum, in order to establish a clearer understanding of the labor and status of Tiro, as well as other enslaved and freed people connected with Cicero’s household. Chapter three then moves beyond Ciceronian sources in order to study Tiro as an author and scholar in his own right. By analyzing fragments and testimonia of Tiro’s writings, the chapter contextualizes Tiro’s work in the intellectual culture of the first century BCE and suggests how Tiro used authorship as a means of self-fashioning. The final two chapters of the dissertation investigate Tiro’s afterlives in antiquity and in later historical periods. Chapter four provides a detailed analysis of Tiro’s reception in the writings of ancient authors, showing how Tiro became a symbolic figure in the classical tradition. Chapter five then presents case studies that explore Tiro’s afterlives in a selection of sources from the fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Taken together, these five chapters construct a multifaceted account of Tiro and his legacy.

The pictorial elements of the first six books of the Aeneid can be evidenced through an examination of its structural components. With commentaries on such literary devices as parallels and antipodes, interwoven themes, cyclic patterns, and strategic placement of words in the text, three genres of painting are treated individually in Chapter 1 to illustrate the poet's consistency of design and to prove him a craftsman of the visual arts. In the first division, "Cinematic progression," attention is directed to the language which conveys movement and frequentative action, with special emphasis placed on specific passages whose verbal components possess sculptural or third-dimensional traits and contribute to the "spiral" and "circle" motifs, the appropriate visual agents for animation. Depiction of mythological subjects comprises the second division entitled "Cameos and snapshots." Three selections, dubbed monstra, are explicated with such cross references as to illustrate the poet's use of epithets which he distributes passim to elicit verbal echoes of other passages. The final division, "The Vergilian landscape," addresses two major themes, antithetical in nature, the martial and the pastoral. Their sequential juxtaposition in the text renders a marked contrast in mood which is manifested pictorially in the transition from darkness to light. A panoramic chiaroscuro emerges which is the tapestry against which Aeneas makes his sojourn through the Underworld. It is the perfect backdrop to accompany the overriding theme of "things hidden," res latentes, which encompasses a greater part of the epic and becomes the culminant motif of the paintings which comprise the visual presentation. Chapter 2 functions as a catalogue raisonne for art inspired by the Aeneid from early antiquity up to the present day. Such examples of artistic expression provide a continuum with which to appropriate Horace's maxim, ut pictura poesis, in their evaluation. The verbal exegeses in Chapter 1 have been programmed to comport with the thematic content of the visual presentation in Chapter 3, a critique exemplifying the transposition of the verbal to the pictorial. With these canvases I have attempted to render a new perspective of Vergil's epic in the genre of abstract expressionism. / Art / D. Litt. et Phil.

The thesis deals with the use of classical and contemporary literature for the development of reading literacy at primary schools. We focused mainly on the research of popular literature of third to fifth grade primary pupils. We also investigated what extra-curricular reading materials teachers choose to develop their pupils' reading literacy and how they work with them. In the theoretical part, we present a brief insight into the issue of reading literacy, current research results, methods, strategies and factors influencing reading literacy. In the research part, we present the results of a questionnaire survey of pupils' parents, where the main attention was paid to the preferences of titles, authors and genres of their children. In the practical part, we followed up on the results of these surveys and designed worksheets with activities aimed at promoting reading comprehension and developing reading strategies. We focused mainly on their motivational and entertaining character. Worksheets with activities were verified in selected classes of primary schools and supplemented by rich reflection from practice.

The pictorial elements of the first six books of the Aeneid can be evidenced through an examination of its structural components. With commentaries on such literary devices as parallels and antipodes, interwoven themes, cyclic patterns, and strategic placement of words in the text, three genres of painting are treated individually in Chapter 1 to illustrate the poet's consistency of design and to prove him a craftsman of the visual arts. In the first division, "Cinematic progression," attention is directed to the language which conveys movement and frequentative action, with special emphasis placed on specific passages whose verbal components possess sculptural or third-dimensional traits and contribute to the "spiral" and "circle" motifs, the appropriate visual agents for animation. Depiction of mythological subjects comprises the second division entitled "Cameos and snapshots." Three selections, dubbed monstra, are explicated with such cross references as to illustrate the poet's use of epithets which he distributes passim to elicit verbal echoes of other passages. The final division, "The Vergilian landscape," addresses two major themes, antithetical in nature, the martial and the pastoral. Their sequential juxtaposition in the text renders a marked contrast in mood which is manifested pictorially in the transition from darkness to light. A panoramic chiaroscuro emerges which is the tapestry against which Aeneas makes his sojourn through the Underworld. It is the perfect backdrop to accompany the overriding theme of "things hidden," res latentes, which encompasses a greater part of the epic and becomes the culminant motif of the paintings which comprise the visual presentation. Chapter 2 functions as a catalogue raisonne for art inspired by the Aeneid from early antiquity up to the present day. Such examples of artistic expression provide a continuum with which to appropriate Horace's maxim, ut pictura poesis, in their evaluation. The verbal exegeses in Chapter 1 have been programmed to comport with the thematic content of the visual presentation in Chapter 3, a critique exemplifying the transposition of the verbal to the pictorial. With these canvases I have attempted to render a new perspective of Vergil's epic in the genre of abstract expressionism. / Art / D. Litt. et Phil.

The complicated issues surrounding translation studies have seen growing attention in recent years from scholars and academics that want to make it a discipline and not a minor branch of another field, such as linguistics or comparative literature. Writ large with Antigonick, Carson showcases the recent Western push towards translation studies in the American academy. By offering up a text that is chaotic in its presentation, she bypasses the rigid idea of univocality. By giving the text discordant images, she betrays the failed efficacy of sign and signification, and by choosing a text to be performed and mutually participated in, she exceeds ideas of the individual subject as the site of authorship. Ultimately, Carson enacts a theory of translation that critically deconstructs translation itself.