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From Metafiction to Self-reflexive Narration (Theory and Practice of Self-disclosing Fiction in Czech Literature) Mgr. Vladimír Trpka Abstract The doctoral thesis deals with metafiction as a key theoretical concept influencing both theoretical contemplations on self-reflexivity in narrative fiction and interpretation of the development of self-reflexive practice in literature. The main objective, based on an analysis of the most influential theoretical approaches to narrative self-reflexivity, is to propose such concepts of metafiction and self-reflexive narration that could be applied in the analysis of the self-reflexive practice in the Czech narrative fiction. The theoretical part focuses on examining the relationship between metafiction and narrative self- reflexivity. Metafiction is viewed as a concept that has not only replaced the concept of self-conscious novel, but it has also adapted it to the postmodern conception of fiction. The concept of fictionality in the theoretical concept of metafiction is directly related to postmodern discourse in which this concept was born. Consequently, an explicitly formulated and/or hidden relationship with constructivist philosophy of language, performativity, and linguistic nature of reality is found in the existing approaches to metafiction. Thus if the...

The aim of this master's thesis is to define and analyse the anti-Communist cycle: a group of several dozen feature films, which were produced in the United States since the late forties until the end of the fifties. The thesis adopts a critical approach to the current research on the cycle; it considers that scholars have not taken into account much of the relevant context and have described the cycle only as a reflection of some social phenomena. This project enriches the debate by considering the plurality of differently motivated participants. In addition to shifts in the society as a whole, the emphasis is put on the interests of both the film industry and ones, who expressed their disagreement with the dominant form of anti-Communism, but not with the anti-Communism itself. The anti-Communist cycle is thus presented as a dynamic group of various films in terms of ideas, style or genres; among these films a discreet tension was created. This general hypothesis is tested by three extensive chapters. The first chapter deals with the context and defines the role of all participants. It is divided into two parts: (a) the historical context, (b) the context of the film industry. The second chapter summarizes the long continuity of production of anti-Communist films in the United States; then it...

(in English) This thesis deals with space in Japanese science fiction literature in 1960s. The aim is to find out specificity of japanese space in works with apocalyptic endings. Theoretical part deals with concept of possible worlds, various approaches to space and above all with theory of fictional worlds, which I use as main methodology of this thesis. Practical part is topoanalysis and comparison of three selected literary works: Inter Ice Age 4 (Dai yon kanpyōki 第四間氷期, 1959) by Abe Kōbō 安部公房 (1924-1993), Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights (Hyaku oku no hiru to sen oku no yoru百億の昼と千億の夜, 1967) by Mitsuse Ryū 光瀬竜 (1928-1999) and Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu 日本沈没) by Komatsu Sakyō 小松左京 (1931-2011). In topoanalysis I focus primarily on island position of Japan and role of the ocean.

En prenant comme point de départ l'interprétation de l'épopée homérique par Erich Auerbach, ce mémoire se consacre à la notion d'immersion fictionnelle, non sous son versant psychologique de phénomène contingent de la conscience imageante, mais sous son versant imaginaire, en tant que mythe sociétal d'immédiateté déterminant des stratégies esthétiques et médiatiques concrètes, que j'articule autour des poétiques contemporaines de construction de mondes (world building). L'enjeu est de saisir les répercussions esthétiques de ce fantasme d'une représentation qui occulterait à la fois sa médiateté et le réel-sensible, à une époque où la transfictionnalité et la transmédiaticité s'élèvent tranquillement comme modes narratifs dominants de notre culture occidentale contemporaine. Avec cette conviction que le terme d'immersion doit être replacé dans le cadre de ses effets, le premier chapitre s'affairera à démêler quelques difficultés théoriques que pose la notion en la problématisant sous l'égide des questions ontologiques de vérité et de la position phénoménologique de Sartre sur l'imaginaire. Tout en posant les outils théoriques nécessaires aux analyses subséquentes, le deuxième chapitre approfondit cette problématisation en empruntant aux théories modales des mondes possibles un cadre conceptuel opératoire, qui amènera, notamment grâce au concept formalisé de «~monde~», à concevoir la fiction comme un mouvement de distanciation. Appuyé par la lecture du roman tolkienien, le troisième chapitre tourne le fantasme d'immersion du côté d'une pulsion encyclopédique de complétude, concrétisée par des stratégies textuelles d'accumulation informationnelle et de virtualisation de données diégétiques laissées en suspens -- effets d'actualité que je qualifie d'extra-narratifs en les présentant en contraste des principes prescriptifs du \emph{muthos} aristotélicien formant une chaîne causale téléologique fondée sur une loi d'économie narrative. Le quatrième et dernier chapitre, articulé autour de la notion encore trop peu étudiée de canonicité, observe les poétiques de construction de mondes telles qu'elles se désamorcent elles-mêmes, dans le contexte des univers partagés, en engendrant des incohérences logiques donnant lieu à la tenue d'un discours auctorial-éditorial régissant les vérités fictionnelles comme moyen de maintenir l'immersivité de la représentation. L'analyse générique des comic-books de superhéros et une enquête sur la gestion éditoriale de l'univers de Star Wars permettront d'identifier les multiples modalités de délimitation de la frontière entre canon et apocryphe. En conclusion, je reviens brièvement sur la notion d'immersion, ainsi exemplifiée, en la resémiotisant comme une médiation compétitive de mise en présence de l'être. / Starting from Erich Auerbach's interpretation of the Homeric epic, this master's dissertation studies the notion of fictional immersion, not in its psychological aspect of a contingent phenomena of human consciousness, but rather in its collective imaginary sense, as a societal myth of immediacy generating concrete aesthetic and media strategies that I investigate from the standpoint of contemporary poetics of world building. The objective is to apprehend the aesthetic repercussions of this desire for a mediation that would conceal both the real and its own mediacy, in a time where transfictionality and transmedia storytelling are becoming more and more the dominant narrative modes of our contemporary western culture. Under the conviction that immersion must be looked at as a set of cultural strategies, the first chapter unravels some theorical difficulties bounded to the term by problematizing it towards ontological questions of truth and Sartre's phenomenological stance on the imaginary. While laying a necessary theorical toolset for subsequent analyses, the second chapter examines these problems by borrowing to possible worlds modal theories a set of working concepts, which will lead to the assumption that fiction is a movement of distanciation, notably with the aide of the formal concept of ``world''. Through a reading of the tolkienian novel, the third chapter directs the desire for immersion towards an encyclopedic impulsion for completeness, embodied by textual strategies such as informational proliferation and allusion to virtual diegetic data -- strategies leaving an impression of the actual that I describe as extra-narrative in contrast to Aristote's \emph{muthos} forming a teological causal chain based on a principle of an unitary narrative. The fourth and final chapter, articulated around the still too little studied notion of canonicity, observes poetics of world building as they neutralize themselves, particularly with shared universes, by generating logical inconsistencies giving birth to authorial and editorial discourses stating fictional truths as a way of maintaining the mediation's immersivity. The analysis of the superhero comics genre and an inquiry of the editorial management of the Star Wars universe will exemplify the multiple modalities of this delimitation between the canon and the apocryphal. As a conclusion, I briefly come back to the notion of immersion itself by redescribing it as a competitive mediation of presence.

This diploma thesis deals with the fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire written by American author G. R. R. Martin and the analysis of its fictional world. It explores saga's genre classification and focuses on elements that depart from its genre and which enrich it. Through the narratological analysis of the work, it focuses on the main principles of the construction of the fictional world and its specific characteristics. The basic theoretical framework for the analysis of the saga consists of contemporary fictional worlds that are not called fictional in the sense that they would form a fictional narrative but create a new narrative universe. It is designed to help construct further sequels or narrative turns. The diploma thesis also refers to the phenomenon of transmediality, thanks to which the narrative universe continues to expand and the fictional world becomes more realistic.

This study provides a precise definition of the term 'Kafkaesque' by enriching literary criticism with scientific theory and practice, including an experiment on readers' responses to Kafka. Dictionary definitions justify taking the term back to its textual origins in Kafka's works, and the works can fruitfully be analysed by investigating how readers engage with them through cognitive processes of imagination. Modern scientific developments posit that vision, imagination, and consciousness should be conceived of not in terms of static pictorialism – reducible to the notion of 'pictures in the head' – but in terms of enaction, i.e. as an ongoing interaction with the external world around us. Most traditional nineteenth-century Realist texts are based on pictorialist assumptions, while Kafka's texts evoke perception non-pictorially and are therefore more cognitively realistic. In his personal writings, Kafka wrestles with problems entailed by pictorialist conceptions of vision, imagination, and the function of language, and comes to enactivist solutions: evocation of perception that does not result in painting static tableaux with words. In his fictional works, Kafka correspondingly evolves a cognitively realistic way of writing to evoke fictional worlds that directly engage the cognitive processes of their readers; Der Proceß is a prime example of the 'Kafkaesque' text and reading experience, defined by being compelling yet simultaneously unsettling. Modulations in narrative perspective and evocation of emotion as enactive also contribute to the experience of the 'Kafkaesque' as compelling; yet Kafka's texts simultaneously unsettle by preventing straightforward emotional identification with the protagonists, and destabilising deep-rooted concepts of selfhood as singular and unified. The theoretical discussion of the 'Kafkaesque' experience as compelling yet unsettling is complemented and refined by an experiment testing readers' responses to a short story by Kafka. The term 'Kafkaesque realism' denotes Kafka's compelling yet unsettling non-pictorial evocation of perception of the fictional world. Kafkaesque realism falls into the broader category of 'cognitive realism', which provides a framework for analysing fictional texts more generally.

(in English): This thesis is devided into three parts. In the fist part, the development of literary discourse in Japan between Meiji and postwar period is described, with emphasis on the development of literary character and Subject in a work of literature. The second part theoretical apparatus for studiying and analyzing literary character is introduced, using contemporary literary theory. In that part relationship between literary character and its subject is also included. In the third part, these findings are applied on a specific literary works of Japanese postwar literature, on which development and changes of literary character are observed. The three analyzed works here are Kamen no kokuhaku by Mishima Yukio, Tanin no kao by Abe Kōbō and Man'en gan'nen no futtobōru by Ōe Kenzaburō.

The theme of the dissertation submitted is the novel Devil Guardian, whose author is a Mexican writer Xavier Velasco. This dissertation is the very first theoretical work in the Czech environment, devoted to the above-mentioned piece of literature published in 2004. In a sense, Devil Guardian represents a characteristic Mexican novel of the early 21st century, combining tradition and novelty in a surprising and original manner. A significant feature of the contemporary Mexican literature is a departure from the theme of Mexicanity, generally from a programmatic indulging in so-called national literature. Velasco's novel is an exemplary, however, not only piece of literature proving that the literary break-up with Mexico is neither an exclusive nor a dominant attribute of the contemporary Mexican fiction. In Devil Guardian Velasco focuses his mind on the theme of personal and national identity, which he treats in a considerably nontraditional manner, giving an ironical turn to speak to a hypermodern girl moving in the globalized world. The dissertation is divided into six parts. The first part "Originality Rooted in Tradition" refers to Devil Guardian ensuing the tradition of Mexican novel and innovating it. The second part "Xavier Velasco" briefly introduces the author's life and work. The issues...

This thesis synthezises theories from intermedia studies, semiotics, Gestalt psychology, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, cognitive poetics, reader response criticism, narratology and possible worlds-theories adjusted to literary studies. The aim is to provide a transdisciplinary explanatory model of the transaction between text and reader during the reading process resulting in the reader experiencing a mental, virtual world. Departing from Mitchells statement that all media are mixed media, this thesis points to Peirce’s tricotomies of different types of signs and to the relation between representamen (sign), object and interpretant, which states that the interpretant can be developed into a more complex sign, for example from a symbolic to an iconic sign. This is explained in cognitive science by the fact that our perceptions are multimodal. We can easily connect sounds and symbolic signs to images. Our brain is highly active in finding structures and patterns, matching them with structures already stored in memory. Cognitive semantics holds that such structures and schematic mental images form the basis for our understanding of concepts. In cognitive linguistics Lakoff and Johnsons theories of conceptual metaphors show that our bodily experiences are fundamental in thought and language, and that abstract thought is concretized by a metaphorical system grounded in our bodily, spatial experiences. Cognitive science has shown that we build situation models based on what the text describes. These mental models are simultaneously influenced by the reader’s personal world knowledge and earlier experiences. Reader response-theorists emphasize the number of gaps that a text leaves to the reader to fill in, using scripts. Eye tracking research reveals that people use mental imaging both when they are re-describing a previously seen picture and when their re-description is based purely on verbal information about a picture. Mental spaces are small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk. A story is built up by a large number of such spaces and the viewpoint and focus changes constantly. There are numerous possible combinations and relations of mental spaces. For the reader it is important to separate them as well as to connect them. Mental spaces can also be blended. In their integration network model Fauconnier and Turner describe four types of blending, where the structures of the input spaces are blended in different ways. A similar act of separation and fusion is needed dealing with different diegetic levels and focalizations, the question of who tells and who sees in the text. Ryan uses possible worlds-theories from modal logic to describe fictional worlds as both possible and parallel worlds. While fictional worlds are comparable to possible worlds if seen as mental constructions created within our actual world, they must also be treated as parallel worlds, with their own actual, reference world from which their own logic stems. As readers we must recenter ourselves into this fictional world to be able to deal with states of affairs that are logically impossible in our own actual world. The principle of minimal departure states that during our recentering, we only make the adjustments necessary due to explicit statements in the text.