La notion de l'absurde a pris dans la pensée et le langage courant un très grand nombre de significations, parfois très éloignées les unes par rapport aux autres. Il est arrivé à au moins deux reprises que le terme « absurde » soit entendu dans le sens d'un courant : dans la philosophie absurde théorisée par Albert Camus en 1942, et dans le Théâtre de l'absurde (Beckett, Ionesco, etc.), qui lui a connu son apogée dans les années cinquante. Ces deux mouvements pourraient être envisagés comme l'expression d'un seul et même courant, l'absurde, qui prend ses racines dans une Europe ébranlée par les horreurs de la guerre et l'affaissement de la religion chrétienne. Pour les contemporains, l'hostilité et le désordre de l'univers, de même que la solitude irrémédiable de l'individu apparaissent comme des vérités à la fois douloureuses et difficile à ignorer. Roman Polanski (1933-), cinéaste à la fois prolifique et éclectique, ouvre à l'absurde de nouveaux horizons, ceux du septième art. L'analyse de son oeuvre (et des éléments autobiographiques qui la sous-tendent parfois) met à jour d'indéniables parentés avec les figures-clés de l'absurde que sont Camus, Kafka, Nietzsche et les dramaturges européens de l'après-guerre. Ces parentés se repèrent tout autant dans les thématiques récurrentes de ses films que dans leurs obsessions formelles. / The idea of absurd has taken a huge amount of different meanings in thought and current speech. Some of these meanings may present important differences with others. There is at least two occurrences where the word “absurd” has been understood as a current: first, in the philosophie absurde, theorized by Albert Camus in 1942, and second, in the Theater of the Absurd (Beckett, Ionesco and others), who had his hours of glory during the 1950s. These two movements can be seen as two branches of a single current, the Absurd, who has its roots in Europe after World War II. The horrors of the conflict and the loss of faith in Christianity pushed the intellectuals and artists of this period to become very sensitive to ideas such as hostility (of men, of world...) and loneliness. Roman Polanski (1933-), film director well-known for the eclecticism of his work, showed very notable acquaintances with Absurd in many of his movies. The analysis of his art (and of the autobiographical elements that sometimes appear in it) proves a clear relation with important figures of the Absurd current, such as Camus, Kafka, Nietzsche, and European playwrights of the post-war era. This relation can be observed in themes as well as in the mise en scène of Polanski's films.

This thesis deals with the use of comic adaptations in literary lessons at primary and secondary schools. The aim of this work is to map available comic adaptations of literary works written by Czech authors. The comic adaptations of Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis will be evaluated based on pre-selected criteria. Part of the work will also be a comparison of the original text with the selected comic adaptation and noting the changes in the fictional world created by transferring it to the comic medium. The work will help teachers to understand the theory of comics. Theoretical knowledge will be applied in the creation of two teaching blocks built for the purposes of literary education at primary and secondary schools. The concrete implementation of both teaching blocks in practice will be compared.

Many accounts of Max Weber’s thought would seek to portray him as a theorist of responsibility or “re-enchantment” – as one who can confirm for us the appropriateness of a liberal position given the conditions of life as moderns, thus preserving the possibility of a renewed project of management at every turn. Such a reading may well be comforting today, insofar as it enables a reconciliation to the constellations of technological thinking within which we already find ourselves engaged. Over and against such accounts, this thesis attempts to elaborate an image of Weber as a hunger artist, as one who brings into emphasis a fundamental sense of loss attendant to “modernity”, and who broods upon that loss as the condition of a more faithful reflection upon the character of being. Not only does Weber offer insight into modern conditions of research and the theorization of politics; he is one who thinks such questions in their mournful profundity, gesturing towards what cannot be carried forward within their terms. In the melancholy of his thought, it is suggested, we glimpse the contours of a horizon from which we have still not emerged.

Charles University First Medical Faculty Study programme: History of Medicine Summary of dissertation The Spanish Flu Pandemic 1918/19 with particular reference to the Bohemian Lands and Central European relations Dr. med. univ. Harald Salfellner Prague, 2017 Summary Towards the end of the First World War, in 1918 and 1919, humanity faced a previously unparalleled flu pandemic; within a few months, more people had been killed than in all the battles of the 1914-18 war put together. The precise number of victims is unknown but is today generally reckoned at between 20 and 50 million. The whole world was affected by the Spanish flu, with the exception of a few remote islands, and Europe, already bled to death by industrialised warfare, was particularly hard hit. In summer 1918, the pandemic reached Bohemia in an early, relatively benign wave. A few weeks later, thousands were struck down in Prague in a second and far more deadly phase of the illness. In October 1918, as the First Czechoslovakian Republic arose from the ashes of the multiethnic Austrian state, and the masses celebrated in the cities, thousands of feverish patients were coughing behind drawn curtains, and facing an uncertain fate. In the USA, the flu pandemic - the greatest health disaster of the 20th century - has been the subject of many...

Many accounts of Max Weber’s thought would seek to portray him as a theorist of responsibility or “re-enchantment” – as one who can confirm for us the appropriateness of a liberal position given the conditions of life as moderns, thus preserving the possibility of a renewed project of management at every turn. Such a reading may well be comforting today, insofar as it enables a reconciliation to the constellations of technological thinking within which we already find ourselves engaged. Over and against such accounts, this thesis attempts to elaborate an image of Weber as a hunger artist, as one who brings into emphasis a fundamental sense of loss attendant to “modernity”, and who broods upon that loss as the condition of a more faithful reflection upon the character of being. Not only does Weber offer insight into modern conditions of research and the theorization of politics; he is one who thinks such questions in their mournful profundity, gesturing towards what cannot be carried forward within their terms. In the melancholy of his thought, it is suggested, we glimpse the contours of a horizon from which we have still not emerged.

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Dieser Aufsatz verfolgt drei Linien, die sich ineinander verweben.  Erstens bilden Michail M. Bachtins Begriffe ‚Außerhalbbefindlichkeit‘, ‚Dialogizität‘, ‚Polyphonie‘ und ‚Intertextualität‘ wie auch einige von Bachtin beschriebenen genretypischen Romanhelden den Ausgangspunkt für Überlegungen zu Franz Kafkas Texten Der Heizer, Das Urteil, Die Verwandlung und Brief an den Vater sowie zu Briefen und Tagebuch­aufzeichnungen. Es handelt sich dabei um Untersuchungen zu dem Themenkomplex ‚Macht, Schuld und Liebe‘. Zweitens wird Franz Kafkas Kritik gegen die bürgerliche Moral und das patriarchalische Machtstreben geschildert. In diesem Zusammenhang wird der Psychoanalytiker Otto Gross präsentiert. Franz Kafkas Beziehung zu Otto Gross und die Rolle Kafkas im Kontext der Psychoanalyse werden beleuchtet. Zudem werden Franz Kafkas Neugestaltung der persönlichen Beziehungen und sein Eintreten für eine freiheitliche Pädagogik beschrieben. Drittens wird, ausgehend von Franz Kafkas Lesen von Texten von Franz Werfel und  Jonathan Swift, wie auch von seiner Begegnung mit dem Dadaisten Raoul Hausmann, über Kafkas Einstellung zum Lesen und Schreiben und über seine dialogische Praxis reflektiert. Bei diesem Gewebe, das auch Bezüge zur Nachkriegszeit beinhaltet, wird deutlich, dass sich Bachtin und Kafka in einem gemeinsamen europäisch-russischen Kontext bewegt haben, und dass Franz Kafkas Literaturverständnis auffallende Ähnlichkeiten mit Michail Bachtins Theorien aufweist.  Innerhalb von diesem Kontext haben sich Kafka, Bachtin und Gross für eine Kultur eingesetzt, welche die autoritären, monologischen Machtstrukturen unterwandert, indem sie freiheitliche Beziehungen und dialogische Literatur gestaltet.

Aufbauend auf einem umfassenden Korpus quantitativer Daten aus 14 Tonaufnahmen von György Kurtágs 40-sätzigen Kafka-Fragmenten (1985–87) und unter Verwendung einer Methode, die musikalische Analyse, historische Forschung sowie close und distant listening integriert, zeigt der vorliegende Aufsatz wesentliche Unterschiede in der zyklischen Formgestaltung dieses Werkes durch Interpret*innen auf. Trotz der beharrlichen Bemühungen des Komponisten, in der Probenarbeit eine ›idiomatische‹ Aufführungspraxis für seine Werke zu etablieren, führen die relative Offenheit seiner Notationspraxis und die Komplexität der zyklischen Organisation zu tiefgreifenden Unterschieden in der Markierung oder Gewichtung der performativen Form zwischen ironischen und dramatischen, zwischen prozessualen und architektonischen (oder ›interpunktischen‹) Konzepten. Das ›Bottom-up‹-Konzept des Kompositionsprozesses und die konsequente Fokussierung des Komponisten auf musikalische Details stehen in einem Spannungsverhältnis zur komplexen ›Top-down‹-Form des Gesamtzyklus, die von Interpret*innen mit großem Variantenreichtum in Klang übersetzt wird. / Building on a comprehensive corpus of quantitative data from 14 recorded performances of György Kurtág’s 40-movement Kafka-Fragmente (1985–87) and employing a method that integrates musical analysis, historical research, and close and distant listening, the present essay demonstrates substantial differences among performers in communicating the cyclic form of this work. Despite the composer’s insistence, evident in his rehearsal practice, to establish an ‘idiomatic’ performance practice for his works, the relative openness of his notational practice and the complexity of the cyclic organisation lead to profound differences in marking or weighting performed form, ranging between ironical and dramatic, between processual and architectonic (or ‘punctuating’) strategies. The ‘bottom-up’ concept of the compositional process and the composer’s consistent focus on musical details are in tension with the complex ‘top-down’ shape of the entire cycle that is translated into sound by performers with great variance.

This thesis explores ways in which the reality of Kantor’s existence at a key moment in occupied Kraków may be read as directly informing the genesis and development of his artistic strategies. It argues for a particular ontological understanding of human being that resonates strongly with that implied by Kantor in his work and writings. Most approaches to Kantor have either operated from within a native perspective that assumes familiarity with Polish culture and its influences, or, from an Anglo-American theatre-history perspective that has tended to focus on his larger-scale performance work. This has meant that contextual factors informing Kantor’s work as a whole, including his happenings, paintings, and writings, as well as his theatrical works, have remained under-explored. The thesis takes a Heideggerian-hermeneutic approach that foregrounds biographical, cultural and aesthetic contexts specific to Kantor, but seemingly alien to Anglo-American experience. Kantor’s work is approached from Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian perspectives that read the work as a world-forming response to these contexts. Read in this way, key writings, art and performance works by Kantor are revealed to be explorations of existence and human being. Traditional ontological distinctions between process and product, painting and performance, are problematised through the critique of representation that these works and working practices propose. Kantor is revealed as a metaphysical artist whose work stands as a testament to a Heideggerian view of human being as a ‘positive negative’: a ‘placeholder of nothing’, but a ‘nothing’ that yet ‘is’ …

This thesis explores literary code-switching, i.e. multilingual aspects within a single speech, as a key polyphonic structural element in the selected works. First, it analyzes Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera (1987) as a work, where the author seeks to establish a literary tradition that would reflect the life in borderlands and the given community through a new language. Secondly, the language of photography and multilingual speech patterns in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants (1992) are considered as vital elements of the authenticity play. The following chapter deals with Franz Kafka's short stories, where gestures form an essential part of, if not the whole stories, and determine the fragmentary nature of such writing. Finally, the importance of language of power, the discourse of social realism altogether with their emergence into private and intimate discussions through repetitions and variations is commented upon in Václav Havel's play The Garden Party (1963).