The diploma thesis discusses gender relationships, construction of romantic love, and questions of infidelity in the novel Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. These concepts are examined by means of feminist literary theories that deal with gender as an analytic category and that draw on resistant reading and reader response criticism as major theoretical and methodological points of analysis. The first analytical part focuses on the ways in which femininity and masculinity of the main characters are constructed within the context of patriarchal society under socialism. The second part of the analysis is devoted to various forms of love that appear among the characters. It investigates the role of these love schemes within the presented relationships and focuses on motives of infidelity while considering the gender identity of the characters. By employing gender analysis, this diploma thesis offers a new perspective that reflects on the reproduction of gender stereotypes and departs from existing interpretations of Kundera's major novel.

This study examines the specific aspects of the reception of Russian formalism and the development of the Formal method in Soviet Ukrainian culture in the 1920s - the beginning of 1930s. Russian formalism in the process of reception becomes an important tool for the "modernization" of national culture and, as a result, an instrument for a new phase in the construction of national cultural identity. On that basis, the cultural-historical and ideological context of the development of Ukrainian literary criticism, criticism and (partially) literature of the late 19th - first decades of the 20th century is consistently reconstructed in eight chapters of the work. The first chapter highlights theoretical aspects of the study, reviews critical literature, reconstructs the history of reception of Russian formalism in Russian and Western criticism and the history of literature. The second chapter addresses the historical and theoretical premises of the reception of Formal theory in Ukrainian culture. The next chapter discusses historical and political context of the development of literature and literary criticism in 1917-1920 using the example of multinational post-revolutionary Kiev; a brief review of the theoretical and historical works of the 1920s also appears here. A special focus is put on the...

The thesis examines the 9th Congress and 18th General Assembly of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) organized in Czechoslovakia in September and October 1966. The main aim of the research is not only to reflect on the title themes of the meeting (The Essence of Art Criticism, The Functions of Art Criticism, The Methodology and Practice of the Profession of Critics), but also to shed some light on the circumstances surrounding the development of exhibitions commissioned for the congress, framing them in a perspective that acknowledges the active role of the event in shaping their ultimate role. To provide proper context, the thesis discusses also the further activities of the Czechoslovak Section (the time frame is concentrated on developments from 1945 to the first half of the 1970s). Furthermore, by turning the attention to the debates that took place within a divided Europe, the aim is to take into consideration the subtleties of viewpoints and interactions that were played out on the frontline of the Cold War and to document an elaborate web of connectivity that came about through a series of personal encounters.

The thesis deals with critical views of the post-war American society as found in three literary works: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The thesis's aim is to introduce briefly the post-war society and then, on basis of text analysis, to provide criticism expressed by each book mentioned above. Divided into four main parts, it describes the post-war situation in the United States (political, social and cultural) and thereafter it focuses on the books itself. It provides a short biographical summary of each author's life but it mainly targets the criticism the book contains. The post-war period was significant because of the change it brought. The society of the 1950s was characterized by many "booms" that contributed to its development. The main features of this period were consumerism and materialism; these were also the principal things subjected to criticism. The question the thesis wants to answer is whether this criticism was justified or not. This objective is realized in the conclusion. Based on all facts provided by the thesis, the answer is that the criticism was justified; however, it is not so easy and it is necessary to read the whole thesis to understand all reasons that led to this conclusion and to think over...

The thesis elaborates upon a question which literary techniques Jeanette Winterson applies in her novels The Passion and Written on the Body to portray queer body. The thesis conceptualizes queer body as crystallizing in discontinuous relationships between the categories of sex, gender identity and compulsory heterosexuality within Butlerian heterosexual matrix. The possibility of discontinuous relationships between them - gender disorder - is realised in the act of beholding queer body. Conceptualization of queer body embedded within the Butlerian heterosexual matrix has not been elaborated upon in the full scope of Jeanette Winterson's work. Literary criticism deals with the body in Written on the Body, not, however, in the context of Butlerian model of heterosexual matrix. Articulation of queer body is realized by deconstructive techniques of Jeanette Winterson's writing. These are comprised in the motifs of mirroring in The Passion and palimpsest in Written on the Body. Ontological anxiety in The Passion brings queer body. Magic realism in the novel gives queer body magical skills which make gender disorder possible. Queer body is abject in the novel. In Written on the Body genderless narrator describes queer body as his/her body. It is an adorable and morbid body. The queer body in this novel...

The thesis deals with gender analysis in films studying metamorphoses of archetypes in film Bitter Moon directed by Roman Polanski. The methodical and theoretical sections of the thesis analyse the influence of archetype changes of film characters in gender roles. The thesis identifies and analyses mainly woman film characters appearing in some classical feminist texts, feminist film theoretical and critical articles, in some psychoanalytical works, in dramatheraphy and film science. The sources mentioned above became primary resource materials for our archetypal research. The analysis of each of the film character is focused on the most distinctive archetype with respect to its metamorphosy. Apart from the archetype research the thesis is marginaly concerned with problems linked to the female ideal and her sexuality usually portrayed in an unalterable way, and archetypal patterns are in such a way transmitted to audiences through femininity and masculinity in the context of gender roles. Keywords: archetype, Roman Polanski, Laura Mulvey, Annis Pratt, cinematic archetypal coherence, feminist film criticism, film narrative analysis, archetypal masculinity, archetypal femininity.

The aim of the doctoral thesis is an analysis of the ideas and political activities of Jan Scheinost (1896-1964), a journalist and skilful backstage policymaker who was also known as an ideologist of Czech fascism. The thesis presents and analyses primarily those texts and activities of this controversial personality which were somehow unique, typical or atypical for the Czechoslovak political and intellectual scene of the First and Second Republic, i.e. from the 1920s to the period of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The influential Catholic journalist Scheinost is often connected not only with conservative traditional Catholicism but also with Fascism in academic literature. However, the thesis tries to prove that throughout his career, Jan Scheinost was always mainly looking for the most suitable movement or political party for putting into practice his aggressive Catholic ideas. At the same time the thesis also follows the historical, cultural and media context in which has Scheinost, as the editor in chief of the daily Lidové listy, acted. Scheinost, as a convinced nationalist and Catholic, joined the Czechoslovak People's Party at the beginning of the 1920s, but this party was not conservative enough for him, and he also felt that it made too many compromises. That is why he...

This dissertation focuses on the current Czech space of legitimation practices in education as a variable sphere of justification and critique of educational goals rooted in global transformations of educational institutions, autonomies of the nation states and transnational comparative data. Since the debate on educational reform (2004), the Czech legitimation educational ecology has been diversified by different types of knowledge and actors (state, non- profit, private sector). In this work, I argue that legitimation as a critical action is today, in various ways and processes (knowledge regimes, patterns of actorship) derived from traditional jurisdictions (state and professional structures) and moves to more flexible structures, which I call topologies. In jurisdictions, mostly passive audiences remain. New legitimation topologies connect values and data and, in many ways, replace dysfunctional state structures, using specific disconnections, but also question the public nature of negotiating educational goals. Based on relational ontology and sociological topological studies and through a qualitative relational analysis of legitimation practices in three fields (published normative documents, public debates and semi-structured interviews with state and non-state actors) I show in the period...

This master thesis explores the media representation of deepfakes. The first part summarizes previous research followed by a comprehensive review of deepfakes, including the technology allowing for their emergence, current uses and methods of regulation and detection. The second part connects the phenomenon with important theoretical concepts such as social construction of reality and the crucial role of media in this process. The empirical part consists of research combining two methods - quantitative content analysis and qualitative critical discourse analysis. The research analysis is focused on media articles dealing with deepfakes in order to find out how the media represent this phenomenon. The results show that current media discourse of deepfakes is strongly negative as the media frame them as a security threat. This negative representation is highly speculative since journalists often invent their own stories of future disastrous consequences of the technology for national security due to lack of current examples. The findings show an apparent hierarchy of the harms posed by deepfakes which is present in media coverage, and reflects gender sereotypes and inequality in the current society. Harm in the form of non-consensual fake pornography targeting women is neglected in the media...

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