One of the reasons for writing this thesis was to help readers and theatregoers better understand Shepard's plays and to let them see, at least partly, his intentions. Yet, to ask for a straightforward explanation or an unambiguous ending would mean to completely misunderstand the author. Samuel Shepard the playwright, actor, director, screenwriter, poet and musician as well as a cowboy and shaman - "a New World shaman" - is anything but a piece of cake. To know this much might be enough unless you plan to translate or direct one of his plays. And for these very purposes, I have decided to prepare a roadmap for understanding Samuel Shepard Rogers III. My goal was to show three main influences that helped to form Shepard's style. First, we will travel with young Sam eastwards all the way to New York in order to discover a brave new world. Only fifteen years later, we will set the sails in the same direction again, this time to accompany an unheard-off success - an Off-Off- Broadway show moving from San Francisco to New York to be eventually awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Unfortunately, this child prodigy we came with is dying; indeed, it is already a Buried Child. After twenty more years, Shepard will revise the text and claim that "it's now a better play". That is where our analysis starts. First, we will...

The thesis deals with the literary production reflecting the 1950s in Czechoslovakia in terms of books published within the years 2000 to 2010. Based on the dominant discourse's analysis, reflection of this period in print media compares the way discourse penetrates the literary speech and also the way of their contrast. The author, giving the wide cross-section of released books, tries to maintain the opinion that projection of the 1950s is happening thanks to a myth created contrary to the construction myth. For this reason the literary speech is being called the re-mythologization reflection of the 1950s. Another goal of this work is to find neuralgic points of the myth and to decode their function - whether ideological or social. During the mapping of the books concerning in 1950s the attentions is paid to the texts that try to disturb the re-mythologization dominant literary speech described in detail. In connection with a slight representation of resembling texts author attempts to discover the causes of the non-existent need to see a different point of view in history through literature. Key words: 1950s, literary speech, discourse, myth, power, ideology, function

The aim of this thesis is to present the specific notion of feminism and mythopoetics in the selected works of Angela Carter and demonstrate them on two selected works of Carter's, namely on the collection of re-visited traditional fairy tales The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and the novel Nights at the Circus. The thesis also deals with chosen features of postmodernism these two works contain. In the first, theoretical part the author and her oeuvre is introduced, followed by the concept of postmodernism and its selected features. The second, practical part is focused on both books' analysis which attempts to establish whether and how the selected works show the features of postmodernism and to which extent it is possible to trace the notions of Carter's feminism and mythopoetics in them.

6 Abstract The diploma thesis concerns the topic of nautical metaphorics in modern literature in a broad sense of the term as defined by Silvio Vietta. Thus besides the topic itself and its main focus on the work of Franz Kafka it also covers the process of evolution of its attributes, which led to the specific imagery of modernism on the brink of the 20th century. The work as a whole derives from the conception of the nautical space as a smooth space of nomadism as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. The first part is based on the propositions of Bachelard's theory of material imagination. It deals with the characteristics of the literary space shaped by the sea element and the possibility of alogorical reading of such images. The hydraulics of the sea provides the nautical space with its unique qualities: shapelessness, flexibility and ambivalence. These enable to percieve the nautical space not only as the space of happenings, but also as the happenings of the space. Thus it puts emphasis on the activity and dynamic plasticity of the substance. The second part reveals the ancient and Christian roots of nautical imagery and its tradition in the European literature. The work of Comenius exemplifies the change in the symbolism of the ship with the arrival of the Age of Exploration which rendered the ship a...

TITLE: The Fictional Man: Ned Kelly in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang in Comparison with Older Portrayals AUTHOR: Adam Prentis DEPARTMENT: Department of English Language and Literature SUPERVISOR: PhDr. Petr Chalupský, Ph.D. ABSTRACT: The thesis concerns itself with the analysis of various personality aspects of the protagonist of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) - Ned Kelly. Albeit a historical figure, Ned Kelly is approached as a fictional character with focus placed on his symbolic status of Australian nationality, myth and manhood, and on the literary means that point to this. The separate aspects are placed in an evolutionary context through comparisons with older portrayals of the same character - in Max Brown's Australian Son (1948) and J. J. Kenneally's The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang and their Pursuers (1929), all of which use a heroising approach to the man. The work shows that Ned Kelly may be perceived in many complex ways, with further possibilities for analysis suggested. Comparing the three books, it is found that although considerable unifying tendencies and moments exist, some aspects have a significant difference in focus or emphasis. A shift is noted from a confrontational idealising defence of what is perceived as a historical person to a...

This diploma work examines a product from the field of print media - front pages of magazine Reflex. Method of mythological analysis is used, which has been in qualitative research of media content applied for half of a century and is considered to be one of the traditional methods used by media studies. Unlike other dissertations in this thematic area this work does not only analyze visual or lexical contents of cover pages, but also focuses on participation of those contents in the development of myth. The work begins with introduction of key theoretical background and resulting terms used in following analyzes describing effects of myths in individual covers. Then the summary brings the interpretation and explanation of described phenomena. The work focuses to decipher myths contained in the first message which the Reflex magazine week after week addresses to his readers -the title page of individual issues. It analyses how the magazine constructs a system of myths, by which ideology can impact on its readers. Aim of this dissertation is not only to describe the process by which the myths capture a variety of signs and fill them with their own meanings, but also a dialectical relationship between myths and stereotypes or ideologies which stand in their background.

Inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s metafiction novel Pale Fire and with Joseph Campbell’s research in comparative mythology and religion in mind, I explore the act of mythmaking and the composition of metafictional text in this work of fiction. The myth aspect combines elements of Classical, biblical, medieval, Romantic, and original materials to form a product that should strike readers as both familiar and alien, demonstrating Campbell’s notion of the monomyth as well as the ongoing tradition of mythmaking that continues to captivate both readers and writers. The metafictional portion of the text emphasizes a reader’s relationship to a work of fiction, a scholar’s relationship to his or her scholarly work, and a subtext’s relationship to its primary text. Combining the texts encourages the reader to read critically and reevaluate his or her conceptions of genre in order to piece together the greater story of tyranny and rebellion.

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Ces quarante dernières années, Louise Glück a su s’imposer dans le paysage de la poésiecontemporaine américaine sans que l’on ait jamais pu l’assigner à quelque genre que ce soit. Sa poésie déroute car traversée par le féminin, elle s’obstine pourtant à lui résister. Le moi glückien se dissimule derrière des masques plus ou moins opaques : des personae de la mythologie telle Perséphone auxmasques sournoisement transparents du recueil Ararat, sa voix poétique se fait plurielle mais singulière, celle d’un moi qui parle, toujours en proie au désir. Glück édifie dans chacun de ses recueils un réseau de paradigmes où la mémoire coexiste avec l’oubli, où la domesticité s’oppose à l’ailleurs hostile, où le mythe et l’ordinaire se confrontent et se confondent.Louise Glück esquive ces structures paradigmatiques à travers une poétique épurée et une ponctuation qui obscurcissent et diffèrent le sens jusqu’à l’éluder. L’entre-deux que son oeuvre explore forme à la fois un interstice et une béance : ce peut être la fissure d’Averno, la crevasse du deux-points ou le silence de Dieu dans The Wild Iris ; le milieu qui nous sépare de l’autre et de nous-mêmes et qui, simultanément, nous lie inextricablement à eux. Nous appelons ce milieu pluriel le neutre, concept que nous devons à Roland Barthes qui lui a consacré un cours au Collège de France en 1977-1978. Nous nous sommes inspirés de son approche pour lire la poésie de Glück, dont les personae sont habitées par un désir qui est, chez le poète, un désir d’écriture pour surseoir à la mort : un désir de neutre. / For forty years now, Louise Glück has been a major figure in contemporary American poetry, particularly because her poems shun the obvious and the lyric genres as we know them. If her poetry give the feminine to read, her work resists and endures it as a genre. The various masks the poet puts on may often seem transparent, but the poetic voice remains that of a persona, be it Persephone or even the ones in Ararat, her most life-inspired collection. Many and different are the faces to people her work, but behind the mask, Glück’s remains unique: her voice can be described as Dickinsonian in its bareness and subversive imagery: disguised as a desiring I, the impersonal threatens. Throughout her work, Glück has drawn a web of paradigmatic oppositions, only to be ‘baffled’: memory coexists with oblivion, the safe and cozy home is opposed to the dangerous outside world, the mythic and the mundane are intertwined in Meadowlands.Louise Glück evades and outplays the paradigm thanks to a bare language and a choice of punctuation, which darken and delay meaning to the extent of eluding it. Her poems explore an inbetweenness, which assumes the shape of a Freudian rift in Persephone’s soul, or of God’s silence to His creatures’s prayers in The Wild Iris. We are naming such in-betweenness the Neutral, a theory the French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes exposed in a lecture course at the Collège de France in 1977-1978. The Neutral is the desire and its intensity, it is what parts us from the other and from ourselves, what intimately binds us together. Our reading of Louise Glück’s poetry was firstly inspired by Barthes’s theory. We see in her work a desire for the Neutral which translates as a desire for the poet to write, and relentlessly defer the instant of death.

Cette thèse intitulée « Géographies de l’'enfance dans Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [1865] de Lewis Carroll, Le Avventure di Pinocchio [1883] de Carlo Collodi, Peter Pan [1911] de James Matthew Barrie et Le Petit Prince [1943] d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry » s'intéresse, à partir d'une étude sur le traitement spatial, aux notions d'espace, de lieu et de monde de l’'enfance. Il s’'agit en effet d'aborder ces quatre ouvrages de littérature enfantine, non pas sous l'angle du personnage, mais sur la relation entre la géographie mise en place dans la narration et leur succès visible encore aujourd’hui. Si la rêverie de l’'enfance semble être au centre de la formation de mondes, c’'est sa matérialisation spatiale impromptue et éphémère qu'il faut retenir comme créatrice de lieux mythiques. En confrontant l'illusion enfantine, la relation entre espaces fantastique et espace merveilleux, la spatialisation des désirs enfantins et la dématérialisation de territoires par le souvenir et le conte, les hypothèses formulées dans cette thèse s’inscrivent dans les études sur les littératures de l'imaginaire et placent la spatialisation d’'une rêverie vers l'enfance au centre du propos. / Entitled « Childhood's Geographies in Alice'sAdventures in Wonderland [1865] by Lewis Carroll, Le Avventure di Pinocchio [1883] by Carlo Collodi, Peter Pan [1911] by James Matthew Barrie and Le Petit Prince [1943] by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry », this thesis investigates the concepts of space, place, and the world of childhood, by focusing on the treatment of space. We approach these four works in children's literature, not from the perspective of the character, but rather from that of the relationship between the geography developed through the narration, and the enduring popularity of the works. Although childhood fancy seems to be at the principle of the creation of worlds, the ephemeral materialization in space can be named the force behind the elaboration of mythical places. By putting in relation such notions as the children's illusion, the space of the fantastic, the space of the marvelous, the spatialization of children's desire and the de-materialization of territory by memory and tale, the hypotheses formulated in this thesis find their place among the studies on fantasy literature, and put the spatialization of fancy at the core of the discussion.