The goals of the present dissertation are twofold: 1) to bring back into the literary thought the notion of "world view", which has been largely discredited due to its abusage in the context of official Marxism during the socialist era, and 2) to affirm the usefulness of the notion of "world view" in the literary practice. The thesis is structured so as to meet the goals: the first chapter presents several probes of the usage of the phrase "world view" and definition discussions related to it. In this framework, the "scientific world view" from the socialist era is then confronted with a range of other definitions of the notion, such as F. X. Šalda's "view of life and world". In the second chapter, I present my approach to this notion, aimed at serving the purposes of current literary research. Firstly, I distinguish the notion of "world view" from the notions of "mentality" and "ideology", and secondly, following the research of The Worldviews Group (Brussels) I propose my own definition of world view. Since the Group does not deal with actual interpretations of literary texts, I make use for the intended purpose of an updated and slightly modified concept of Terry Eagleton, originally published within the monograph Criticism and Ideology (1976). What is essential is foremost to differ between a)...

This diploma thesis deals with a crystallization of the political affair in Czech Social Democratic Party concerning lying of the politician M. Hašek and his colleagues about their meeting with the president after parliamentary election in autumn 2013. The qualitative analysis of mass media texts is based on the term media dialogical network, which was developed by J. Nekvapil and I. Leudar. In their latest publications they combined it with the apparatus of membership categorization analysis and the term structured immediacy. The membership categorization analysis enables me to take into consideration besides sequential aspects of social interaction also participants' categorization practices and thank to the term structured immediacy I could focus on how participants treat historical meanings in their statements. The second important aim of this thesis is to innovate the term media dialogical network as a viable approach to the intertextuality analysis of mass media communication in the new media environment. The fact, that the call for resignation of party's leader was linked to the secret meeting with the president after the election, resulted in the interpretation of the event as a coup against party's leader B. Sobotka. The politicians accused of coup organization defended themselves against...

(in English): This work deals with the formation of party historiography in fifties and sixties of the twentieth century. It examines this issue in two ways. The first level is the institutionalization of party historiography at Faculty of Arts of Charles University. Establishment, development and abolition of the department of the History of the Communist party (History of Working class movement) is explored with focusing on key turning points in 1953 (establishment of the department), 1958 (restriction of teaching staff), 1964 (reorganization, merger and establishment of the department of the History of Working class movement) and 1970 (abolition of the department). Teaching staff is examined and attention is paid to the efforts to create typological profile of chair historians, who were part of emerging generation of party historians. The second level of the research is the participation of party historians in shaping and formulating new historical narratives, that provided legitimazing framework of communist project to social transformation. Attention is paid to possibilities and limits of party historiography in social and political context and its methodological base is also examined. The development of party historiography is divided into three phases - the phase of stalinist discourse, the...

The thesis deals with discourse surrounding the topic of the Greek debt crisis (GDC) in the online version of the British daily newspaper the Guardian (www.theguardian.com). The study builds on a bilateral division of the EU public discourse on the economic crisis, distinguishing between two opposing perspectives: "the Northern diagnosis" (DeGrauwe 2011: 5) prevailing in Germany and other creditor states, and 'the Southern opinion' on the situation held mainly by the debtor countries. The thesis examines the position of the Guardian in relation to this bilateral discourse framework. The Guardian represents a liberal, socially aware and traditionally EU-supportive newspaper that is published in a country which counts among the Europe's leading economic and political powers, a country that is also characterized by strong Eurosceptic tendencies. These aspects form a complex background with regard to the EEC/GDC discourse framework. There are factors supporting both "the Northern diagnosis" of the GDC and those suggesting inclination to 'the Southern opinion'. The analysis, dealing with a self-collected corpus (altogether 349 texts, 277 973 words) consisting of the Guardian online news on the GDC is situated - both theoretically and methodologically - in the field of Corpus- assisted discourse studies...

The present study focuses on functions and English translation counterparts of the Czech lexeme aby. It is a relatively frequent word in the Czech language which is described as a subordinating conjunction expressing purpose, effect, manner, and also as a particle with a number of discourse functions. The current description, however, does not seem complete and this study therefore aims to analyse its use in more detail. Lexicographic and grammatical sources served as a basis for the classification of aby as a conjunction and as a particle. After an analysis of 200 examples it soon became evident that this listing is not complete and the use of aby is more complex than originally expected. The present paper thus treats all the functions of aby and also exemplifies each of them using extracted corpus data. In the study, aby in its conjunction and particle use is firstly treated separately to analyse each of them in more depth. This analysis, consequently, provides basis to point out their common features as well as their differences. The English translational counterparts are another point of interest in the study, in particular, their adequacy, regularity, and lexicalization.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the knowledge of linguistic tools typical for French political discourse. The thesis is based on an analysis of selected political speeches of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. It tries to capture how a change in a specific political situation of a particular author can affect communicative strategies, discursive practices, and then select the linguistic tools due to the addressee in a particular communicative situation and the communicative intention. The first part of the thesis is focused on the rhetoric and stylistics, which contribute to the typological definition of texts falling within the French political discourse. The second part is based on an analysis of three essential political speeches Nicolas Sarkozy.

The diploma thesis presents own research method for examination of speech formations. It focuses on examination of televised political debates. The method applied here may be characterized as an organized hermeneutic analysis of political discourse. Through the application of an analytical - philosophical approach (e.g. application of the theory of maxima, illocutionary acts evaluation, and analysis of arguments and verification of their truthfulness), the method allows us to establish objective facts of the debate as well as some personal features of debate participants. To examine texts, the theoretical knowledge of distinguished authors (J. J. Austin, K. Bayer, T. A. van Dijk, N. Fairclough, H. P. Grice, J. Habermas, J. Kraus, G. N. Leeche, J. R. Searl, and others) have been made use of. In addition to the literary survey, the thesis also includes the argumentation in respect of selection of the method, selection of talk shows, transcript of debates from TV records, transformation of the text into an analysable form, and research methodology. Accordingly, a specific communication model of programme is drawn up, the talk show discourse is analysed as a whole, and the styles and argumentation of selected participants are examined and analysed, which is followed by a comprehensive assessment of the...

(in English) The main topic of this thesis is both analysis and interpretation of the relationship between funeral rites, political power and society. Funeral rites are understood as a complex of performative, symbolic social acts, which are themselves comprised of various distinctive phases and signs. The meaning of these acts and signs is important because it can change the features and practice of the collective it is assigned to. The main purpose of this thesis is not only to perform a thick description of different kinds of communist funeral rite in the given time period but to interprate it in the wider social and cultural context as well. The concept of political religion as a heuristic tool was used in the thesis in order to distinguish an ambivalent nature of communist ideology which manifested itself in funeral rites. Funeral rites are analyzed as models for human behavior, which represent key values and norms of communist ideology. At the same time, funeral rites are analyzed as forms of cultural management. That is the reason, why are put under scrutiny not only the rites which are significant for society as a whole but also the funeral rites of individual actors.

This thesis deals with politeness and its realization in a classroom discourse. The theoretical part describes the most influential politeness theories and also the findings on the topic of teaching pragmatics and linguistic politeness. The research in the thesis focuses on analysis of teachers' verbal realizations of politeness as found in the recordings of four English lessons. The research was designed to verify the two hypotheses: (1) teachers are basically polite in a classroom of English as a second language and (2) politeness strategies of Czech teachers of English differ from those of native speaking teachers. The analytical part adopts the viewpoint of Brown and Levinson's positive and negative politeness. The last part of the thesis aims at summarizing the implications that this thesis, its theoretical summary and its research, have for teaching English as a second language.

The diploma thesis Fragmentary writing: the motifs of Central European literary discourse in postmodern Russian literature discusses the issue of the fragment as melancholy, aesthetic and Central European principle of writing; it accepts the montage method (due to its formalistic conception) as a primary poetic feature of the fragmentary discourse. The thesis examines the texts as the changing boundaries of the various cultural codes and different levels of fragmentation and discontinuity in the causal narrative. The thesis should show the continuity or, in other words, the coherence of the analyzed texts to the Central European literary context. The theme is developed based on the interpretation of works written by Pavel Ulitin (Immortality in the pocket; Conversation about the fish; Xenophobe and various prose; Hopeless Journey, etc.) and others.