This study sets out to uncover the thus far unexplored affinities between the works of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Michel Leiris, two key figures of twentieth-century literature whose place within the broader European literary panorama has been largely overlooked. Through an inquiry into three interconnected areas – the question of 'community'; the relationship between male self and female other; and writing as a space in which a fractured experience of subjectivity is both played out and exposed – I argue that their works are underpinned by a parallel tension, between a nostalgia for a lost experience of unity and a recognition of its impossibility within a fractured modernity. Chapter One examines the relationship between the individual and the communal. With a focus on Gadda's Giornale di guerra e di prigionia, and Leiris's involvement in a series of key intellectual, literary and political societies of the 1930s and 1940s, it argues that while both authors were drawn to a form of communal integration, both were ultimately thwarted in their attempts to reinstate it. Chapter Two continues this inquiry into the relationship between self and other through an examination of the dysfunctional relationship between individual (male) self and (female) other. With a focus on Leiris's L'Age d'homme and Gadda's Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, it questions the extent to which any authentic relationship between male self and female other is ruled out, and examines the association between sexuality and fear that underpins their approach to the sphere of the female at large. The final chapter examines the implications of the authors' shared loss of faith in the notion of a unified, authentic experience of selfhood for their approach to the literary act itself. Through a study of these three key areas, this study thus sets out to respond to the need for further contextualisation of these two key figures of the twentieth-century European literary panorama, in the conviction that a comparative examination will shed new light both on their individual works and on their shared affinity with a number of key tenets of twentieth-century European thought.

The study examines cognitive rationality as to()l for problemsolving within the context of a movement from determinism and monolithic universal Reason towards indeterminism and plurality. It is contended that theories of literature do not provide an adequate conceptual framework, and therefore, extensive use is made of pluralist fallibilism (Popper, Helmut Spinner) and chaos theory. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is viewed as a decisive influence in the shift towards plurality and scepticism. In chapter 2, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, a novel by Agatha Christie and Gaston Leroux's Le mystere de Ia chambre jaune are discussed as examples of optimistic rationalism. Chapter 3 indicates that Eco's II nome della rosa emphasizes the conjectural nature of truth and objective knowledge, underpinned by a 'soft' rationalism which amounts to monopolistic pluralism. Chapter 4 analyses the defeat of cognitive rationality by the complex interaction of a multiplicity of independent causal series. The detectives' relationship with the feminine exemplifies the interpenetration of rationality and the instinctual, while the mystery of the feminine is a metaphor for impenetrable complexity. Chapter 5 shows that hypotheses concerning random complex systems remain inconclusive. However, as the trajectory of a complex system can be regulated, so reason can be viewed as the underlying regulative pattern (strange attractorl for an infinite proliferation of hypotheses. Thus, despite .shifting conceptions of rationality and order, all the detectives in the study accept objective truth as regulative principle and are involved in a search for objective knowledge / Afrikaans & Theory of Literature / D.Litt. et Phil. (Theory of literature)

The objective of this thesis is to identify changes in the area of food banks in the Czech Republic which were made after the amendment to the Act on Food and Tobacco Products had entered into effect.The practical part includes a survey performed at the level of 14 food banks which are members of the Czech Federation of Food Banks. In the next section of the practical part, changes effected in the Food Bank of the South Bohemian Region after the amendment entered into effect were identified. Main changes and measures which had to be adopted are explained for the food redistribu-tion process.

The study examines cognitive rationality as to()l for problemsolving within the context of a movement from determinism and monolithic universal Reason towards indeterminism and plurality. It is contended that theories of literature do not provide an adequate conceptual framework, and therefore, extensive use is made of pluralist fallibilism (Popper, Helmut Spinner) and chaos theory. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is viewed as a decisive influence in the shift towards plurality and scepticism. In chapter 2, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, a novel by Agatha Christie and Gaston Leroux's Le mystere de Ia chambre jaune are discussed as examples of optimistic rationalism. Chapter 3 indicates that Eco's II nome della rosa emphasizes the conjectural nature of truth and objective knowledge, underpinned by a 'soft' rationalism which amounts to monopolistic pluralism. Chapter 4 analyses the defeat of cognitive rationality by the complex interaction of a multiplicity of independent causal series. The detectives' relationship with the feminine exemplifies the interpenetration of rationality and the instinctual, while the mystery of the feminine is a metaphor for impenetrable complexity. Chapter 5 shows that hypotheses concerning random complex systems remain inconclusive. However, as the trajectory of a complex system can be regulated, so reason can be viewed as the underlying regulative pattern (strange attractorl for an infinite proliferation of hypotheses. Thus, despite .shifting conceptions of rationality and order, all the detectives in the study accept objective truth as regulative principle and are involved in a search for objective knowledge / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / D.Litt. et Phil. (Theory of literature)

Ce travail met sur un plan de comparaison deux auteurs apparemment écartées l'un de l'autre: C.E.Gadda et M.Merleau-Ponty. La Meditazione Milanese constitue le premier plan d'approche entre eux: écrite dans le cadre de l'éventuel diplôme de Gadda en philosophie, ce texte est aussi point de référence et de départ de son œuvre littéraire, plus connue et importante. Sur les rélations entre philosophie et littérature s'axe la confrontation avec Merleau-Ponty, qui pérçoit l'exigence d'élargir le domaine de la philosophie à l'art, et la littérature notamment. La première partie, "Une phénoménologie", analyse d'abord la problématique posée à la philosophie et à la littérature par la phénoménologie, et se concentre ensuite sur la comparaison entre la conception merleau-pontienne de corps et les propositions corporelles présentées dans l'œuvre de Gadda. La deuxième partie, "Le baroque", scrute de près les structures du baroque (gaddien et merleau-pontien) à travers l'analyse des notions de structure et de monade, puis des problématiques liées à l'expression et au travail de Saussure; ensuite introduit les thèmes de la multiplicité et du devenir à partir de la confrontation des deux auteurs avec le langage cinématographique. Le chapitre final approfondit le thème gaddien du rapport entre totalité et multiplicité par le biais des figures merleau-pontiennes du chiasme et de la chair, et montre tout acte de language comme déformation, c'est-à-dire tant comme création que comme passivité, où le silence est cosubstantiel aux paroles.