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The diploma thesis is focused on the ergonomic analysis of selected workplaces in the company TRUNN, s.r.o. The theoretical part of the thesis contains a summary of basic knowledge in the field of ergonomics, which are then applied in the practical part of the thesis. The practical part of the work includes a description of the current state of workplaces and evaluation of jobs using the methods described in the theoretical part. Based on the evaluation, own recommendations and suggestions are made on how to adjust the jobs. The aim of the diploma thesis is to provide workers with a suitable workplace that meets ergonomic requirements.

The origins and ongoing legacies of American Spiritualism in their relations to mainstream religion, science, and politics are by this point well-charted. As a vector between, on one side, esoteric philosophy and diffuse pseudo-scientific and occult disciplines, and, on the other, exoteric mass culture and the 19th century groundswell of popular progressive rhetoric, Spiritualism as a historical phenomenon has in the past decades become more legible than ever as a religious, political, and social movement. Less thoroughly studied, however, is the enormous mass of print culture left behind by Spiritualists. Spiritualist newsletters, journals, and small presses printed vast quantities of written matter, running from the obvious sermons, lectures, and seance transcriptions to Spiritualist novels, Spiritualist hymns, and, in particular, Spiritualist lyric verse. While critics like Helen Sword in Ghostwriting Modernism have begun to approach this archive as literary matter and not merely as the incidental byproduct of the movement, much work remains to be done. In this dissertation I want to draw connections from this mass of widely read, but little remembered, Spiritualist poetry to the late 19th century and early 20th century’s proliferation of occult and metaphysical poetry. In doing so I hope to illuminate the recurring esoteric streak running from high modernism to, in fits and spurts, the present. The crux of this dissertation pursues the trail of breadcrumbs leading from Spiritualist poet-mediums like Achsa Sprague and Lizzie Doten to the mediumistic elements of 20th century poets H.D. and Jack Spicer, before arriving in the conclusion at the 21st century and its fresh proliferation of esoterically inclined medium-poets. I propose that there is a meaningful thread wending from the 1850s to the present, and that this thread can be tracked by taking seriously the claims made by these poets regarding the composition of their verse, no matter how outrageous or unlikely those claims may at first seem. What would it mean to interrogate in earnest the logistics of authorship when a poem is attributed to a ghost? How do Spicer’s extraordinary claims about Martians and angels inflect how we read his body of work? What complications emerge from H.D.’s World War II-era poems of grief and trauma if we grant her the premise that their composition was saturated with the tangible presence of the dead? These allowances-- or at least the agreement to take these writers seriously in their compositional, metaphysical, and aesthetic claims-- reveals intriguing and consistent fissures in the normative understanding of the lyric. While Sprague and Doten, along with other Spiritualist poets, largely sought to write verse recognizable in terms of form and content as “lyric verse,” they began from first principles seemingly dramatically opposed to the received 19th century wisdom regarding what constituted the lyric and how it functioned. By contrasting these poets, who sought to write and publish from a position of authorial multiplicity and supernatural collaboration, with the lyric philosophy of thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hegel, and Poe, I hope to demonstrate the theoretical radicalism quietly bubbling away under the sometimes deceptively staid and conventional surface of these poems. I track these fissures as they widen and grow more unruly in their contours, underlying the daring and experimental poetry of H.D. and Spicer, for whom the grounds staked by the category of the “lyric” exist in productive tension and conflict with the desire to complicate, subvert, and sidestep the attending assumptions about subjectivity, audience, and the stability of the figure of the author. By rejecting the Millsian atomism of the writing self, and opening the position of authorship to both supernatural gnosis and abject supplication, these practices of the “mediumistic lyric” offer an apophatic poetics embraced by over a century of poets eager, for one reason or another, to locate alternatives to the model of the lyric subject as persistent, singular, masterful, and solitary. In doing so I propose that it becomes an attractive, durable, and remarkably flexible model for queer writers, writers orienting themselves against the subject of colonialism, and writers otherwise displaced from lyric stability and sovereignty. Chapter One: “Voices From the Other Sphere”: The Poet in Emerson and Sprague: This chapter begins by offering a comparison between two near-contemporary texts with identical titles but drastically different aspirations. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet” provided a sturdy blueprint for American Romanticism by drawing on the example of European poets as well as esoteric philosophers contemporaneously in intellectual circulation such as Swedenborg and Boehme. Achsa Sprague’s verse drama “The Poet,” on the other hand, is a full-throatedly Spiritualist didactic narrative, offering amidst its supernatural and allegorical narrative, a domestic plot strikingly attuned to class and gender-based inequalities. I use these two texts as a springboard to begin to delineate the differing trajectories of their respective authors-- Emerson the public intellectual and religious progressive, Sprague a rural school teacher turned radical activist and spirit medium-- as well as the considerable overlap in their essential reference points. Chapter Two: “The Harp-Strings of My Being”: Lizzie Doten and the Phenomenology of Spirits: The next two chapters focus on major Spiritualist woman poets who in quite different ways drew on the mythic figure of Poe as compositional grist, offering two disparate models of how a Spiritualist metaphysics could inform an aesthetic orientation towards imitation, influence, and the knotty category of “originality.” Chapter Four takes up Lizzie Doten, whose 1863 Poems From the Inner Life contains a mix of original poems and poems allegedly dictated by controlling spirits, including Poe. I discuss how imitation functions in these poems, and in particular how the desire to replicate the stylistic and formal tics of well-known authors interacted with the desire to produce didactic religious verse in which the post-mortem reform and uplift of seemingly morally vexed poets like Poe, Burns, and Byron. In this verse, deceased poets were represented as writing not as themselves but as better versions of themselves, creating a rich juxtaposition between the formal challenge of imitation and the didactic demands of poetic content. I also discuss her essay “A Word to the World,” a strikingly thorough prose exposition of what, in her framing, mediumship felt like and how the linguistic output of spirits filtered through the mortal hands of the poet. Chapter Three: Sarah Helen Whitman’s Poe: Performing Spiritualism: This chapter juxtaposes Doten’s explicitly supernatural and metaphysical understanding of imitation with the more socially mediated practice of Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet who maintained a somewhat wider distance between her poetics and her participation in Spiritualist mediumship and seances. A former lover of Poe and one of his primary early literary executors, Whitman’s Spiritualism can be read in the context of her widely circulated “secular” Poe imitations, situating them, after the pattern of Eliza Richards’ Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, in a social and aesthetic milieu in which mimicry and virtuosic copy-catting was not only expected of woman poets but imposed as a closed formal horizon. I argue that Spiritualism offered an avenue in which female poets could leverage the formal games of imitation so foregrounded in contemporaneous practices of poetic reading and writing towards wider modes of didactic and polemical expression, a method, in other words, of “hijacking” imitation’s limits and turning these assumed voices towards their own ends. Chapter Four: “Why Should We Not, At a Certain Stage, Remember?”: H.D. and the Echoing Other: Here I turn from the 19th century to the 20th, beginning with H.D. and concluding with the Berkeley Renaissance poet Jack Spicer. Chapter four offers a brief overview of H.D.’s history in esoteric and occult research and a survey of her contemporary milieu. It revolves around the 1919 prose work Notes on Thought and Vision, an intense description of an early visionary experience and a sustained exegesis of her thinking, at that time, on the intersection of visionary experience and privileged, quasi-mediumistic states of knowing. I read these texts and other early explorations of these themes as H.D.’s experimental studies on writing the self seemingly overdetermined by socialization and history, as well as on fashioning a generative middle-ground between spiritual supplication and modernist theories of mastery. I then track these motifs through the vision of gnosis described in her later text, the World War II-era The Flowering of the Rood. In short, I propose that H.D. leveraged the language and practices of mediumship as a vehicle for a novel species of autobiographical writing, one which might simultaneously privilege to a heightened degree the phenomenology of knowing, thinking, and perceiving, while offering a vantage point from which to observe the position of selfhood from a distance. Chapter Five: “The Ghost Is a Joke”: Jack Spicer and the Bathos of Outside: Chapter five centers on Jack Spicer and broadly, his mediumistic theory of poetic dictation (what his peer Robin Blaser dubbed his “practice of Outside”) and the playful, punning language of Martians, angels, and ghosts in which he scaffolded it. I argue that for Spicer, “dictation” provides not only a means for him to explore an abject, apophatic queer poetics, but to articulate his sense of longing for a poetics of proximity between the world and the word that was otherwise impossible, repeatedly linking the linguistic communion between poet and received language as a fantasized analogue to the gulf between signifier and signified, desirer and object of desire, and life and death. Chapter Eight introduces the figure of the “Martian” in Spicer’s poems and lectures, along with the models of bodily sovereignty he inherited from his early studies with Kantorowicz, arguing that the loss of physical agency and the absence of semantic meaning are two elements of a broader poetics of absence throughout his career. Conclusion: “A House That Tries to Be Haunted”: The conclusion revisits the arguments of the dissertation as a whole, retracing the line of lyric development and subversion from the 19th century Spiritualists to Spicer, before ending with a brief survey of the continuing diffusion of mediumistic lyric into the 21st century. First I gesture to the mediumistic writing of several 20th century poets not included in this project-- e.g., Robert Duncan, Nathaniel Mackey, Hannah Weiner, and James Merrill-- before describing the influence of mediumistic ideas on contemporary poets such as CA Conrad and Ariana Reines, for whom the occult and metaphysical themes of mediumship are just as important as its potential for lyric modes outside of the discourse of mastery and agential authorship. I thus end by positing this new flourishing of poet mediums as not only a continuation of a long tradition, but as a final example of such mediumship’s position at the intersection of lyrical and vanguard writing practices. / English

With the publication of On the Road in 1957, Jack Kerouac became a cultural phenomenon. Crowned the "King" of the Beat Generation, Kerouac embodied the restlessness of Cold War-era America. What no one realized at the time, however, was that the movement that he supposedly led went against Kerouac's own beliefs. Rather than rebellion, Kerouac wanted to write in a way that no one had written before. Heavily influenced by, among others, Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, Herman Melville, and, especially, James Joyce, Kerouac used the influence of his predecessors to formulate his own style of writing-spontaneous prose. The critics who label Kerouac as a cultural icon akin to James Dean fail to see Kerouac as a serious author. The removal of the cultural fanfare surrounding Kerouac shows the truth about his writing, his influences, and his influence on late-twentieth century literature, including the entire postmodern movement.

The rediscovery of a number of Walt Whitman's early fictions prompts a discussion of where they belong within the larger web of Whitman scholarship. Though we have been aware of the existence of these writings for quite some time, frequently these works return to obscurity soon after being discovered due to the lack of research regarding them. This thesis presents an alternative framework whereby these novels can be integrated into a hypertextual model centered on Leaves of Grass (1855) and Whitman's overall authorial identity. I build on Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price's work creating a hypertext archive incorporating Whitman's works, allowing constraints associated with traditional print form to be overcome. My analysis centers on the recently rediscovered novel The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852) due to its unique publication date. Because we possess so little of Whitman's public writing from the immediate leadup to his first publication of Leaves of Grass, I focus on tracing linguistic and thematic development across the two works. With the help of digital textual analytical tools, I find specific links between the works and argue that Whitman used the novel to experiment with transcendental language and themes that would characterize his later poetic voice. Based on this connection, novels like The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle thrive due to their ability to offer new perspectives on the source text of Leaves of Grass. Within this model, Leaves of Grass also gains new importance due to highlighting the value of the satellite texts like The Life and Adventure of Jack Engle, remedying their previous ambiguous value when isolated. I then discuss how this hypertextual model aids scholars to more easily incorporate Whitman's fiction into future research due to the increased accessibility it provides. Finally, the thesis discusses how this model repositions the role of the archive as more than simply a receptacle of preservation. Instead, it now operates as a source of redefinition by providing artifacts that reimagine period and authorial narratives through this hypertextual model.

Ce mémoire fait état des résultats obtenus concernant les vecteurs singuliers de l’algèbre superconforme dans le secteur de Ramond. Une formule explicite exprimant ces vecteurs singuliers a été obtenue en termes de superpolynômes de Jack via la représentation de l’algèbre superconforme en termes de superpolynômes symétriques. On présente d’abord les partitions d’entiers et les fonctions symétriques standards. Ceci permet d’introduire les fonctions propres du modèle Calogero-Sutherland (CS) en termes de polynômes de Jack qui se révèlent être une représentation efficace des vecteurs singuliers de l’algèbre conforme. Suivant cette piste, on procède à la supersymétrisation du modèle CS ce qui permet de générer les superpolynômes de Jack, polynômes symétriques dans le superespace. On présente finalement la formule explicite des vecteurs singuliers de l’algèbre superconforme en termes de superpolynômes de Jack. / This mémoire presents results concerning the Ramond singular vectors of the superconformal algebra. An explicit formula has been obtained for the Ramond singular vectors of the superconformal algebra via its superpolynomial representation and the formula is given here in terms of Jack superpolynomials. We first present some basic elements of the integer partition and symmetric functions theories. This leads us to consider the eigenfunctions of the Calogero-Sutherland (CS) model, the Jack polynomials. These happen to be the singular vectors of the conformal algebra when represented in terms of symmetric polynomials. Given those results, we extend the CS model to the supersymmetric case and interpret its eigenfunctions as the Jack superpolynomials which are symmetric functions in superspace. We then display the explicit formula of the Ramond singular vectors of the superconformal algebra which has been obtained in terms of Jack superpolynomials.

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