Lenka Mundevová Translation of Colloquial Language Devices in Fiction: A Century of Maupassant's Ivrogne in Czech Translation Abstract The dissertation compares the stylization of the dialogues in the French original of Maupassant's short story Ivrogne (The Drunkard), written in 1884, with five Czech translations published between 1902 and 1997. The comparative analysis is focused on the devices of colloquial language, including dialect, which appear frequently in the dialogues of the story and prove to be extraordinarily useful when interpreting Maupassant's text. The analysis of the excerpted material is preceded by the description of the basic characteristics of colloquial French and Czech, followed by the description of their stratifications. The mutual relation of the colloquial language varieties is an important prerequisite for the evaluation of the translations of colloquial language devices and their appropriateness in the individual Czech versions of Ivrogne. The paper also deals with the development of Czech aesthetic translation standards and their relation to the standard of local fiction, outlining the important tendencies of Czech fiction translation applied when colloquial devices were conveyed from French to Czech during the specified timeframe. The individual language devices used in the...

In its first part, the thesis deals with Guy de Maupassant's life, the importance of short stories in his work, their reception in the French and Czech literary milieu as well as their uniqueness in the context of the literary movements of the 19th century. As a part of the thesis, an overview of the Czech translations of Guy de Maupassant's short stories is included. A separate chapter is devoted to their reception in the Czech literary context. The second empirical part focuses on the comparative critical analysis of the inital texts and their translations. The translations were chosen so that they could represent different generations of Czech translators (1902 - Pavel Projsa, 1960's - Luděk Kárl and Břetislav Štorm, 1990's - Dana Melanová). Here, the thesis deals with the skills of the translators to express the stylistic concisseness of Maupassant as well as the different stylistic levels of the original text (pathos and poetic language on one hand and informality on the other). In the conclusion, a final critical evaluation of the translations is given.

The plot twist is a complex narrative surprise in which a revelation retroactively transforms readers’ understanding of the preceding events. Readers discover belatedly that the situation depicted in the narrative had all along been quite different from what they thought. Although the term “plot twist” was first used in the early twentieth century, many of the best-known works of fiction of the nineteenth century were revealed, in retrospect, to be twist narratives. This dissertation studies twist narratives and their readers in the period before the plot twist became a known device. Through case studies of Jane Austen’s Emma, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the chapters investigate what kinds of knowledge-making practices readers engage in during first-time readings and rereadings of twist narratives, as well as before and after reading. Across these chapters I make the case that twist narratives demonstrate the crucial and interconnected roles of knowledge and temporality in any narrative experience. What we know, and when, and especially what we don’t (yet) know, is crucial to how narratives work and why we enjoy them.