Keywords "Long" 18th century; 18th century; Baroque; Enlightenment; Czech National Revival; history of Czech language; development of Czech language; Czech language in the Baroque period; Czech language in the times of the Czech National Revival; Czech language in the "long" 18th century; manuscript; scribe's usage; cultural Czech language; books of historiographic records; historiography; "folk chronicles"; gramatography; grammar books; Baroque stylistics; Baroque rhetoric; history of spelling; development of spelling; history of phonetics; development of phonetics; history of morphology; development of morphology; development of the lexis; Chlumec nad Cidlinou; Kutná Hora; Milčice; Nové Strašecí; Pelhřimov; Roudnice nad Labem; František Šolc; Vojtěch Kegler; František Jan Vavák; Filip Ignác Dremsa; Antonín Štěpán; Vojtěch Jílek; Václav Preinhelter. Abstract The traditional view describing Czech literary works written in the period from the late 17th century to the end of 18th century as signs of decline in the level of Czech language and literature has been successfully overcome by linguists over the past few decades. However, most papers covering the topic were focused on prints; handwritten sources are being analysed marginally and unsystematically. The aim of this dissertation is to provide a more...

Within the last three decades, contemporary North America came to reinvent a socially focused genre of literary personal narratives. These new editorial and writing projects, published in the form of collections of personal narratives, emerged as a tool for the socially voiceless to secure some measure of agency in their contemporary social and cultural situation. Projects such as the Freedom Writers’ Diary or volumes of the Voice of Witness book series fit in the process that is currently labeled social empowerment. Witnesses express a deep urge to share their story in the hope to denounce their experience of an enduring social injustice. The written word, primary a means for self-disclosure, serves to exorcise the suffering associated to this specific predicament. The narrators engage in a powerful self-investigative gesture oriented towards resilience and renewed enfranchisement in regaining control over their life and environment. At the moment of publication, however, these testimonies come to be validated as authentic examples of the injustices they disclose. These examples serve an educational purpose: raising the audience’s awareness and opening deliberative fora for these issues to be discussed and for solutions to be hammered out and eventually implemented. <p>The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a theoretical model for the subgenre of testimonials of social empowerment. With the concept of empowerment as groundwork, the model develops a textual approach framed in a psychosocial structure. I argue that testimonials may be described as examples of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action. As speech acts aimed at reaching understanding, testimonials capitalize both on the binding and bonding aspects of illocutionary force in the hope to secure with their audience an ongoing dialogue over issues of social justice. The volumes, as unofficial public spheres, mobilize the normative and practical dynamics at work in social movements. These dynamics express as two narrative guiding threads: an aesthetic based on impact, and an ethics based on responsibility. The texts’ aesthetic develops a form of perlocutionary realism instantiating a sense of authenticity and sincerity embodied in the narrators’ voices. The resulting impact is coupled to moral concerns based on a polysemic understanding of social responsibility, on which narrators seek to build their narratives’ ethical potential. A series of case studies allowed to demonstrate that both narrative threads are realized as an appropriation of four paradigmatic forms of rhetorical ethos, each based on a specific realm of the social world: intimacy, justice, spirituality and activism.<p> / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished