English Summary The present thesis deals with the various ways in which Anglophone literatures form their canon(s) in the Czech context. In doing so, it treats literature as one inseparable whole, consisting of poetry, prose and literary criticism. The latter is not understood as auxiliary literature, but rather as a self-sufficient form that deserves equal attention to so-called "creative writing"; after all, all the three major literary forms inevitably participate in canon formation, albeit in their own respective ways. The process of canon formation takes different turns and yields different results in the original, i.e. Anglophone, milieu and in the Czech context - and the canons that thus arise differ as well. Moreover, the debate on canons is always being complicated by their essentially unstable, variable nature; by definition, the process of canon formation is unfinished and interminable. Canons are not to be viewed as the be-all and end-all of literary analysis but rather as guideposts, useful tools that stimulate further study and permanently invite questioning and revisions of themselves. In spite of this fundamental - and quite simple - purpose, the literary canon is an extremely complex and intricate concept. The complexity of its meanings and its implications is dealt with in the thesis'...

My paper examines how American authors of the South Asian Diaspora (Indian-American or South Asian American) can be read 1) as simply American and 2) without regard to ethnicity. I develop this argument using American authors Jhumpa Lahiri, a first generation American of Bengali-Indian descent, and Bharati Mukherjee, an American of Bengali-Indian origin. I borrow from Deepika Bahri's materialist aesthetics in postcolonialism (in turn borrowed from members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) and include theoretical insights from Rey Chow, Graham Huggan, and R. Radhakrishnan regarding multiculturalism, identity politics, and diaspora studies. Huggan and Radhakrishnan's insights are especially useful because their work deals with the South Asian diaspora, in England and the United States, respectively. After setting up a theoretical framework, I critique reviews and essays that privilege hyphenated, "Indian," or "South Asian" identity, and the resultant reading paradigm that fixes these authors into an ethnic minority category. I then trace aesthetic and thematic content of short stories from both Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories to demonstrate how these stories resist this ethno-cultural pigeonholing. My analysis exposes how ethnic and multicultural identity politics supplant aesthetic criticism and transform ethno-cultural identity into an aesthetic object, even if done as a celebration of hybridity or liminality as a putatively liberating space (hyphenated identity as embodying that space). Though my purpose is not to undermine the meaningful artwork and criticism instantiated in or about the "in-between" spaces of American culture, I demonstrate that an over-emphasis on ethnicity and culture (culture "other" than the majority culture in the U.S.) in fact stifles the opening of the American literary canon. Ethnicity and culture become ways of limiting the hermeneutics available to literary criticism because they become the only ways of reading, instead of one lens through which American literature is read.

Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy v Praze DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Daniela Theinová LIMITS AND LANGUAGES in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry "Irish poetry" is an inherently equivocal concept characterized by two fissures, one linguistic (Irish-English; standard English-Hiberno English) and the other chronological (oral-written; Old Irish-modern Irish). Central to my project is to show how this bifurcate cultural identity, prominent in Irish literature due to Ireland's history and the politicized concept of "national language," figures in poetry by Irish women of the last forty years. While I account for the significance of the hyphen in Anglo-Irish as well as in Gaelic-Irish poets, contradictory tensions are traced not only across and along the linguistic divide. In attending to the shift from feminism (Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paula Meehan, Medbh McGuckian, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill) to post-feminism in Irish poetry (Biddy Jenkinson, Vona Groarke, Caitríona O'Reilly, and Aifric Mac Aodha), I illustrate the role that the border between English and Irish has played in these processes. The dissertation falls into two parts each of which consists of two chapters. Part One explores some of the ways in which poets have confronted the inherited tradition and the feminine stereotypes therein. My...