12th International Cultural Studies Conference
&
1st International Conference on Linguistics and Teaching/Learning English
Pardubice Castle, 20 - 21 October, 2014
ABSTRACTS
LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES
LINGUISTICS AND TEACHING/LEARNING ENGLISH
LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES
ADAMOVÁ Diana
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
Poppy Z. Brite – In and Out of Gender Frame
Poppy Z. Brite has been known for her horror novels full of graphic violence and sexual descriptions with male protagonists. The reason for that lies in her gender issue. Born as Melissa Ann Brite, she early discovered to be a gay man born into a woman´s body. Her search for identity has influenced her writing as she employed usually bisexual or gay man. She announced first to be neither “she” nor “he” and stepped out of the gender frame. Since 2010, the pseudonym Poppy Z. Brite refers to Billy Martin, who wants to be called by male pronouns only. My paper argues to what extent his life has been portrayed in his most famous novels Lost Souls, Drawing Blood and Exquisite Corpse and how has his identity struggle shaped the protagonists.
ANTÉNE Petr
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
The Abuses of Political Correctness in American Academia: Reading Philip Roth’s The Human Stain in Light of Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe
Both Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952) and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) are campus novels set in small liberal arts colleges and satirizing the contemporary political environment. Roth’s novel presents the life story of Coleman Silk, a classics professor at the fictional Athena College who is, towards the end of his career, unjustly charged of using a racial slur against African Americans in the classroom. However, in spite of the blatant falsity of the accusation, the case is taken up by his department head as well as by the college’s black student organization and Silk is forced to resign. This recent indictment of American political correctness provides interesting frames of comparison with McCarthy’s earlier novel. In this text, a literature professor Henry Mulcahy who is to lose his job at the fictional Jocelyn College spreads the rumour that he is being dismissed because he was once a member of the communist party. His motivation is a belief that the college and faculty are too politically correct to be seen as persecuting the Left. In turn, not only does Mulcahy keep his job but also the college president resigns. Thus, while almost half a century apart, both novels provide a harsh satire of American academia, highlighting the ways in which the obsession with political correctness can be abused with devastating results. Most disturbingly, in the 1950s novel, the corrupted faculty member abuses the well-meaning institution whereas in the more contemporary text, the innocent individual is victimized.
BENEŠ Jan
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Jessie Fauset: Harlem Renaissance’s Novelist of Manners
Jessie Redmon Fauset is well-known as literary editor of The Crisis and mentor of several young Harlem Renaissance authors. This role has been often mentioned and highlighted as Fauset’s major achievement. Her novels have received little scholarly attention – with the exception of Plum Bun – and Fauset has been only reluctantly included among major Harlem Renaissance writers. Especially since her long fiction is nowhere near as radical as that of Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, or Nella Larsen, nor does it boast the modernist style of writing and experimental narrative perspective Harlem Renaissance literature is so famous for.
However, Fauset’s long fiction does have, as this paper argues, an unparalleled position in the Harlem era. All four of her novels are mixtures of the traditional novel of manners with aspects of the Bildungsroman and Kunstlerroman, charting the development of usually young African American females from childhood to maturity, from innocence to experience. In writing within this genre, Fauset presents a unique African American voice, which captures in the predominantly white genre the African American (female) experience. Through a strongly pedagogic narration, her texts thus show the development – movement from the Old Negro mentality to the New Negro one – of the up-and-coming African American generation. In this way, Fauset’s work may be seen as a gateway to the philosophy of the New Negro and the ideals that the African American elite of the Harlem Renaissance wished to instill in their readership.
ČOUPKOVÁ Eva
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Censorship as a Framing Factor in the Late Eighteenth Century British Drama
The paper explores the means by which the government or local authorities exerted control over the production of stage dramas at the turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in London theatres. Recently, the role of censorship, specifically the practices of John Larpent, who was the Examiner of Plays from 1778 until his death in 1824, has been discussed by leading scholars in the field. It is significant that in this period of war, social upheaval, and confusion following the French Revolution, drama was the only literary form subjected to a strict government supervision. This fact had far-reaching consequences for playwrights, actors, critics, theatre managers, and other groups involved in stage productions of that time. Censorship influenced writing for the stage in patent royal theatres in Westminster as well as for the non-patent theatres in the capital or provinces. While licensed theatres were able to stage regular five-act dramas, the minor houses were allowed to play burlettas or hybrid genres such as comic opera, melodrama, and various scenic spectacles. To illustrate the effects of this limited theatrical freedom on a specific work, the paper shows how The Kentish Barons (1791) by Francis North, originally a “three-act play interspersed with songs”, became, after the cuts of the passages marked as offensive by the censor, and other alterations made by a theatre manager, only a two-act piece with several resulting inconsistencies in its dramatic structure.
FLAJŠAR Jiří
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
No Way Out: Louis Simpson and the Frame of the American Suburbs
Louis Simpson (1923-2012) was a postwar American poet in whose work criticism of suburban conformity is coupled with attempts to reject the optimistic vision of American culture that was promoted in the 19th century by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. In his breakthrough poetry volume, At the End of the Open Road (1963), Simpson dramatizes a critical dialogue with Whitman about the decline of American belief in perpetual progress which is documented by the framework of deadening sameness brought forth by postwar American suburbs. This environment seems to plague the artist as much as his traumatic memories of WWII. Besides close reading of representative Simpson poems that deal with the identity of American suburbanites, the paper shall also relate Simpson’s work to cultural histories of American suburbs by Kenneth T. Jackson (Crabgrass Frontier) and Mark Clapson (Suburban Century). Ultimately, the paper will argue for the position of Simpson’s iconoclastic poetry as a central voice that contributed to the 1960s stylistic and thematic opening of the American poetry canon, changing the notions of poetic subject matter as much as the more overtly political work of the Beats did. The radicalism of Simpson’s critique of suburbia is heightened by the poet’s awareness of being marginalized among suburban neighbors who have no patience for the subversive potential of poetry and the arts.
FLAJŠAROVÁ Pavlína
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
To Frame or Not to Frame That Is the Question: Diaspora in the Poetry of Grace Nichols
“I have crossed an ocean/I have lost my tongue/ From the root of the old one/ A new one has sprung” claims Grace Nichols in her Epilogue poem in I Is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983). Nichols as a Guynese-British poet, resident in United Kingdom since 1977, has celebrated the multicultural diversity of Caribbean and British culture. Her poetry explores the textual and visual aspects within the frame of contemporary culture. The paper aims to explore the diasporic features in selected poems by Nichols in order to show in what ways British and Caribbean literary traditions diverge and converge. The motif of diaspora will be examined as a frame within which the cultural and political consciousness of the poetic speakers develop. The paper will further discuss the ethnic elements that were included in the texts so as to contextualize the poems within the canon of British-Caribbean diasporic literature. Nicholsˈ work incorporates the lyric voice of the immigrant community paying special attention to the possibilities of standard English as opposed to Caribbean creole. Therefore the paper will finally evaluate Nichols´ amalgam of art, language, and diaspora as means of demythologizing the framing culture of contemporary Britain.
JIROUTOVÁ KYNČLOVÁ Tereza
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Representations of Juárez Femicides in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood
In her canonical, yet subversive masterpiece Borderlands/La Frontera – The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa, a leading figure of Chicana literature and activism, calls the US-Mexico border “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Anzaldúa 1999 [1987]: 25-26). Globally, there are only few borders where the “gratings” and “bleedings” of worlds are so brutal like the ones taking place in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area.
The effects of the 1993 ratification of NAFTA gradually turned Ciudad Juárez into a major hub of transnational trade and the center of US-owned corporations that built maquiladoras employing thousands of young women of poor, working class background at the industrial assembly lines. Between 1994 and 2000 more than 300 of them were savagely murdered having been severely tortured prior to their death.
Read against the theoretical conceptualization of the US-Mexico border as introduced by Gloria Anzaldúa and maintained by Chicana feminist writings, with employment of the scholarly interventions contained in Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera (2010) edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, the paper will analyze the intersection of gender and race as rendered in the latter author’s novel Desert Blood (2005) that portrays a story of an American girl kidnapped in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area and who witnesses events leading to several maquiladora female workers deaths.
Employing postcolonial, literary and gender-sensitive perspectives informed by feminist theories, the paper will be interdisciplinary in its nature.
KOVALOVÁ Karla
University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Black Feminist Critique for the 21st Century
In 2013, the Liverpool University Press published Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century (eds. Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi), a collection of essays addressing black states of desire and “the conditions of social transformation in the black world”(1). Reflecting the contemporary theorization that seems to highlight intersectionality, transdisciplinarity as well as black lived experience, the volume sought to “revise racial, gender, and sexual constructions in texts and discourses, and in the social world alike” (3). This paper aims at contributing to the discussion by focusing on the production of black feminist thought in the 21st century, assessing its current trajectories. In particular, the paper will analyze two major streams within contemporary black feminist criticism – one elaborating on the highly influential work on terror by Saidiya Hartman and another linked to Elizabeth Alexander’s work on “the black interior” – in order to determine black feminist critique for the 21st century in which policies of inequality and discrimination still matter.
LACKO Ivan
Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
Framing and Reframing: Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play
In an interview, Suzan-Lori Parks stated that when conceiving The America Play her intent was “to write about a hole” in American history, a hole that came to represent the void in the African American construction of identity brought about by negating the white influence in history making and interpretation. Drawing on Henry Louis Gates’s notion of “signifying meaning” in literary (and other) texts, this contribution seeks to present and analyze the approach Suzan-Lori Parks takes in The America Play to challenge the framing of African American history, culture, politics and language, as well as to discuss the intricacies of the consequent reframing of these terms. Combining a critical examination of text and performance, I aspire to consider the importance of absence, or “a hole” (or, in this particular context “the Great Hole of History”) in the process of (re)claiming cultural identity, and also to analyze the context of the process which Deborah Geis refers to as “rewriting [iconic characters] through the prism of African American cultural history.”
MERZ Lukáš
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Tinker Traitor Liar Fry: Heterogeneity and Englishness in Stephen Fry’s The Liar
The proposed paper analyses the literary qualities of Stephen Fry’s first novel The Liar (1991), which seems to deceive and misguide the reader throughout, to operate seemingly out-of-frame by employing a whole set of postmodern narrative strategies: ingenious play with the narrative, pastiche, genre mixing, linguistic and stylistic originality, transgressive elements and a questionable outcome. The novel’s hybrid form and content reach beyond the – disputable as they might be – borders of “popular” fiction. However, it is presented not as a novelty or rarity in the context of English literary tradition, but rather as a work of imagination and wit that takes advantage of the intrinsic character of English writing and a long literary tradition. The apparently unusual use of heterogeneous techniques and subversive strategies is discussed in the context of “Englishness” of English literature, as described in essays by the writer and critic Peter Ackroyd. I would like to link some of Ackroyd’s arguments about the peculiar qualities of English literature and imaginations with the characteristic traits of The Liar and while using this perspective to place it paradoxically back “in the frame”, where it, I would like to argue, belongs.
MÍŠA Patrik
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
(Re)creating the Past: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
Experimentations in (auto)biographical writing, including transgressions towards fiction, started to appear in the Anglophone literature early during the modernist era, and are also present in the postmodern writing. One of the examples of this literary form is Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, a fictional autobiography of Claudia Hampton, a former war correspondent. Claudia’s endeavour presents her own personal history in a highly fragmented and ambiguous form, which disregards the time chronology, and repeatedly shows the same events from multiple points of view. In a truly postmodern fashion, the text constantly reminds the reader of how a subjective interpretation of facts is unavoidable and of how flexible the truth can be.
In my presentation, I would like to show how Lively transcends the boundaries of the genre of fictional autobiography, and creates a text that builds on memories and at the same time casts doubt upon their reliability. The form of the text itself denies the idea of authoritative truth, and presents each singular event in Claudia’s life, in fact, as a sum of multiple perspectives. I would like to draw the attention to how this (post)modern approach opens the text to the readers’ personal interpretations, and enables them to construct their own versions of Claudia’s past.
OTRÍSALOVÁ Lucia
Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
Hybrid Identity and Hybrid Narration in George Seremba’s Come Good Rain
George Seremba’s Come Good Rain (1990) is an autobiographical solo performance about Ugandan political oppression in which the playwright, a former leader of student protests against the Ugandan president Milton Obote at the beginning of the 1980s, recounts his story of miraculous survival after being abducted, interrogated and shot multiple times by the Ugandan military. Besides exploring the therapeutic effects of reenacting one’s memories of traumatic experiences, the play also grapples with questions of what it means to African in diaspora. This paper examines the hybrid mix of Western and African artistic techniques which Seremba employs to give expression to the in-betweenness of his identity as an African exiled in Canada and which, at the same time, challenges traditional Western stage realism and dramatic linearity.
POLEHLOVÁ Helena
University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
Bede and Eddi: Two Complementary Reflections of Early Anglo-Saxon World
Venerable Bede´s Ecclesiastical History of the English People is a generally accepted and celebrated canonical authority for our knowledge of the early history of Anglo-Saxon England. Outside the frame of historiography, The Life of St Wilfrid, an 8th-century Anglo-Latin hagiographical text, however, also comprises valuable records which shed slightly different light on the earliest Anglo-Saxon history and offer an interesting insight into it, although the Life is primarily aimed at a different purpose.
On a concrete account of historical events, the paper attempts to analyze the way historical facts are treated in The Life of St Wilfrid, written by Eddi, Bede´s contemporary. The unique significance of the work for our perception of early Anglo-Saxon history will arise and become even more evident when compared with other works of hagiography of the same period.
PŘIBYLOVÁ Irena
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Growing Up on the Reservation: Myth and Fiction
The presentation focuses on the role of myth in contemporary fiction which features teenage Native characters. With the growing interest in young adult literature and in honest representation of ethic cultures, and with the pop culture reaching the most remote parts of the world, the reflection of mythology in contemporary fiction has been treated differently than in the past. A young character is shown as somebody who does not care much for traditions, and learns about them through personal crisis. Specific myths and legends emerge from the past and make it into the present. On examples from novels by two writers of Ojibway-Caucasian origin, Drew Hayden Taylor: The Night Wanderer (2007), and Louis Erdrich: The Round House (2012), I will show how and to what effect the authors worked with mythology in their stories.
RYCHTER Ewa
The Angelus Silesius College, Walbrzych, Poland
The Scarlet Line in the Window: Women in Some Contemporary Re-writings of the Bible
Discussing the biblical use of the widespread Near-Eastern topos of “the woman at the window”, Cheryl Exum argues that this image represents both the woman's confinement within the patriarchal perspective – her circumscription within the androcentric narrative – and her attempt (often unsuccessful) to move beyond the imposed boundary (1996:75). Thus, though framed by the patriarchal culture, women in the Bible seek to assert their autonomy and resist their confinement. In my paper I will focus on the problem of such “framing” as present in selected contemporary novels that rewrite the Bible. I will examine ways in which these novels revisit, revise and re-imagine such framed status of women characters. I will support my reading of Winterson, Diski, Roberts, Toibin, McCaughrean, with the classification of the feminist biblical interpretations devised by Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and with Alicia Suskin Ostriker's discussion of feminist revisions of the Bible.
SAVANOVIC Vesna
Vožd Karađorđe, Aleksinac, Serbia
Frameworks within the Memory of Historical Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and D. M. Thomas’ The White Hotel
Historical trauma that links the collective experience of some horrible events with the psychic suffering of an individual owes its existence to violence which is an element of essentially egocentric relationship towards what has been considered as the ‘Other’. Traumatized people live trying to find the way to overcome the traumatic experiences and to go beyond but very often the directions are false; they stay within the frameworks which obstruct the true insights into the historical forces responsible for the traumatic events and then those uninformed ignorant rebels only reinforce the patterns of violence.
It is important to single out the studies which go directly to the heart of the problem. Such examinations are carried out by some of the best fiction which displays narratives of victims as a response to traumatic shock that refuses to go away. Two such narratives, one about a black woman, a former slave, struggling to make peace with the ghosts of the past in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the other about a Jewish artist, the victim of Babi Yar massacre in D. M. Thomas’ The White Hotel, apart from being extraordinary readings, can help us understand some new aspects and effects of historical trauma in general. Both authors by using the art of words which deals with wounds in a conscious way intended to remind the readers and, on a broader level the whole society, of the past and make the suppressed memories and various falsifications come out in the open for an alternative revision.
STACHUROVÁ Alexandra
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
“Most Strange of All”—Going Beyond Typicality in The Puritan Widow
The principal characters of the city comedies by Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), an English Jacobean playwright, are young, witty men who are cunning enough to achieve their goals by plotting, cheating and pretending. These young men outwit their adversaries, and thereafter they are rewarded with money, property, estates, or the love of a desired woman. However, one of Middleton’s city comedies is different. This paper looks into the ways The Puritan Widow (1606) exceeds the framework of typicality of characters and plots in Middleton’s city comedies, shows how Middleton usually operates his characters, and how his going “outside the frame” affects the overall meaning of The Puritan Widow in comparison with the rest of his city comedies.
SUK Jan
University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
Chronopoetics - Time Deframing Efficacy in the Work of Forced Entertainment
Forced Entertainment, a leading British experimental troupe operating both in and outside of the frame of theatre studies, is renowned largely due to their durational performances. Besides their subversive creative strategies, such as a palimpsestuous approach to the dramatic textual (sic) material, recycling of old shows and character identities, accentuated liveness and self-reflexivity, it is their original dislocation from time framing supported by the illusionary step outside the spatial frame of the theatre, which creates ruptures for the audience to comprehend the activity on the stage, as a kind-of self-realization process which I call chronopoetics (the poetics of time). The paper addresses the issue connected with time in/and theatre to argue that time awareness blended with a here-and-now-for-you approach constitutes the efficacy of the company's work. The general treatment of spatial and time framing advocated the primary concern of Goffman: to highlight the existence of the frame in theatre helps to show the human (actors') frailty, thus to reveal their vulnerability and arouse sympathy in their audiences. The findings from the theoretical part, which lead towards spectatorial conspiracy through the experience of time, are illustrated both on the company's durational pieces and time revolving performances, such as Showtime (1996) or Pleasure (1997).
SUKDOLOVÁ Alice
University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
Crossing the Threshold in Dracula
The focus of my paper is based on Deleuze and Guattari's classification of the smooth and striated space as they define it in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bram Stoker’s Dracula deals with the theme of stepping over the threshold between the smooth space of the wood and the space striated by civilization aims. The theme of crossing the threshold will be dealt with from various points of view. Deleuze's category of the Wolf-Man will be analyzed with respect to the wolves becoming werewolves in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Further on, the study will discuss Deleuze's notion of the Wolf-Man in terms of identity of the human, animal or becoming-animal. It will be centered on the relation between Dracula and the wolves, i.e. on the process of an individual becoming a multiplicity, as Dracula's blood thirst turns more and more humans into vampires. A parallel between the multiplicity of wolves who become werewolves and human characters who become vampires could be traced in Stoker's novel.
The position of the vampire existence on the edge of society and also on the edge of the pack of wolves could also be considered as the position on the threshold between two worlds, i.e. on the thin line where the striated space emerges from the smooth one. However, the question whether the space striated by the walls of Dracula's castle could be considered as truly striated remains to be answered.
SUKENÍKOVÁ Alena
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
Fan Fiction: a New Literary Genre?
Fan fiction is a broad term which describes the work of fans of some original art work. It is a new phenomenon of popular culture which developed with mass media. The presentation introduces the phenomenon of fan fiction literature and explores its connection to the Internet. It examines fan fiction as a genre of the 21st century; interactive with its audience, existing without copyright, and free on the Internet. It analyses the basic frames of this new genre; canon and fanon, categories and types, its various fan art and the special vocabulary of the readers and writers of the genre. It also examines the genre as derivative work and discusses franchise and its legal issues and copyright problems. It discusses such Internet phenomena as fandom, fan fiction sites, writer’s online collaboration, reader’s feedback, and beta-reading.
ŠTEFANSKÁ Pavla
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Domestic Violence in Contemporary Popular Romance: Nora Roberts and Lisa Kleypas
The relationship between the genre of romance and violence has always been tumultuous and contraversional. From the early 70’s to late 80’s rape was so ubiquitous in romance novels, it became a trope and caused the novels to be referred to as bodice-rippers. In 2001 Julia T. Wood published the article ‘The normalization of violence in heterosexual relationships: Women’s narratives of love and violence’ in which she argues that humans rely on narratives to make sense of their lives and, as a result of Western long-lived myths about male/female relationships, women are more likely to justify their partner’s abuse through these narratives and choose to stay with their abusive partners. Woods’ conclusion is that new romance narratives must be created to help diminish such behavior. If we accept Woods’ argument as valid, literature, especially the genre of romance which is solely focused on the intimate relationship, plays an important role in shaping our romantic expectations and beliefs. This paper examines whether the portrayal of domestic violence and its effects in the contemporary works of two best-selling romance authors Nora Roberts and Lisa Kleypas falls into the category of what Woods calls toxic narratives, or if these books succeed in creating healthier alternatives. The chosen novels are written in the span of almost 20 years and therefore document not only the changes within the genre as such, but also changes in society’s acceptance of domestic violence since the early 90’s to this day.
ŠVÁBENSKÝ Robert
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Cormac McCarthy: The Road – An Environmental Post-apocalyptic Appeal Standing outside the Frame of Environmental Rhetoric
Over his almost half a century long writing career, Cormac McCarthy sets on a trail of exploration of men’s existential experiences, evocation of the pastoral myth and scrutinizing the complexity of the American frontier theory. In my paper, I concentrate on McCarthy as an environmentalist. Whereas most of the research into his environmental philosophy deals with his Southern Gothic novel, namely The Orchard Keeper (1965) and Suttree (1979), on the background of latter-day environmental theories and approaches, I highlight his post-apocalyptic The Road (2006) as a fundamental environmental manifesto, a vital contribution to the framework of global ecocritical discourse. What makes McCarthy’s argument so strong and different from the existing eco-canon is the way he addresses his appeal. And he does so by breaking away from the usually employed rhetoric of the tragic apocalyptic narrative. Using his vivid imagery, specific narrative style, scarcity of language and peculiar treatment of syntax and typography, McCarthy steps out of the traditional framework of environmental rhetoric, he does not shout a warning: “Look what we are capable of doing to our planet”, his message and appeal is rather more subtle in pointing out: “Look what we might turn into under the given circumstances”, which is a point of view advocating that the core subject of ecocriticism is the study of the relationship of the human and the non-human. McCarthy’s venture outside the framework of traditional environmental discourse, however, does not discredit the ecocritical appeal; on the contrary, his vision beyond it offers a unique perspective challenging the limits of such framework.
TESKE Joanna Klara
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
Contradictions in Realist, Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction
The paper will contrast the use of contradictions in three narrative conventions: realism, modernism and postmodernism. Contradictions will be defined as co-presence of mutually exclusive ideas expressed either explicitly or, as typical of art, implicitly. Art, literature included, will be taken as a cognitive activity, consisting first of all in communicating ideas and staging experiments. This is done by either representation of reality (external or internal reality, forms of cognition or act of creation) or free creation, or, most often, in various proportions both representation and free creation (mimesis and poiesis).
Realism is by and large mimetic, confident of its view of reality and interested in social interactions. As regards its interpretation of reality, it tends to take intelligibility and coherence of reality for granted. Contradictions are therefore avoided. Modernism is mainly representational, the focus falling on psychic life, but the element of free creation is also present. Sceptical about human cognitive possibilities, modernism recognizes the presence of contradictions especially in the mind, but does not perceive them as absolute. Postmodernism is typically experimental: free creation comes to the foreground. Its main interest is the man-made world: art, technology, man’s transformations. It views contradictions as natural: related to the nature of language, man-made artefacts, human life. Man constructs meanings, contradictory meanings included. The above hypotheses will be considered and illustrated with passages taken from the 20th- and 21st-century British fiction.
VICE Brad
University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic
Talking to Yourself: The Autofictions of Barry Hannah
“Ray, you are a doctor and you are in a hospital in Mobile, except now you are a patient but you’re still me. Say What? You say you want to know who I am?” So says the titular narrator of one of Barry Hannah’s most popular novel’s Ray (1980). Who is Ray? And to what extent does Ray mirror his creator Barry, the author that shares the letters of his name, as well as the same occupation, hometown, passions, even the names of the author’s children? Though most people prefer to think of Barry Hannah as a postmodern heir to William Faulkner, Hannah himself has listed French and Francophile existentialists like Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, and especially Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) to be among his primary influences. In this paper I will explore the way Hannah uses an autobiographical framework to structure his most famous fictions from the 70’s and 80’s like Geronimo Rex (1972), Ray (1980) Captain Maximus (1985) as well as his own autobiography Boomerang (1989). I will investigate how Hannah adopts Miller’s aesthetics for his own purposes, including the use of carnivalesque and vaudevillian dramatic forms to exaggerate his own persona. To help map the border between fact and fiction I will use the French literary critic Philippe Lejune and his concept of an autofiction, a text that creates its own pact with a reader and cannot be defined by preexisting generic boundaries like novel, memoir, or autobiography.
VRÁNKOVÁ Kamila
University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
‘Dancing on the Edge of Gloom’: Thoughts of the Sublime and its Transformations
The title of the proposal refers to a letter written by Edmund Burke, contemplating life as a state of constant uncertainty and a presence of a hidden threat. This feeling, in fact, permeates through his influential aesthetic theory, which points out the crucial role of fear and terror in the perception of the sublime. This concept, partly following the ideas of John Dennis, interestingly modifies the original view of Longinus, dealing with the rhetorical sublime and the experience of a spiritual exaltation.
As the paper attempts to show, the sublime as an aesthetic category cannot be easily and unambiguously defined. It is an inseparable part of our literary and cultural history and, in spite of the varieties of interpretation, it centers on external forms of greatness, as well as on internal emotional response to this greatness. The paper draws on the postmodern concept of the sublime as an encounter with the unspeakable and the inexpressible. It discusses the sublime as a threshold experience involving particular physical sensations as well as the states of consciousness.
WEISS Michaela
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
Mothers Traumatized and Traumatic in the Works of Elizabeth Bishop, Irena Klepfisz, and Jeanette Winterson
The paper analyzes the image of mothers in the works of American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), American Jewish poet Irena Klepfisz (b. 1941), and a British writer Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959). All three writers had a complicated relationship with their mothers and lost their homes very early. The main attention is paid to their fictional representation of their childhood and early adolescence in relation to their mothers who are not portrayed as nurturing and comforting figures providing homes, but rather as unstable and largely traumatic figures.
LINGUISTICS AND TEACHING/LEARNING ENGLISH
BEČKOVÁ Barbora
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
Discipline in English Classrooms: Intervention Strategies in the Context of Organizational Forms
The presentation deals with the issue of discipline in English classrooms. First of all, the contrasting views on discipline, types of pupil misbehaviour and problems concerning the specification of the optimal set of intervention steps will be introduced. Attention will also be focused on the occurrence of misbehaviour in individual organizational forms. In the second part, results and findings of the multiple-case study will be presented. The main aim of the study was to find out what types of uncooperative behaviour occur in the organizational forms which individual teachers of the English language at the selected basic school include in their lessons, what intervention strategies individual teachers use to eliminate individual types of uncooperative behaviour and how effective the strategies are in eliminating individual types of uncooperative behaviour.
BETÁKOVÁ Lucie, SOVOVÁ Lenka
University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
Teacher Follow-up Move within Classroom Discourse
Many authors claim that typical exchange in the classroom consists of an initiation by the teacher, followed by a response from the pupil, followed by feedback to the pupil’s response from the teacher. Even though the three interconnected parts have been given different names by different authors, this type of exchange is regarded as “the very fabric of classroom interaction” (Walsh 2006).
The paper will concentrate on the final move of the sequence as it is believed to be “a distinguishing feature of educational discourse” (Mehan 1985). The follow-up move or feedback can have various functions in the development of classroom discourse and thus plays an important role in student learning. An analysis will be offered of the F- move of various teachers of English in EFL context. The analysis will concentrate on the functions of the F-move – evaluation, explanation, acknowledgement or discoursal function (as proposed by Cullen 2002) and the strategies particular teachers use to evaluate students’ responses or to reformulate them and incorporate them into a wider context. The main concern will be to investigate the types of feedback (follow-up) from the perspective of promoting effective communication in the classroom.
ČERNÁ Monika
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
Czech Students in English Language Teacher Education Study Programmes: Who They Are and Why They Come
The enrolment of students in teacher education study programmes has recently been a debated issue also in the context of English language study programmes. Institutions educating future teachers often choose their students on the basis of the subject matter knowledge since it is measurable unlike some other aspects of individuals’ potential. However, for the effectiveness of teacher education it is important to learn who the students are and why they come. The presented study, therefore, concentrates on uncovering the background and motivation of first year students in English language teacher education study programmes at three universities in the Czech Republic. The presentation builds on both quantitative and qualitative data obtained in a larger research project.
HEADLANDOVÁ KALISCHOVÁ Irena
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Language Competences of Academics for Instruction in English
The contribution presents the stages in creating a course for teachers of Masaryk University who either teach their subjects in English or are planning to do so. The aim of the course is to offer these people a possibility to improve and develop their knowledge of English with a particular focus on teaching strategies. It is not merely a general English course but its modules are based on the teaching experience and expertise of the participants and are aimed at improving/consolidating their spoken production in English. The modules it contains are as follows: 1. pronunciation (difficult sounds, intonation, model pronunciation of given terminology), 2. methodology (classroom management - seminar, lecture; giving instructions, check questions), 3. soft skills (polite requests, presentation techniques), 4. "tailored" sessions: reflecting requests/needs of participants. As the pilot project will be launched in September 2014, there should also be feedback on the first five sessions available at the time of the conference.
HUSCHOVÁ Petra
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
Non-native Writers’ Use of Hedging Devices
The presentation deals with the use of hedging devices in written academic discourse, particularly in bachelor theses written by Czech students of English. The aim is to investigate how students hedge their propositions and which subcategories of linguistic hedging devices they employ most frequently. Firstly, the presentation introduces the major forms of hedges and discusses their distribution and functions. Secondly, it attempts to find out whether Czech students use these devices appropriately and effectively to indicate their commitment to the propositional content of the message. Finally, it comments on the difficulties students may encounter in acquiring the use of hedging devices in academic writing.
IVANOVÁ Jaroslava
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
Reading Aloud Individual Words
What can the university teacher of English phonetics and phonology learn from reading aloud individual English words? This presentation aims to answer this question analysing 80 recordings of the first-year university students from the point of view of the segmental pronunciation features. Not only does it highlight Czech students’ typical flaws but it also suggests some ways to tackle them.
JANÍK Zdeněk
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Self-concepts and Views of Others in Intercultural Communication
Our self-concepts and views of others are derived from our views of ourselves as members of cultures and from how we view ourselves and others in particular situations. In intercultural context we step outside our cultural frames and the frames of reference we customarily use to view the familiar are tested and revised in light of the new and unfamiliar we encounter in intercultural situations. The study herein presented was designed with the following objectives: to determine the context of intercultural situations which influence the self-concepts of members of different cultures interacting within one host culture (1), to find out how ones’ self-concepts and views of others can change as a result of their interaction with members of other cultures in intercultural context (2). The data representing the results of the study were gathered by means of discourse analysis of approximately five hundred Reflective Journals in which over one hundred international students of various nationalities reflected on their intercultural experience while studying at Masaryk University. Although generalizations are avoided, the study brought interesting findings about the U.S. American students and their self-concepts and views of others in comparison to the views of the students of other nationalities.
JEŽKOVÁ Šárka
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
Designing, Compiling and Analyzing Learner Corpus
The presentation describes a part of a bigger multidimensional project called “Aspects of English Language Acquisition of Czech Students on the Onset of Teacher Education” which is focused on the processes of acquiring communicative competence in speaking English as a foreign language by Czech university learners and is financially supported by the Czech Science Foundation.
As argued by many linguists, writing and speech are two different systems (e.g. Carter and McCarthy 1995, Biber et al. 1999) and the specific features of dynamic on-line production in conversation lead to a certain degree of dysfluency which brings structures typical of grammar of speaking. Thus the process of designing the data collecting tools reflected (a) the declared differences between speech and writing and (b) the preliminary smaller scale studies carried out by the team. The form of students’ oral performance was brought closer to the “natural” conversation so that the analysis could include the following areas: (a) spoken language features; (b) discourse management structures; (c) grammatical accuracy of the performance (e) potential Czech native language negative transfer.
One of the areas of analysis is focused on the occurrence and distribution of non-clausal units in spoken discourse (i.e. elliptic replies, condensed questions, echo questions, etc.) with the aim to find out how far the learners’ spoken performance differs from the native speakers’ one. Finally the conclusions made on the basis of the analyses could be used for modifications of course syllabi and curriculum of the TEFL study programme.
REIMANNOVÁ Irena, ZITKOVÁ Helena
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
Building Subject Content Knowledge of Student Teachers
The study focuses on how the subject content is built in the bachelor programme - English for education. In our paper we are interested in whether and how the planned curriculum of individual subjects, respectively subjects of communicative and linguistic modules, reflects the general aim of the study programme, i.e. communicative competence development. Based on the content and aims analysis of the relevant syllabuses, we claim that the development of communicative competence is enhanced by all the selected subjects.
SIEGLOVÁ Dagmar
University of Finance and Administration, Prague
Škoda Auto University, Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic
Speech Acts in Advertisement: Warnings and Consumer Face
The Shannon-Weaver communication model from 1948 still used in marketing for developing and interpreting marketing communication messages describes the bidirectional communication process between a source (marketer) and a receiver (consumer) as a trajectory of a marketer’s message sent with an encoded meaning through a chosen channel in order to become further decoded by a consumer into the end interpretation. According to the model, the receiver’s reaction and contextual cues, then, provide feedback back to the source that can further serve to help developing effective marketing communication strategies.This model reflects what has been originally described in the speech act theory (Austin, 1962 and Searle 1967) as a process between a speaker and a hearer encoding a meaning of a locutionary act (utterance) into an illocutionary force (intention) to be decoded in the form or a perlocutionary act (result). Combined with the organization of culturally varied speech act adjacency pair patterns (Heritage 1984), and an analysis of the addressee’s perception of linguistic “face” (Brown & Levinson 1978), the traditional speech acts theory perspective can provide valuable information for current marketers internationally in identifying their market segments and developing targeted intercultural marketing messages to their potential consumers worldwide. This presentation is adapting the psycholinguistic approach in an analysis and interpretation of the work with the speech act of warnings in marketing communication and local adaptations strategies between global insurance companies and their potential consumer.
SYROVÝ Jindřich
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
Subject Complement Clauses in Fiction and Their Translation
The presentation reports on the outcomes of a research carried out as an integral component of author’s master thesis. The research examined subject complement clauses in English fiction and their Czech counterparts. The purpose of this study was to investigate the clausal forms of the subject complement in English sentences and their syntactic counterparts in the Czech translations. The analysis of correlations between the individual forms of the subject complement and their Czech syntactic counterparts revealed the characteristic features of both languages and offered possible implications for the theory of translation.
TAMPIEROVÁ Helena
University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
Interdisciplinary Approach to Teaching History and Literature
The process of contextualizing texts of literature and events of history in the classroom without sufficient and informed insight into religious matters and theology of the day tends to result in false conclusions and inaccurate assumptions. Moreover, the knowledge acquired remains strictly superficial. The aim of the presentation, therefore, is to demonstrate in concrete terms that an interdisciplinary approach integrating facts, theories, concepts, values, perceptions and a grasp of the relevant mentalities from the religious sphere into the teaching process is of seminal assistance in order to acquire mature insight and reach valid interpretations both of works of art and facts of and processes in history. Periods of high middle ages and the Renaissance will be discussed and texts from Langland to Blake through Shakespeare, Donne and Milton will serve as examples.
TAUCHMANOVÁ Věra
University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
Presentations of Grammar Issues - ICT and Creativity
The text focuses on the necessity of creative approaches to grammar teaching materials presented on various websites. The author presents this issue from a teacher trainer´s point of view, and reflects on her practical experience with training pre- and in-service English teachers.
ZEMKOVÁ Ludmila
University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
The Analysis of Gender in Juvenile Animals
This paper is devoted to gender in animal youngsters. Although most grammars of both modern and earlier stages of English either ignore the topic or maintain that the appropriate pronoun to use when referring to youngsters is it, the actual language use identified by my research is quite different. The aim of this research study is to answer the question: How is the gender of juvenile animals distributed? The next aim is to analyse and compare gender assignment in juvenile animals retrieved from National Geographic articles and scientific papers in Journal of Zoology. The research attempts to ascertain differences - if any - of gender assignment in youngsters within the two different subcorpora. The initial hypothesis was that gender assignment to juvenile animals would manifest differences from that in adults.
contacts
ADAMOVÁ Diana
diana.adamova@fpf.slu.cz
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
ANTÉNE Petr
p.antene@seznam.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
BEČKOVÁ Barbora
barbora.beckova@seznam.cz
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
BENEŠ Jan
jan.benes85@seznam.cz
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
BETÁKOVÁ Lucie
betakova@pf.jcu.cz
University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
ČERNÁ Monika
monika.cerna@upce.cz
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
ČOUPKOVÁ Eva
coupkova@sci.muni.cz
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
FLAJŠAR Jiří
jiriflajsar@centrum.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
FLAJŠAROVÁ Pavlína
flajsarova@centrum.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
HEADLANDOVÁ KALISCHOVÁ Irena
604@mail.muni.cz
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
HUSCHOVÁ Petra
petra.huschova@upce.cz
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
IVANOVÁ Jaroslava
jaroslava.ivanova@upce.cz
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
JANÍK Zdeněk
zdenekjanik@volny.cz
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
JEŽKOVÁ Šárka
sarka.jezkova@upce.cz
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
JIROUTOVÁ KYNČLOVÁ Tereza
tereza.kynclova@fhs.cuni.cz
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
KOVALOVÁ Karla
Karla.Kovalova@osu.cz
University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
LACKO Ivan
lacko@fphil.uniba.sk
Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
MERZ Lukáš
lukas.merz@gmail.com
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
MÍŠA Patrik
pmisa@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
OTRÍSALOVÁ Lucia
otrisalova@fphil.uniba.sk
Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
POLEHLOVÁ Helena
helena.polehlova@uhk.cz
University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
PŘIBYLOVÁ Irena
pribylova@ped.muni.cz
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
REIMANNOVÁ Irena
irena.reimannova@upce.cz
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
RYCHTER Ewa
rje@wp.pl
The Angelus Silesius College, Walbrzych, Poland
SAVANOVIC Vesna
vesnasavanovic0201@gmail.com
Vožd Karađorđe, Aleksinac, Serbia
SIEGLOVÁ Dagmar
dagmar.sieglova@sieglovi.cz
University of Finance and Administration, Prague
Škoda Auto University, Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic
SOVOVÁ Lenka,
sovova.an@gmail.cz
STACHUROVÁ Alexandra
178433@mail.muni.cz
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
SUK Jan
jan.suk@uhk.cz
University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
SUKDOLOVÁ Alice
sukdolova@pf.jcu.cz
University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
SUKENÍKOVÁ Alena
KaraAlen@seznam.cz
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
SYROVÝ Jindřich
syrovyjindrich@gmail.com
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
ŠTEFANSKÁ Pavla
Pavla.Stefanska@gmail.com
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
ŠVÁBENSKÝ Robert
robertsvabensky@seznam.cz
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
TAMPIEROVÁ Helena
helena.tampierova@uhk.cz
University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
TAUCHMANOVÁ Věra
vera.tauchmanova@uhk.cz
University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
TESKE Joanna Klara
jteske@kul.pl
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
VICE Brad
wbvice@aol.com
University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic
VRÁNKOVÁ Kamila
vrankova@pf.jcu.cz
University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
WEISS Michaela
Michaela.weiss@fpf.slu.cz
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
ZEMKOVÁ Ludmila
zemkova@pf.jcu.cz
University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
ZITKOVÁ Helena
helena.zitkova@upce.cz
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
