CALL FOR PAPERS
The Department of English and American Studies
at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, University of Pardubice,
is pleased to announce its
13th International Cultural Studies Conference
&
2nd International Conference on Linguistics and Language Teaching and Learning
Pardubice, 13-14 October 2016
Abstracts:
Literature and Cultural Studies
CHALUPSKÝ Petr
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
The Living Presence of Invisible Agencies and Unseen Powers – The Dramatised and Reinvented History of Peter Ackroyd’s Novels
Peter Ackroyd is one of the most prolific and versatile personalities on the contemporary British literary scene. Being simultaneously an historian, literary historian and writer, the body of his work is truly interdisciplinary and, consequently, considerably heterogeneous and multi-layered. Although he began his literary career writing poetry, he is now most renowned for his non-fiction and fiction. His non-fiction is very miscellaneous and is comprised of essays, lectures, biographies, books on English history and the history of English literature, historical books for children and scripts for television documentaries; his fiction consists of his novels and a small number of short stories. Ackroyd’s writing stems from his three major areas of interest – English history, English literature and London, its history and the textual production the capital has generated, enabled and inspired – which combine in all his acclaimed works. From non-fiction, apart from his most recent and yet unfinished six-volume History of England, it can be found primarily in the textual and intertextual history of London in London: The Biography (2000), his outline of the historical development of an English literary sensibility, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002), and the biographies of outstanding personalities whom Ackroyd calls “London luminaries” or “Cockney visionaries” and who include not only writers, such as Blake, Dickens, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Eliot and Pound, but also other artists (Turner, Chaplin) and scholars (More, Newton).
An interconnection of the three areas of interest also lies at the core of most of his novels. His fiction is difficult to categorise because as a whole it defies traditional generic delineation. Although it always revolves around the past or the relationship between the past and the present, he cannot be labelled a purely historical writer since several of his novels, like The Great Fire of London (1982), First Light (1989), English Music (1992), The Fall of Troy (2006) and Three Brothers (2013), are set in the present or a very recent past. Two other novels can each stand as a separate category: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), written as a fictional diary of the eponymous writer during the last days of his life, and the experimental futuristic conceit-novel The Plato Papers (1999). Even the remaining novels can be further subdivided into those with multiple, parallel plotlines taking place both in the present and in the past, such as Hawksmoor (1985), Chatterton (1987) and The House of Doctor Dee (1993), and those whose story is set solely in the past, such as Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), Milton in America (1996), The Clerkenwell Tales (2003), The Lambs of London (2004) and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008). It is especially in these novels set in the past, or in both past and present, that his fields of expertise and his rich imagination most forcefully resonate. Using various tendencies in recent and contemporary historical fiction as a frame of reference, particularly historiographic metafiction, pastiche, palimpsest and the so called “What if?” or alternate approach to history, the aim of this paper is to explore how the two sides of Ackroyd’s professional self – the historian and the writer – intersect in these novels and how, within his creative license, he dramatically renders, exploits and re-fabricates history in order to achieve the intended effect on the reader.
ŘEŘICHA Václav
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Stylistics of Borrowings as a Reflection of Culture Dimensions
Contemporary intercultural education may find a theoretical background in a theory of national cultures. A lexical analysis of internationalisms (mostly borrowings from English) suggests that their subsequent development in respective national languages like Czech or Slovak may reflect the six cultural dimensions developed by Geert Hofstede, cf. Power Distance, Individualism versus Collectivism, Masculinity versus Feminity, Uncertainty Avoidance, Long versus Short Term Orientation and Indulgence versus Restraint. The lexical analysis is a relevant tool as according to the theory of national cultures “language is the most clearly recognisable part of culture and the part that has lent itself most readily to systematic study and theory building”. Cultures can be meaningfully described only by comparison. Although cultures shift, they shift together and the relative scores of culture dimensions remain stable. The new shifts are made visible by the new internationalisms borrowed into national languages. The subsequent development of the borrowings/internationalism in the national language remains stable as well because it is “filtered” through one or more of the six cultural dimensions.
LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES
ANTÉNE Petr
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
A Campus Novel, a Picaresque Novel and a Double Bildungsroman: Reconsidering Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys
Michael Chabon’s second novel Wonder Boys (1995) focuses on the protagonist and narrator Grady Tripp, a professor of creative writing whose personal and professional problems culminate during a writers’ festival at the university. A first-person account of a series of unexpected events that Grady and his student James Leer go through in and outside of Pittsburgh during one weekend, the novel received mixed reviews. Whereas Robert Ward praised it for being “the ultimate writing-program novel,” Michael Gorra denounced the author for lack of “any kind of logic for either the sheer linearity or the contingency of his characters’ lives.” Most famously, Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post review appreciated the novel’s style and effective use of comic elements, but concluded that the text portrays a limited experience similar to the author’s own, thus urging Chabon “to move on, to break away from the first person and explore larger worlds.” While Chabon later followed Yardley’s advice in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), an ambitious historical novel which earned him the Pulitzer Prize, this paper aims to reconsider Wonder Boys by drawing on its previous criticism and analyzing it as an amalgam of the campus novel, the picaresque as well as both Grady’s and James’s Bildungsroman. In addition, I also seek to contextualize the novel within Chabon’s oeuvre and, since the author is a Jewish American writer, within the tradition of Jewish American literature.
BOLDIZSÁROVÁ Gabriela
Catholic University in Ružomberok, Ružomberok, Slovakia
Metaphor of Petrification in Marina Warner`s Murderers I Have Known
The British writer Marina Warner (1946) is an author whose work of a scholar is closely related to that of a writer. Her academic work on myth, symbolism and fairy tales has influence on her fiction, in which she merges the mythical and fantastic with the real, often reshaping old texts using new voices which were previously unheard. One of her main themes is metamorphosis and its different forms inspired by Ovid. Warner understands metamorphosis as a trope, as an expression of human imagination often fed by our images of other/new worlds. According to Warner fantastic metamorphosis which appears in arts and literature is the outcome of the historical situation of meeting different cultures and their mutual interaction. The basic forms of metamorphosis are bodily changes or the splitting of the body and soul. In her collection of short stories Murderers I Have Known she focuses on the idea of petrification and/or disintegration of female characters. According to Ovid (and Warner) petrification is the worst fate as it stops development, it is used as a figure for death. Warner presents characters in danger of petrification – and parallels physical forms of mythology with mental and emotional forms of the real life. The paper discusses various forms of petrification which Warner presents in the above mentioned collection and explores the tension between the dynamic principle of Ovidian flux and the biblical principle of static perfection.
FIŠEROVÁ Nicole
University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic
Forming of Technical Terminology within the Frame of Sidney's Intellectual Network
The contribution is focused on the language which was used for communication within the frame of the intellectual network around the Renaissance poet Philip Sidney. The main topic which is dealt with in this work, is a question, if it is possible to trace and specify the slowly forming of English technical terminology in the correspondence among particular authors. It is expected that the terminology used for science and philosophy was based on the Latin language, in which classical documents and publications were written. However, during the Renaissance, even English terminology started to be formed; until then English was not used for scientific communication about knowledge because Latin had been considered to be the only language of educated people.
FLAJŠAR Jiří
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Visionary Gardening in the Poetry of Mona Van Duyn
The paper analyzes the poetics of suburban gardening in the work of Mona Van Duyn (1921-2004), an unjustly forgotten poet of American suburbia who received many of the biggest literary prizes (Pulitzer, Ruth Lilly, Bollingen, National Book Award, and so on) yet remained obscure and misread by contemporaries like Allen Ginsberg, who dismissed her as an author of “domesticated mediocrity.” Van Duyn is an essential poet with a deceptively complex and intelligent vision of the world which she accomplishes through the mundane activity of observing (and working in) her suburban garden and meditating upon life on the suburban block, her marriage, and neighbors. Of American poets, perhaps only Stanley Kunitz and Gerald Stern have come close to Van Duyn’s vision of America as failed pastoral, utilizing the suburban garden as the locus of an epiphanic transformation of faith, self, and identity. According to Emily Grosholz, Van Duyn has admirably “fashioned her own distinctive poetic perspective” from her “plot of house and garden, sidewalk and lawn,” able to “examine the realities of a life that is very literary and intellectual, yet also thoroughly planted in space and time.” The paper traces Van Duyns perception of suburbia through a representative selection of her gardening poems in order to show that Van Duyn is an unrecognized major poet of post-war American suburbia. The method of the paper is multidisciplinary, using the approaches of suburban studies, phenomenology, cultural studies, and literary criticism.
FLAJŠAROVÁ Pavlína
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Jamaica Meets England
Multifaceted British-Jamaican poet Benjamin Zephaniah claims that he cannot remember time when he was not writing literature. His work spans between both shores of the Atlantic Ocean—between his native United Kingdom and Jamaica, the country of his ancestors. He represents the multi-layered nature of contemporary anglophone culture and literature that does not easily fit into any pre-defined frame. His work engages elements from many genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, performance and music. His literary work is permeated by his political and social commitment and comments greatly on the current British social development. He does not claim to be a British citizen only, but rather he considers himself living "in two places, Britain and the world." The paper will therefore focus on Zephaniah´s depiction of immigrant and black issues in contemporary Britain. It will discuss his politically engaged poetry that explores racially motivated attacks in post-war Britain. Special attention will be paid to poems included in his collections Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black, Too Strong (2001). Last but not least, the paper will further discuss the echoes of dub poetry and the traces of Rastafarian rhetoric.
FLEISCHMANNOVÁ Šárka
University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic
Letter-Writing and Knowledge Networks of Scientists in the Renaissance Era – Thaddeus Hagecius Ab Hayek and Elizabethan England
The paper intends to investigate the importance of letter-writing for communication about knowledge in the Renaissance. We can argue that the letter-writing for Renaissance men played the similar role as conferences and journals for today´s scientists and philosophers. The importance of correspondence in Renaissance communication about knowledge will be demonstrated on the correspondence of Thaddeus Hagecius ab Hayek with sir Philip Sidney and his family. Thaddeus Hagecius was a Bohemian astronomer and the personal physician of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Philip Sidney was an English poet, courtier, scholar and soldier who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age. Their correspondence has never been systematically analyzed. The main purpose of this paper is therefore a detailed analysis of the correspondence between Thaddeus Hagecius ab Hayek and Philip Sidney.
HOFFMANNOVÁ Andrea
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
America on Czech Stage
The paper deals with the perception of the United States in the Czech Republic via dramatic works of American playwrights performed on Czech stage in the last two decades. The paper focuses on the character of American plays and their reception by the Czech audience, particularly Czech reviewers. The overall image of the United States coming out of the most popular plays will be outlined.
JELÍNKOVÁ Ema
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
The Absent Satirist: The Strange Case of Muriel Spark
Based on her early novels, Muriel Spark was pigeonholed by her contemporaries as a Catholic satirist committed to eternal truths. However, Spark took an increasing delight breaking the boundaries; in elusiveness in her later novels, and even refusing to confer value on her texts or insert an easily recognizable moral preoccupation. This paper is an attempt to discuss whether Spark´s cool, unengaged quality and ostentatious disinterestedness in upholding moral values may or may not enable satire within the confines of its traditional predicament. Since Spark came very close to contradicting many of her previous claims and findings during her dynamic development, I am obliged to utilize novels from different periods, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1961) and The Abbess of Crewe (1974), to find out whether any method can be derived from apparent inconsistency.
KASTNEROVÁ Martina
University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic
Philip Sidney’s Poetics in the Context of Ancient and Continental Examples
The paper deals with the main tenets of Philip Sidney’s poetics on the basis of The Defence of Poesy and his poetry (mainly Astrophil and Stella) in the context of Elizabethan considerations of the classical aesthetic concepts (especially that of Aristotle and Horace) and some of the Renaissance continental examples. Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy represents a fundamental step in establishing poetry as the creator of its own world, its so-called second nature, and points out poetry’s ability to create figures and imitate reality; thus the main value of poetry lies in creating clear rhetorical images of moral truth. So Sidney’s poetics plays an important role in establishing English poetry as a device of the national cultural and social autonomy.
KLIMEK Michal
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
The Metaphorical Concept of Stephen King's The Shining
This paper analyzes the metaphorical concept of a modern gothic novel The Shining by Stephen King. The multilayered story puts its characters into situations seemingly driven by supernatural forces which – after further review – seem to be of rather psychological nature. This finding allows the book to be interpreted and viewed as a family-centered drama whose characters are incapable of running away from either their addictions or mental issues. Part of this paper also discusses a child’s perception of their family’s decay and their way of dealing with these isolating and senses-provoking situations.
PECINA Jozef
University of SS. Cyril and Methodius, Trnava, Slovakia
Eye-gouging in Antebellum Popular Fiction
Early nineteenth century visitors of Appalachian frontier were shocked by the violence they encountered. In the antebellum Southern backcountry, a “rough and tumble“ fight was the accustomed method for settling even minor disagreements. What made this fighting style unique was the emphasis on maximum disfigurement of the opponent and amid pulling hair, biting off lips, tearing off noses and choking, gouging out an opponent’s eye became the essence of rough and tumble. The popularity of this fighting style was attested by the presence of numerous one-eyed men along the Appalachian frontier and the winners of such fights were celebrated in the region’s oral folklore. The article traces the reflection of this violent phenomenon in various works of antebellum popular fiction, including series of humor pamphlets known as Crockett Almanacs which were published between 1835 and 1856.
RYCHTER Ewa
The University of Applied Sciences, Wałbrzych, Poland
Re-enacting the Canonical Process. Recent Biblical Rewrites and the Contemporary Dominant Images of the Bible
This paper focuses on selected contemporary Anglophone rewritings of the Bible and contends that the rewrites by Winterson, Pullman and Crace can be read against the background of the late twentieth-century solidification of some dominant understandings of the Bible: of the Bible as a cultural icon and of the Bible as an epitome of liberal/human values. Those dominant – or “canonical” – images of the Bible are distinctly selective, current-context-dependent and tacitly authoritative. They foreground the role the Bible played in the formation of Western culture and democracy, and play down the more scandalous, less palatable features of biblical texts. While the dominant images embody the currently most popular and culturally orthodox perspectives on the meaning of the Bible, other concerns and perspectives are relegated to the margins of interest. Seeing some parallels between such contemporary processes of marginalisation/promotion and the past mechanisms of biblical canon-formation, I argue that the recent biblical rewritings re-enact the process of forgetting, suppressing or proscribing alternative accounts of biblical events, and simultaneously, bring into sharp focus and problematize its twentieth- and twenty-first-century form of canonicity.
SUKDOLOVÁ Alice
University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
Hardy and the Distance: Stepping Outside the Frame
The paper aims to discuss space-time relations in Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels with respect to Deleuzian treatment of time and timelessness based on the two categories of Chronos and Aion as mentioned by Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sense. Hardy’s approach to the space-time dimension of the Wessex region is based on a monumental concept of history when the past condemns the pettiness of the present, when the presupposed historical consciousness is overdeveloped and threatens life itself. The burden of history and the consequent tragicality of human fate will be discussed in Hardy's novels The Return of the Native, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Woodlanders among others. Another aspect of Hardy's approach to space-time relations will use Nietzsche's categories of the will to power and will to nothingness in an analysis of the characters who occupy the space of Wessex. Consequently, two types of characters will be distinguished, namely those whose behaviour reflects their active becoming, and those who remain reactive. The movement of characters on Egdon Heath will be compared with human existence in the woodlands where the spatial dimension becomes limited and intensively based on human assimilation with nature. However, this aspect of human existence may result in absolute destruction, especially when crossing the boundary of the region comes into question.
ŠVÁBENSKÝ Robert
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Liminal Frontiers in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner presented his Frontier Thesis, in which he defined the American frontier experience as the key driving force of social, economic and political dynamics of the expanding United States. Though later frequently redefined, rejected, and revisited, the Frontier Thesis still stands as one of the pillars of a wide literary and cultural discourse. In the 1960s, another Turner, this time Victor, developed Arnold van Gennep’s concept of rituals in small-scale societies into a theory of liminal in-betweenness, stressing the indetermined and disordered stage of an unfinished ritual. These two theories meet and merge in Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, which can be read as a phenomenal genre crossbreed, as a narrative braiding several dichotomies into one whole, as a testimony to the liminal nature of the indefinite American Frontier. This paper sets out to explore how McCarthy weaves together fundamental binary elements, such as good vs. evil, the living vs. the dead, and new vs. old in his western/thriller narrative, where the actual geographic border between the United States and Mexico is just one of many frontiers in question.
VERNYIK Zénó, MACHÁČOVÁ Barbora
Technical University of Liberec, Liberec, Czech Republic
"Reeking of Racial Hatred"? On the Portrayal of British and Jewish Characters in Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night
Although after decades of relative silence there has been a renewal of interest in research on Arthur Koestler since the late 1990s, most recent works being biographies, they have neither significantly changed the picture that, as far as his fiction is considered, Koestler is remembered as a one-book author, nor have they provided detailed analyses of his literary texts. Yet, regardless of their somewhat forgotten status, some of his books, and in particular Thieves in the Night (1946), are arguably comparable in literary interest to his canonized novel, Darkness at Noon (1940). This presentation, through focusing on the complexity of the portrayal of British and Jewish characters in the novel, continues the research initiated by two of my earlier articles, one recently published, the other in print. The first one showed that the majority of the novel’s British reviews in the 1940s were politically biased and indulged in critical fallacies, while the other one partially refuted the frequent claim of those very reviews that the novel’s characters are flat and stereotypical through an analysis of the novel’s portrayal of women and Arabs. The presentation’s explicit aim, through a discussion of the book’s depiction of Jewish and British characters, is to prove that allegations of racist, stereotypical or overly simplistic representation are unfounded in the case of these groups as well.
LINGUISTICS AND TEACHING/LEARNING ENGLISH
BARNEY Liana
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
Teaching ELT in First Grade of Standard and Bilingual Elementary School: a Comparison
This presentation deals with a comparison of teaching the English language in the first grade of a standard and a bilingual elementary school within the first term of a school year. The theoretical part defines the terms framework education programme and school education programme, describes lesson plans for both schools, provides information and analysis on teaching methods and materials used in the selected classes, specifically the Happy House 1 Student´s Book and Teacher´s Book for the standard school, and Jolly Phonics Pupil Book 1 and The Phonics Handbook for the bilingual school. The practical part focuses on complementary worksheets for the study material and also presents an evaluation of a comparison test executed in a mixed class. The presentation also compares achieved knowledge in both classes at the end of the first term of a school year.
ČERNÁ Monika, IVANOVÁ Jaroslava, JEŽKOVÁ Šárka
University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic
Routes and Destinations: At an Intersection of Research Findings
The presentation aims to introduce the routes, which twenty selected students followed in the course of their lives when learning English, in relation to the destinations they reached till the onset of university education. The routes are provided in the form of individual profiles building both on quantitative and qualitative data. The destinations are described using the outcomes of multiple analyses including holistic evaluation of their overall performance in pronunciation and individual pronunciation profiles; assessing their use of particular grammatical structures; and showing their ability to perform a natural spoken discourse. As a result, twenty portraits of Czech learners of English were formed and grouped on the basis of shared characteristics. Sample portraits will be presented during the talk.
CHMELAŘOVÁ Linda
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Non-linguists and their Language Competencies
The paper deals with teaching English for non-linguists in Faculties of Education. It focuses on the content and language skills which are essential for future lower-secondary school teachers. It presents ESP as an alternative to general English and maps the situations of various centres offering English courses for non-linguists within Faculties of Education in the Czech Republic. It also sums up basic results from the questionnaire concerning the presented topic.
KLÍMOVÁ Blanka
University of Hradec Králové, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
The Art of Writing a Review Article for Impact Factor Journals
Currently, there is considerable pressure on academics to produce articles of high quality and publish them in journals with impact factor (IF), or at least in journals which stand high in the world´s acknowledged databases such as Scopus, Springer or Web of Science. The purpose of this article is to reveal the process of writing such an article, specifically a review article for an IF journal. The author of this paper explains all the phases of this process; its preparation (e.g., the right choice of the topic and the IF journal), a thorough description of all parts which the manuscript should involve, including the language policy, and finally, the submission process. Author´s successful IF publications are used to illustrate the key steps and constraints of producing the IF review article, as well as the role of co-authors in this process.
LACKO Ivan
Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
Preframing, Deframing and Performing: Classroom, Language and Citizenship
The current challenge in university education is to realize the potential of the multicultural environment which propels the spread of western languages and the changing nature of the traditional classroom. These two phenomena call for what Jan Suk and I have titled Guerrilla Pedagogy – an attempt to move the subject of teaching culture, literature or the media away from the dried up and overly descriptive range of subjects and bring it closer to an immanent (cf. Deleuze) line of thinking in which the recipients (students) cease to be passive acceptors of information, skill or experience, but become active and dynamic elements that co-shape the pedagogical process through bodily, emotional, performative and cognitive, rational and empirical experience. Just like theatre/performance, education should be an event where anything can happen, where things can go terribly wrong, where things are not only built, but also destroyed, questioned, evaluated and re-evaluated, collected and stored, found and thrown away. Guerrilla Pedagogy is not synonymous with student-based learning, but with the idea that instead of relying on traditional pillars of bricks-and-mortar pedagogy, we go into the woods where we get scared, exhausted and challenged in a fight for a genuine learning experience. Bringing together Shannon Jackson’s ideas about the clash of performance and performativity with institutional and scholarly concepts and Augusto Boal’s ideas about “spect-actorship”, my contribution seeks to spark a discussion about the importance of in-betweenness (practice and theory, revolution and tradition, status quo and progress) for “guerrilla-like” methods of learning. The focus of this approach is on the collaborative aspect of theatre and performance in education (Nicholson, 2011).
SUK Jan
University of Hradec Králové, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
Performing, Deforming and Reforming: Immanent Pedagogy as Border-Crossing
While discussing in-and-out of frame approaches to contemporary performance practices as well as pedagogy in the 21st century, one cannot avoid the philosophical notion of immanence as advocated by Deleuze. Deleuze’s immanence, contained within rather than outside (practice/experience), presupposes interconnection rather than isolation, interdisciplinary and crossing of borders rather than exclusivity. Similarly, when discussing performance (and) pedagogy, the current trends navigate towards collapsing concepts while accentuating fluid boundaries or crossings of borders. Border-crossing is at the crux of the performance artist, activist and educator Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s radical performances. Furthermore, Peña sees the potential of the performance pedagogy in the idea of a practitioner as a rebel. In the analysis of contemporary performance (pedagogy) I will therefore depart from Peña’s understanding to support what Ivan Lacko and I have called Guerrilla Pedagogy. The trajectory of my analysis will depart from Peña’s seminal project “The Couple in the Cage” (in collaboration with Coco Fusco 1992-93) and use it as a case study for locating rebel artist/teacher. Crossing of borders, navigating both inside and outside of the frame will be theoretically treated by the notion of immanence, which accentuates both thinking performatively and performing thinking. The conclusions suggest that the “total experience” of performance as advocated by Guillermo Gómez-Peña is transferrable onto pedagogy via the inclusion of immanent practices.
ŠVIDERNOCH Jiří
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
Electronic Communication as a Means of ELT
This presentation deals with online communication technologies and their use in ELT. It is focused on distance learning for individuals. The aim of this presentation is to introduce the possibilities of e-learning and its technologies, as well as to provide an example of the resulting lessons. There is an emphasis on the differences in tuition resulting from different age and level of English. The theoretical part introduces the main types of e-learning, maps various technologies alongside with their potential use, and considers the technology combinations and differences in tuition. The practical part analyses how different technologies performed in practice. It offers examples of activities and exercises. Finally, sample lessons are described in detail and evaluated.
TAKÁČOVÁ Ivana
Pavol Jozef Safarik University, Košice, Slovakia
Incorporating Artwork Analyses in U.S. Culture Classes to Promote Students’ Understanding of U.S. Self-Perception
Interdisciplinarity as a fusion of perspectives and methods enables a deeper and more thorough understanding of the concepts considered. When helping students grasp aspects of U.S. history, culture(s) and identities, incorporating fine arts helps enrich the teaching – learning process. Works of fine arts as cultural artefacts provide further dimensions to students’ understanding of the U.S. self-perception(s) and self-identification(s). In addition, in cultural studies, our objective is to help promote students’ critical thinking and interpretation skills. Artworks as texts are valuable in this respect as well. Thus, this presentation will employ selected works of U.S. fine arts to illustrate how incorporating analyses of artworks in classes on U.S. history and cultures both helps promote students’ critical thinking and interpretation skills and also deepens and enriches their understanding of aspects of U.S. identity. The selected works include Signing the Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull (1797) as a rendition aiming to make manifest the philosophical and spiritual background of this, for the U.S., self-defining historical moment; an example of landscape painting by Thomas Cole as a representation of the contemplation of U.S. nationalism of the 1820s-1830s; American Progress by John Gast (1872) celebrating the concept of “Manifest Destiny” as it also devalues the Native American populations; and, ultimately, an aesthetic contemplation by Winslow Homer of the socioeconomic realities former African American slaves were facing in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
VÁLKOVÁ Silvie, KOŘÍNKOVÁ Jana
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Adverbials in Advanced Students’ Writing
This paper presents the results of a comparative analysis of the incidence, type and structure of adverbials in native and non-native English texts. The analysis is a part of a long-term project aiming at determining specific needs in teaching Czech advanced learners of English. Our previous research showed that Czech advanced students tend to use certain language items or structures (e.g. specific types of syntactic structures, verb forms, pronouns, punctuation) with a different frequency than is natural in the authentic foreign language texts and we consider these finding a useful basis in our effort to make the teaching of Czech advanced learners of English more focussed and hence effective. The first part of our paper focuses on a theoretical overview of the classification and terminology of adverbials as introduced in some English grammar books commonly used by advanced students. The second part presents and discusses the results of a quantitative analysis of the writing of advanced Czech learners of English and English native speakers in terms of adverbial usage. The essential quantitative differences in the occurrence of selected parameters of adverbials will be summed up in the conclusion.
CONTACTS
ANTÉNE Petr
p.antene@seznam.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
BARNEY Liana
liana.barney@gmail.com
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
BOLDIZSÁROVÁ Gabriela
gabriela.boldizsarova@gmail.com
Catholic University in Ružomberok, Ružomberok, Slovakia
ČERNÁ Monika
monika.cerna@upce.cz
University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic
FIŠEROVÁ Nicole
nici.ryan@seznam.cz
University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic
FLAJŠAR Jiří
jiriflajsar@centrum.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
FLAJŠAROVÁ Pavlína
flajsarova@centrum.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
FLEISCHMANNOVÁ Šárka
fleisch@kfi.zcu.cz
University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic
HOFFMANNOVÁ Andrea
andrea.hoffmannova@upol.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
CHALUPSKÝ Petr
petr.chalupsky@pedf.cuni.cz
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
CHMELAŘOVÁ Linda
linda.chmelarova@upol.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
IVANOVÁ Jaroslava
jaroslava.ivanova@upce.cz
University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic
JELÍNKOVÁ Ema
ema.jelinkova@upol.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
JEŽKOVÁ Šárka
sarka.jezkova@upce.cz
University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic
KASTNEROVÁ Martina
kastnerm@kfi.zcu.cz
University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic
KLIMEK Michal
michal.klimek@seznam.cz
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
KLÍMOVÁ Blanka
blanka.klimova@uhk.cz
University of Hradec Králové, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
KOŘÍNKOVÁ Jana
jana.korinkova@upol.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
LACKO Ivan
ivan.lacko@uniba.sk
Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
MACHÁČOVÁ Barbora
b.machacova@gmail.com
Technical University of Liberec, Liberec, Czech Republic
PECINA Jozef
jozef.pecina@ucm.sk
University of SS. Cyril and Methodius, Trnava, Slovakia
RYCHTER Ewa
rje@wp.pl
The University of Applied Sciences, Wałbrzych, Poland
ŘEŘICHA Václav
vaclav.rericha@upol.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
SUK Jan
jan.suk@uhk.cz
University of Hradec Králové, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
SUKDOLOVÁ Alice
sukdolova@pf.jcu.cz
University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
ŠVÁBENSKÝ Robert
robertsvabensky@seznam.cz
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
ŠVIDERNOCH Jiří
j.svidernoch@gmail.com
Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic
TAKÁČOVÁ Ivana
ivana.takacova@upjs.sk
Pavol Jozef Safarik University, Košice, Slovakia
VÁLKOVÁ Silvie
silvie.valkova@upol.cz
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
VERNYIK Zénó
zeno.vernyik@tul.cz
Technical University of Liberec, Liberec, Czech Republic
