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ABSTRACTS |
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Daniel Topinka, Dušan Lužný and Jana Korečková The Assimilation of Post-War Generations of Czech Immigrants in Chicago |
9 | |
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Miloš Blahút A Long and Winding Road from Narrator to Character: A Stylistic Analysis of Tom Robbins’ novel Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates |
21 | ► |
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Tetiana Grebeniuk Narrative Unreliability in Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train as a Strategy of Reader Immersion |
36 | |
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Katarina Labudova Hungry for Truth and (Hi)story: Images of Food in Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood |
49 | ► |
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Loran Gami History matters (?) Various Ways of Looking at History in Graham Swift’s Waterland |
64 | |
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Tereza Topolovská The Poetics of the Constructed Environment in J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise |
76 | |
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Ladislav Vít Landscape as a Benchmark: Poetics of Place as a Critical Tool in W.H. Auden’s Prose |
87 | |
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Martina Kastnerová “Constant Art”: Concept of Love in Poetry of Mary Wroth in Dialogue with the Male Poetic Tradition |
100 | |
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STUDENT CONTRIBUTION |
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Žaneta Stýblová The Role of Setting in the Golden Age Detective Novel |
115 | |
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BOOK REVIEW |
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Ivona Mišterová A Multiplicity of Voices in Grace Nichols’s Work (Review of Grace Nichols Universal and Diverse: Ethnicity in the Poetry of Grace Nichols by Pavlína Flajšarová) |
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ABSTRACTS, KEYWORDS AND CONTACT DETAILS
Author
Daniel Topinka, Dušan Lužný and Jana Korečková
Title of the Article
The Assimilation of Post-War Generations of Czech Immigrants in Chicago
Abstract
This paper presents the results of the research conducted since 2013 in the Czech immigrant community in Chicago. The case of Czech immigration is particularly interesting, as it can be considered a textbook example of successful assimilation. Czechs had arrived in Chicago as early as mid-19th century. During the 20th and 21st centuries, there have been several waves of Czech immigration, usually connected to political as well as economic situations in Czechoslovakia or later the Czech Republic. The research methodology is based mainly on participatory observations and interviews. The research sample includes respondents from different migration waves, especially political immigrants after 1948 and 1968 who have legal status, as well as post-1989 immigrants whose choice to migrate was largely non-political and mostly economic. Czech immigration can generally be characterized by very strong and relatively fast assimilation across generations.
Keywords
assimilation; Czech immigration; Czech diaspora; generation; Chicago
Contact
Department of Sociology, Andragogy and Cultural Anthropology
Faculty of Arts
Palacký University in Olomouc
tr. Svobody 26
779 00, Olomouc
Czech Republic
Author
Miloš Blahút
Title of the Article
A Long and Winding Road from Narrator to Character: A Stylistic Analysis of Tom Robbins’ novel Fierce Invalids Home from
Hot Climates
Abstract
Tom Robbins’ novel Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000) provides a plethora of ways to obtain an
insight into his characters’ minds and learn about their feelings and emotions by means of certain techniques of
representing speech, thought, and perception, namely free indirect speech/thought, narrative report of thought act,
and substitutionary perception/free indirect perception, to name but a few. The aim of this paper is to demarcate
the boundaries between those modes of representation and through stylistic analysis to pinpoint examples of
mode of representation which both reflect characters’ thoughts and perceptions, while at the same time reveal
the narrator’s creativity while constructing the fictional world of the novel.
Keywords
Free indirect discourse; overt narrator; speech and thought representation; Tom Robbins; Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
Contact
Inštitút anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Filozofická fakulta
Prešovská univerzita v Prešove
Ulica 17. novembra 15
080 01 Prešov
milos.blahut@unipo.sk
Author
Tetiana Grebeniuk
Title of the Article
Narrative Unreliability in Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train as a Strategy of Reader Immersion
Abstract
This paper considers the narratological phenomenon of unreliable narration in the novel The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, concentrating on mechanisms of reader perception. Starting with a survey of the main contemporary definitions of unreliable narration as well as sources of unreliability, the article moves to the problem of how unreliable narration can influence a reader of the analysed text, discussing ways in which unreliability combines with other aspects of the narrative. The effect of unreliable narration on the reader is examined in terms of recipient immersion. The disclosure of unreliable statments, the search for truth hidden beneath the cover of narration, along with the recuperation of the “reliability” of the narrator are viewed as supplementary objects of the reader’s interest during text perception. Attention is focused on two components of reader gratification as manifest in Hawkins’ novel: intellectual satisfaction due to the solution of the murder mystery (temporal immersion), as well as satisfaction resulting from the protagonist’s psychic recovery and revenge (emotional immersion). The last section of the paper compares the reader’s perception of the novel with the viewer’s reactions to a screen version directed by Tate Taylor.
Keywords
unreliable narrator; narrative; the reader; immersion; sources of unreliability
Contact
Department of Culture and Ukrainian Studies
International Faculty No.1
Zaporizhzhia State Medical University
Stalevarov Street, 31-a
Zaporizhzhia, 69035, Ukraine
Ukraine
Author
Katarina Labudova
Title of the Article
Hungry for Truth and (Hi)story: Images of Food in Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Abstract
Alias Grace is a historiographic metafiction written by Margaret Atwood in 1996 about Grace Marks, imprisoned for double murder. The style of the novel is a convincing reconstruction of the Victorian historical novel because of authentic descriptions of 19th century Canadian households and domestic life and its regular meals. The food motif is a vivid undercurrent in Alias Grace just as it is in Atwood’s other novels. Images of food intensify the realistic portrait of Canada, however, the food operates on a deeper, symbolic level: images of food, eating, and hunger are often interwoven with the power and class injustice. The analysis shows that hunger is not only physical experience and a hard fact of prisoner’s life but it can be metaphorical, manifested as hunger for truth and story. The article argues that imprisoned Grace controls her hunger to usurp responsibility for her story. It also illustrates that women are constantly associated with food and edibles and thus it points to related issues of cannibalism and power struggles. Although the motifs of food, eating and cannibalism have been discussed by numerous critics including Sarah Sceats, Heidi Darroch, and Sharon Rose Wilson, this article extends their research by exploring Atwood’s strategies of writing and storytelling using food images. The article examines Atwood’s postmodern technique of cooking up the Alias Grace from many historical texts and using genre fiction ingredients.
Keywords
Margaret Atwood; Alias Grace; cannibalism; eating; food; historiographic metafiction
Contact
Department of English Language and Literature
Faculty of Arts and Letters
Catholic University in Ruzomberok
Hrabovska cesta 1A
034 01 Ružomberok
Slovakia
Author
Loran Gami
Title of the Article
History matters (?) Various Ways of Looking at History in Graham Swift’s Waterland
Abstract
The paper focuses on how history is dealt with in Waterland, one of Graham Swift’s best-known novels. Even though the novel is not a pamphlet on the philosophy of history, it however explores the many ways in which history is indispensable for people in their endeavors to make sense of their past and their identity. However, Waterland presents different views of history and story-telling, which are often opposite and undermine one another. The paper will discuss how the novel, at times, suggests that tracing and reconstructing the past is a possible and objective activity, while, at other times, seeming to side with the idea that the past cannot be retrieved and that History is but an arbitrary ordering and construction of facts from the past, which are in themselves disorderly and structureless. In this regard, the novel has often been considered as taking part in the postmodernist debate about the truth in History. The article also deals with the contradictory perspective of History explored in Swift’s novel: that of History as a “Grand Narrative” of Progress and the opposite view of History as cyclical and regressive.
Keywords
History; identity; narrative; amnesia; curiosity; postmodernism
Contact
Department of English
Faculty of Foreign Languages
University of Tirana
Rruga e Elbasanit
Tirana, Albania
Author
Tereza Topolovská
Title of the Article
The Poetics of the Constructed Environment in J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise
Abstract
This article analyses major constituents of the poetics of the constructed environment in James Graham Ballard’s novel High-Rise (1975). The novel’s high-rise is contextualised within the framework of contemporary architectural development as well as Ballard’s overall work, with its particular emphasis on novels dealing with prototypically modern urban constructions. The interpretation of Ballard’s narrative seeks to examine the chief aspects of the space of the tower block as well as the tenants’ response to it. The paper endeavours to highlight the author’s tendency to examine the interconnected relationships between humans and contemporary architectural structures in his fiction.
Keywords
J.G. Ballard; poetics of space; architecture in literature; high-rise; alienation
Contact
Department of English Language and Literature
Faculty of Education
Charles University
Celetná 13
110 00 Prague
Czech Republic
tereza.topolovska@pedf.cuni.cz
Author
Ladislav Vít
Title of the Article
Landscape as a Benchmark: Poetics of Place as a Critical Tool in W.H. Auden’s Prose
Abstract
W.H. Auden had a profound and clearly defined spatial awareness. As an editor of anthologies, Professor of Poetry at Oxford and author of essays, reviews, forewords and introductions, he was also prolific in the profession of a literary critic judging the work of others. This paper traces the connections between these two facets, with a special emphasis on Auden’s readiness to use other writers’ topophilic responsiveness to the physical environment and landscape as a benchmark for assessing their qualities. Focusing on Auden’s critical assessment of Wordsworth, Frost, Betjeman and Rilke on the basis of their poetics of place, the present study examines Auden’s implementation of this criterion in his critical method.
Keywords
W.H. Auden; poetics of place; landscape; topophilia; criticism; William Wordsworth; Robert Frost
Contact
Department of English and American Studies
Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
University of Pardubice
Studentská 84
532 10 Pardubice
Czech Republic
Author
Martina Kastnerová
Title of the Article
“Constant Art”: Concept of Love in Poetry of Mary Wroth in Dialogue with the Male Poetic Tradition
Abstract
The paper intends to analyse development of the literary representation of women in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, forming an integral part of female authorship during this period, especially on the basis of Mary Wrothʼs poetry in the dialogue with the male poetic tradition (William Herbert, William Shakespeare). However, instead of taking aim at the male view, the genius of Wroth is to absorb it and use it for her own ends. Reclaiming the virtues of the woman through constancy, she upends the conventional views of the woman. Thus, Wroth strengthens the autonomy of the woman by allowing her to make the decision to accept a role subordinate to man.
Keywords
Lady Mary Wroth; Literary Culture; Elizabethan Renaissance; Jacobean Court; William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke; Philip Sidney; William Shakespeare
Contact
Department of of Philosophy
University of West Bohemia
Riegrova 11/217
306 14 Pilsen
Czech Republic
E-mail: kastnerm@kfi.zcu.cz
Author
The Role of Setting in the Golden Age Detective Novel
Title of the Article
The Role of Setting in the Golden Age Detective Novel
Abstract
Analyses of crime fiction often focus on the plot, characters and their social positioning but tend to pay much less attention to the actual setting. Employing the concept of active and passive relationships of setting and plot, G. J. Demko’s notion of cultural and physical space as well as other theories of literary representation of place, the article discusses the role of setting in the Golden Age crime fiction, namely in Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Third Girl.
Keywords
Setting; space; crime fiction; detective novel; Golden Age; The Mysterious Affair at Styles; Third Girl
Contact
Department of English and American Studies
University of Pardubice
Studentská 84
zaneta.styblova@student.upce.cz
