| 1. | Essays about literature and literature as a concept and image in essays ** | The topic focuses on transfer of knowledge about literature (reflection on literary texts, history and functions of literature, changing status of literature, and/or a specific image of the history of literature) and knowledge about literary theory in cultural and social contexts through the reception and translation of essays (in the sense of a reflection, debate, commentary or type of lecture, or similar discursive text). It seeks to answer the questions to what extent the cultural and scholarly valorization of translated essays was/is present, to what extent translations in the 20th century satisfied social needs, what role the fact of translating or not translating this type of texts played, what image of literature essays do form, what aspects of literature they point to in changing times. The material part of the topic includes the work of authors writing in Romance languages (selectively A. Camus, J.-P. Sartre, J. d'Ormesson, A. Finkielkraut, P. Bruckner, A. Maalouf, M. Kundera, Ortega y Gasset, Italo Calvino, etc.). A comparatist approach to the texts is welcome. |
| 2. | Texts of Enlightenment thinkers in Slovak translations ** | The topic focuses on the reception of translations of the French Enlightenment literature in the 19th – 21st centuries. The material research will focus on Enlightenment discursive texts (treatises, excerpts from encyclopaedias, letters, essays, reflections and dictionaries in Slovak translations), examining their nature, the conditions under which translations emerged in the historical context, the circulation in the receiving environment, the status, function and role of translators and other mediators, and the institutional background and function of the translations in the broader framework of literary transfer. A literary-historical approach will allow to answer the question to what extent translations have the potential to constitute a thesaurus of texts (canonized literary and cultural heritage), to what extent they are a full-fledged transfer of the Enlightenment knowledge, whether translating this type of literature is a scholarly activity, how the selection and realization of translation is affected by tradition, scholarly orientation, geopolitical orientation, power intervention, etc |
| 3. | Reception of video game literature in Slovakia ** | Video game literature is a unique and dynamic phenomenon in contemporary popular culture. It includes novels such as Ruination by Anthony Reynolds, the Cyberpunk comic series, as well as encyclopedias and manuals for games such as Minecraft, which are based on video games as multimedia works. The aim of the dissertation project is to analyse the qualitative attributes of video game literature and its critical reception in Slovakia. The project will also focus on the forms and analysis of its translation, on adaptation processes into Slovak with the aim of understanding how video game literature is integrated into the local cultural and linguistic environment and how it is affected by this environment. |
| 4. | Postcolonial and postcommunist (female) migrant experience in contemporary British literature ** | The project analyses how contemporary multicultural British women writers are changing British literature and national identity. By comparing British postcolonial writing with migrant writing of Eastern European origin, it explores how it questions categories such as insiders/outsiders and depicts the plurality of contemporary British society. The gendered and raced female subject, located at the intersection of unstable and ambivalent postcolonial and postcommunist spaces, will be examined in relation to the themes of nomadism and unhomeliness in the wider context of women’s writing against patriarchal nationalism, colonialism and totalitarianism. |
| 5. | Magical realism and the prose of Lajos Grendel ** | Magical realism as a mode of writing also shapes the fictional worlds of Lajos Grendel, which is manifested in inspirations from the texts of mainstream Hispanic American representatives, in authentic novel realisations or in the author's literary reflections. The dissertation aims to elaborate the context of magical realism in Hungarian literature; to analyse and describe in detail the contexts, features and forms of magical realism in Grendel's prose texts. |
| 6. | Notions of justice and their artistic representation in ancient Greek literature ** | The topic opens a literary and cultural-historical perspective on the relations between notions of natural justice and literature in Greek antiquity. The project is characterised by interdisciplinarity, as it presupposes an insight into issues of justice in Greek religion, philosophy, private and public life (politics), and also reaches into the field of legal and meta-legal thought in European antiquity. On the one hand, the literary monuments are taken here as time-conditioned fictional/aesthetic documents testifying to ancient man's thinking about the dilemmas of justice; on the other hand, they are considered as aesthetic forms in which ancient man formulated his notions of justice (e.g. fable, tragedy). |
| 7. | Feminist narrative in contemporary Russian-language literature ** | The aim of the thesis is the analytical-interpretive understanding of contemporary Russian-language literature by women authors, which exhibits features of feminist narrative. It seeks to contextualize this exploration culturally and socio-historically: The emergence and development of the women's rights movement in the Russian Empire, the germs of feminism in the revolutionary era (provisional government and suffrage), the first Soviet ambassador A. Kollontai and the contemporary proclamation of free sexual life, Zhenotdel, Stalinist women vs. Stalinist repression(s) of women, Leningrad feminist samizdat of the 1970s, and Leningrad feminist samizdat of the 1970s. The feminist samizdat of the 1970s – part of the samizdat as a mode of communication of literary texts in the period of stagnation. The thesis should focus on feminism in contemporary Russian-language literature, based on the socio-political changes of the 1990s, the rise of Putinism, and one of the forms of actionalist art – the feminist opposition (Pussy Riot). This analytical-interpretive approach should be applied to several Russian-language authors who are an part of the contemporary literary process (L. Ulitskaya, T. Tolstaya, E. Nekrasova, G. Yakhina, N. Abgaryan, and possibly others). |
