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Ways of forming collective identities in older Slovak literature

The thesis will be based on the knowledge of the interrelation between narrative structures and collective identities. It will focus on selected works of early Slovak literature that served to defend and assert national and confessional (or other) collective identities. It will examine literary constructions of the origins, character and mission of a given community. Against the background of contemporary rhetorical theory, genre typology and the poetics of myth, the aim is to identify the literary strategies and practices that were used to defend and prove the legitimacy of the community and to praise its origins, significance and role.

The subject of the research will be the concept of vitality in Slovak Romantic literature about contemporary literary representations of masculinity. Based on the analysis of texts by Slovak Romantic authors and their setting in contemporary aesthetic, philosophical and social contexts, the dissertation will examine the relationship between vitality and the ideal of masculinity in Slovak Romanticism. It will also show how these ideas related to conventional/contemporary norms of masculinity and how they contributed to the literary imagery of Slovak Romanticism. The methodological starting point of the dissertation will be research on Romanticism in the national and international environment, as well as the impulses of gender studies (men's studies).

Motherhood in 19th century Slovak literature

The dissertation will focus on literary representations of motherhood in late 19th-century Slovak literature and their integration into ideological and aesthetic contexts. The methodological starting point will be the analysis of the theme of motherhood in contemporary gender studies, taking into account the contemporary socio-historical situation. The research will focus on the forms of motherhood in literary texts realised in different literary poetics, their ideological background as well as the gender perspective applied.

The dissertation aims to reconstruct the type of Central European writer-philosopher against the background of the social and political changes of the first decades of the 20th century. The research will focus on the work and personality of Gejza Vamos, which will be traced in the context of Slovak modernism and Central European literature, together with the work of Ladislav Klíma and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.

The thesis will focus on the image of women in Slovak literature of the interwar period, taking into account the cultural, social, ideological, and aesthetic contexts of the time. The research will focus on typological variations and forms of femininity as they are realised in literary texts of different poetics (decadence, secession, expressionism, poetism, proletarian literature, etc.) and ideological currents (nationalism, socialism). The starting point is the assumption that modernity has influenced the shape of traditional images of women and created new images that respond to the changed reality in different ways and depending on different environments.

The Representation of Reality in Modernism

The research themes of the dissertation focus on the following areas: 1. the peculiarities of the modeling of the fictional world and the representation of reality in modernist texts (in contrast, for example, to the literary trend of realism); 2. the world as a psychic projection of the subject and the resulting implications for the construction of the fictional world: the persistent and uncertain character of reality, frequent motifs of hallucinations, dreams, penetration into another (sometimes transcendent) reality; 3. the problems of the representation of the literary subject and modernist themes: problems of the individual, mortal love, melancholy. It is also possible to choose a monograph on the work of one author, for example, Ivan Minárik, or to analyze selected texts by several authors.

This dissertation aims to examine and analyze the specific form of the writer/poet's functioning in different social roles in a selected historical context. The research will focus on a specific Slovak author and his or her work. The assignment is based on the assumption that creators are not only authors of literary texts but also participants in public life and part of cultural and social memory. The material basis of the work will be literary works, cultural and literary periodicals, and autobiographical genres..

The dissertation aims to reflect on the effects of the social changes that took place in Czechoslovakia at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, i.e. to examine the impact of the external social conditions of the following two decades on the genre, poetological, thematic, and motivic, but above all on the ideological and value profile of Slovak prose of the normalization period. The field of research will be defined by prose works accessible in the contemporary public communicative space controlled by official structures.