American Literature and Cultural Studies Section

Director:
doc. Erik Roraback, D. Phil (Oxon)

Members:
Prof. PhDr. Martin Procházka, CSc., doc. Mariana Machová, PhD, doc. Justin Quinn, PhD, Pavla Veselá, PhD, Prof. David Robbins, PhD, doc. Erik Roraback, D. Phil (Oxon), PhDr. Hana Ulmanová, PhD, M.A., doc. Clare Wallace, PhD, M.A., Louis Armand, PhD, Stephan Delbos, PhD, MFA, Klára Kolinská, PhD

The section organizes courses for:

1. the BA Programme (lectures and compulsory seminars on American literature)
2. the MA Programme – the Core Course and the courses in the American Literature Special Programme.
3. the PhD Programme,

and the supervision of BA, MA and PhD theses.

Research and teaching are focused on the following areas:

1. Colonial American Literature and Culture – the Myths of the Apocalypse and the Millennium; Early American Utopias (Martin Procházka)
2. Early American Gothic – Charles Brockden Brown (Martin Procházka)
3. American Transcendentalism and Romanticism: Emerson, Hawthorne and Melville (David Robbins, Martin Procházka)
4. Fiction in the Second Half of the Nineteenth and at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Henry James and Mark Twain (Pavla Veselá, Erik Roraback, Martin Procházka)
5. American Poetry: Modernism to the Present (Justin Quinn, Louis Armand, Pavla Veselá)
6. Literature of the American South (Hana Ulmanová)
7. Post-modern Fiction (Erik Roraback, David Robbins, Hana Ulmanová)
8. Multiculturalism and Ethnicity in American Literature (Hana Ulmanová, Pavla Veselá)
9. Modern and Contemporary American Drama (Clare Wallace)
10. Avant-garde Art (Louis Armand)
11. American Film (Erik Roraback)
12. Cultural History of Ruins and Ghost Towns in the U.S. (Martin Procházka)
13. American Utopia (Pavla Veselá)

The principal research output of the section includes books on Wallace Stevens (by Justin Quinn), on Empire and Sublimity in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (by Justin Quinn), on Transnationalism in Poetry during the Cold-War (by Justin Quinn), on the dialectics of late capitalism of Henry James and Balzac (by Erik Roraback), on the Autopoiesis of Cultural Modernities and the Philosophical Baroque (by Erik Roraback), on Community and the Creative Life (by Erik Roraback), and on Contemporary Poetics (by Louis Armand).

Some of our guest lecturers have included Gary Snyder, Ishmael Reed, Gore Vidal, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Cristanne Miller, Stephen Burt, and Sacvan Bercovitch.