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The Necessity to Demonstrate the Crude: The Abject in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life
by Karin Hrošová The postmodern world, especially the Western world, is in a state of fusibility. Beholden to the past and obliged to atone for its mistakes and foresee the errors of the future, it is overcompensating for the loss of cultural and personal identity. As defined in this essay, to fuse society means to…
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Humanity and Nature: Environmental Consciousness of Bread and Puppet Theater
by Anna Amelie Sokolová Bread and Puppet Theater is a performance-art-based group from Glover, Vermont. Since its founding in 1963, it has been using play with language, puppetry, movement and music to raise awareness about various sociopolitical issues. From local to global problems, the theatre claims to be one of the oldest sustainable and non-profit…
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Mimicry, Belonging and Violence in R. F. Kuang’s Babel
by Kristína Szegediová The main theme of R. F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution is a critique of British colonialism. The novel takes place in the 19ᵗʰ century where British progress is owed to silver-working, a type of magic that relies on match-pairs between languages…
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“I’m Happy to Be Your Servant ‘Til the Day I Die”: Courtly Love in BBC’s Merlin
by Eliška Pituchová As evidenced by the 2017 publication of The Legacy of Courtly Literature: From Medieval to Contemporary Culture, edited by Deborah Nelson-Campbell and Rouben Cholakian, the Western tradition of courtly writing and courtly love was not confined to the medieval period. Instead, it has continued to evolve, leaving its echoes throughout modern popular…
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“You Are the Monster”: Del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) and the Ethos of Ambiguity
by Martina Vajdová Few novels have been adapted and misinterpreted as extensively as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, whose mad scientist and his creation have inhabited the cultural imagination for over two centuries. Director Guillermo del Toro has long been vocal about his love for Shelley’s novel, stating: “It’s the most important book of my life, so…
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Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing: Erasing
by Karin Hrošová In the novel Surfacing, Margaret Atwood perceptively conjures Canadian wildlife by simultaneously highlighting the over-consuming and destructive postmodern society with its frivolous dilemmas and vain endeavours. This research paper analyses the piece of fiction by focusing on an independent video recording provided by the appearing camera, generating a somewhat outsider’s point of…
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Overcoming the “Muddle”: Repression and Authenticity in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View
by Dana Mena Cueto During the climax of Forster’s celebrated novel A Room with a View, its main character Lucy Honeychurch excuses her actions and dishonesty towards her own family by explaining to Mr. Emerson, “please not, Mr. Emerson—they trust me” to which he replies: “But why should they, when you have deceived them?” (Chapter…
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Scott Joplin’s A Guest of Honor as Legacy of Sorrow Songs
by Samuel Chalupka In February 1903, the US Copyright Office in St. Louis received this letter: Dear Sir, please find enclosed with this letter one dollar and application for coppyright [sic]. The title of the musical composition is in type writing in the blanck [sic] space on the application. Yours truly, Scott Joplin (Berlin 119)…
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United in Adversity: An Analysis of Donald Trump’s Discourse
by Erik Szabó The study was conducted before the assassination attempt against Donald Trump; therefore, this act of violence did not influence the outcome of the study. The writer condemns any act of violence committed from political or ideological deliberation. It is safe to say that the 2016 U.S. presidential elections marked a turning point…