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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…