Seznam témat k státním zkouškám

Učitelství pro 2. stupeň ZŠ

Literature

The students are required to bring a reading list comprising of a minimum of 20 titles from English literature and 20 titles from American literature belonging to the Western Canon and corresponding to the thematic questions.

American Literature - Periods and Literary Movements

1. American literature of the colonial period:
   The "American dream"
   American Puritanism
   Salem Witch Trials
   John Smith, John Winthrop, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor
2. American Revolution and the Age of Reason:
   Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin
   Jonathan Edwards
3. American Renaissance:
   Washington Irving
   J.F. Cooper
   W.C. Bryant
   American Transcendentalism - Emerson, Thoreau
4. The development of 19^th-century American poetry:
   Romantic poetry of E.A. Poe and H.W. Longfellow
   The changes of poetic form in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson
5. The development of 19^th-century American prose:
   Late Romanticism - Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville
   Regionalism and the "local color" - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), Bret Harte
   Jack London
   American naturalism and the "Gospel of Wealth" (Crane, Norris, Dreiser, Conwell)
   Psychological novel (Henry James, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather)
6. 20^th-century American poetry:
   Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot
   Robert Frost
   The beatnicks: Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
   Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath
7. 20^th -century American drama:
   Eugene O´Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee
8. 20^th -century American prose:
   Modernism and stream of consciousness (William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe)
   The Lost Generation (Ernest Hemingway, F.S. Fitzgerald)
   The Great Depression (John Steinbeck)
   The War novel (Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller)
   The Beat Generation ( Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs)
   Jewish literature (Saul Bellow, I.B. Singer, Bernard Malamud)
   African American literature (Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison)
   Contemporary fiction, postmodernism

 

Suggested themes:

The beginnings of American literature in the colonial period (Bradford, Winthrop)

The first American poets (Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Puritan children´s verses)

Salem witch trials

Jonathan Edwards

Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution

Washington Irving (Rip Van Winkle)

J.F. Cooper and American historical novel

American Transcendentalism (R.W. Emerson and H.D. Thoreau)

American Gothic literature, E.A. Poe´s tales

E.A. Poe´s poetry ("The Raven")

E.A. Poe and H.W. Longfellow (comparison)

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his response to Puritans and Transcendentalists

Nathaniel Hawthorne´s "mad scientist" stories

Herman Melville, his prose and poetry

Walt Whitman ("Song of Myself")

Emily Dickinson

The "local color" school (Bret Harte)

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

The psychological novel of Henry James

Classic American women writers (Wharton, Cather, Chopin)

American naturalism and the "Gospel of Wealth" (Crane, Norris, Dreiser, Conwell)

Jack London

Sherwood Anderson´s critical realism

Critical humour of James Thurber

American poetry at the turn of the century ( E.A. Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Robinson Jeffers)

T.S. Eliot, his poetry and criticism, and Ezra Pound

William Faulkner and the development of modernism in American literature, the "stream of consciousness"

Ernest Hemingway and the "lost generation"

F.S. Fitzgerald and the "jazz age"

John Steinbeck

William Saroyan

Carson McCullers and other writers of the American South

The American drama (Eugene O´Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee)

The "beat generation" (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac)

American Jewish literature (Bellow, Malamud, Singer, Salinger, Roth)

Modern African American literature (Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison)

Contemporary prose (Updike, Shaw, Mailer, Heller, Styron, Myrer, Bradbury)

American postmodernism (Nabokov, Barthelme, Carver, Vonnegut, Woody Allen )

Modern American poetry (Roethke, Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Ferlinghetti)

 

Recommended literature
Anne Bradstreet - poems
Benjamin Franklin - Autobiography
Washington Irving - The Sketch Book (one story)
J.F. Cooper - one novel (The Spy)
R.W. Emerson, Nature or Self-Reliance (excerpts - The Norton Anthology)
H.D. Thoreau - Walden (excerpts)
E.A. Poe - The Raven and other poems, one short story
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Scarlet Letter, one short story
Herman Melville - Bartleby the Scrivener (or Billy Budd)
Walt Whitman - The Leaves of Grass
Emily Dickinson - poems
Bret Harte - one story
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) - Huckleberry Finn
Henry James - one novel (Daisy Miller)
Edith Wharton - one novel (The Age of Innocence)
Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio
Jack London - Martin Eden or The Sea-Wolf (or another novel)
Robert Frost - poems
T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets
William Faulkner - A Rose for Emily
Ernest Hemingway - one novel, one short story
F.S. Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men, East of Eden
William Saroyan - short stories (My Name is Aram)
Carson McCullers - The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Truman Capote - Other Voices, Other Rooms
Eugene O´Neill - The Long Day´s Journey into Night
Norman Mailer - The Naked and the Dead
Joseph Heller - Catch-22
Jack Kerouac - On the Road
Allen Ginsberg - Howl (one poem)
Ken Kesey - One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
Saul Bellow - Seize the Day
J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Bernard Malamud - one novel (The Assistant)
Toni Morrison - Beloved or The Bluest Eye
William Styron - Sophie's Choice
John Updike - one novel
Ira Levin - Rosemary's Baby or The Stepford Wives
E.L. Doctorow - Ragtime
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
Raymond Carver - short stories
Sylvia Plath - poems

 

Secondary literature:
High, P.B., An Outline of American Literature, Longman 1986
Procházka, Martin a kol., Lectures on American Literature, Praha: Karolinum, 2002.
Ruland, R., Bradbury, M., Od puritanismu k postmodernismu, Praha: MF 1997
The Norton Anthology of American Literature I, II, 1979.

 

English literature

1. Old English (Béowulf, heroic epic poems, lyrical poems and elegies, religious poems, Anglo-Saxon riddles; Christianity and Paganism
2. Middle English (romances, ballads, Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales)
3. The beginnings of the Renaissance prose, poetry and drama, Shakespeare´s predecessors
4. Elizabethan drama and William Shakespeare, his tragedies, comedies, romances and historical plays
5. Shakespeare´s contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance Titanism, Ben Jonson and the comedy of humours
   Restoration drama: William Congreve and the comedy of manners
6. The development of Renaissance prose (Thomas More, Francis Bacon, euphuism, pastoral and picaresque novel) and poetry (Wyatt, Spencer, Shakespeare´s sonnets, John Donne and metaphysical poetry, John Milton)
7. Classicism and the Age of Reason: Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope
8. Classical novel of the 18^th century: Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollet
9. Gothic Revival and Historical novel
10. Robert Burns and William Blake
11. The development of Romantic poetry: the Lake School poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge) and poetry of the Romantic revolt (Byron, Shelley, Keats)
12. Jane Austen's 'Comedy of manners'
13. The development of the Victorian novel: Charles Dickens, W.M. Thackeray, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell
14. The Brontë sisters
15. English aesthetic movement and Oscar Wilde
16. Late Victorian novelists: Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennet
17. Joseph Conrad's influence on the English novel
18. The development of the Victorian poetry: Arnold, Tennyson, Swinburne, Elizabeth Browning, Robert Browning
19. Paradox and Warning in the novels of G.K. Chesterton and H.G. Wells
20. A new approach to the individual: Henry James, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence
21. James Joyce's stream of consciousness
22. Impressionist techniques of Virginia Woolf
23. Irish literary revival: J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats
24. Aldous Huxley's experiments in novel
25. The age of T.S. Eliot
26. George Orwell
27. Satire and social criticism in the novel of the 40s and 50s
28. George Bernard Shaw's new themes in drama
29. The generation of 'Angry Young Men'
30. English drama in the post-war period
31. British poetry since 1950
32. New generation of women writers
33. Contemporary British novel
34. Experimental novel of William Golding and John Fowles
35. Drama of the Absurd and Experimental Theatre
36. British anti-colonial novel
37. Literary developments in the Commonwealth countries

 

Recommended literature Beowulf (extracts), The Wanderer
G. Chaucer - Canterbury Tales
T. Kyd - The Spanish Tragedy
C. Marlowe - Doctor Faustus
W. Shakespeare - Sonnets, one tragedy, one comedy, one romance
B. Jonson - Volpone, or the Fox
J. Webster - The Duchess of Malfi
J. Donne - Songs and Sonnets
J. Milton - Paradise Lost (extracts)
W. Congreve - Love for Love
J. Swift - Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal
D. Defoe - Moll Flanders
J. Gay - Beggar's Opera
H. Fielding - Tom Jones
L. Sterne - Tristram Shandy
R. Burns - poems
W. Blake - Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience
H. Walpole - Castle of Otranto
M. Shelley - Frankenstein
W. Scott - Ivanhoe
J. Austen - Pride and Prejudice
W. Wordsworth - Lyrical Ballads
S.T. Coleridge - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
G.G. Byron - Manfred, The Prisoner of Chillon, Child Harold's Pilgrimage
P.B. Shelley - Ode to the West Wind
J. Keats - poems
E. Brontë - Wuthering Heights
C. Brontë - Jane Eyre
E. Gaskell - Mary Barton
T. Carlyle - On Heroes and Hero-Worship
C. Dickens - one novel
W.M. Thackeray - Vanity Fair
G. Eliot - Silas Marner
R. Browning - poems
E.B. Browning - Sonnets from Portuguese, Letters to R.B.
O. Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, stories, plays, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
E. Lear - A Book of Nonsense
W. Collins - The Woman in White
A.C. Doyle - Sherlock Holmes Stories
R.L. Stevenson - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
T. Hardy - Tess of the D'Urbervilles or The Mayor of Casterbridge
J. Galsworthy - The Dark Flower of The Man of Property
J. Conrad - Heart of Darkness
G.K. Chesterton - Father Brown stories
G.H. Wells - The Invisible Man
G.B. Shaw - Pygmalion, Saint Joan or any other play
H. James - Daisy Miller
E.M. Forster - A Passage to India
D.H. Lawrence - Women in Love, short stories
A. Huxley - Brave New World
J. Joyce - Dubliners
W. Woolf - Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse
C. Mansfield - Bliss, Garden Party or other stories
J.M. Synge - In the Shadow of the Glen
W.B. Yeats - poems
T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land, Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral
G. Orwell - Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
G. Greene - The Power and the Glory
L. Durrell - Alexandria Quartet
S. Beckett - Waiting for Godot
J. Osborne - Look Back in Anger
H. Pinter - The Caretaker, The Birthday Party
J. Braine - Room at the Top
J. Wain - Hurry on Down
K. Amis - Lucky Jim
I. Murdoch - The Sandcastle
M. Spark - The Ballad of Peckham Rye
J. Rhyss - Wide Sargasso Sea
W. Golding - Lord of the Flies, The Spire
J. Fowles - The Collector, The French Lieutenant's Woman
J.G. Farrell - Troubles
P. White - A Fringe of Leaves
A. Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
M.S. Bradbury - Eating People is Wrong
D. Lodge - Changing Places
M. Atwood - The Edible Woman
N. Gordimer - July's People
A. Carter - Nights at the Circus
M. Amis - Money, Success
G. Swift - Waterland
K. Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day
W. Trevor - The News from Ireland

 

Secondary literature:
Burgess, Anthony, English Literature, Longman Group Ltd, 1991.
Drabble, Margaret, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford, New York: O.U.P., 1987.
Franková, Milada, Britské spisovatelky na konci tisíciletí, Brno: Masarykova universita, 1999.
Franková, Milada, Britské spisovatelky na přelomu tisíciletí, Brno: Masarykova universita, 2003.
Hilský, Martin, Angloamerická "Nová Kritika", Praha: Universita Karlova, 1976.
Hilský, Martin, Modernisté, Praha: Torst, 1995.
Hilský, Martin, Současný britský román, Praha: H & H Jinočany, 1991.
Hilský, Martin; Nagy, Ladislav, ed., Od slavíka k papouškovi: proměny britské prózy, Brno: Host, 2002.
Procházka, Martin; Stříbrný Zdeněk a kol., Slovník spisovatelů (anglická-waleská lit.), Praha: Libri, 1996.
Stříbrný, Zdeněk - Dějiny anglické literatury I, II, Praha: Academia 1987