Issue ii

Issue II, 2015

Re:Views Anniversary

Department of English and American Studies Canadian Studies in Brno The Gypsywood Players Reviews Far From the Madding Crowd The Sleeper and the Spindle Interview Barbora Kratochvílová

Tento projekt vznikl za finanční podpory Grantu TGM Spolku absolventů a přátel Masarykovy univerzity, Filozofické falkuty MU a za podpory Krmítka a Plánotisku.

This project was realized with financial support of TGM Grants of Alumni and Friends of Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, and with support of Krmítko and Plánotisk.

Editorial staff Editor in chief – Markéta Šonková Deputy Editor and PR manager – Anna Formánková Deputy Editor and Finance manager – Martina Krénová Editors – Lucie Horáková, Barbora Orlická, Šárka Panochová, Tereza Pavlíková, Blanka Šustrová External contributors: Sára Dobiášová, Zuzana Halgašová, Tomáš Varga, Alena Vrabcová, Jan Zajíček, Boleslav Žemlík Proofreader – Katarína Gažíková Graphic design – Štěpán Šonka Unless stated otherwise, contributions in the magazine do not necessarily express opinions of the entire editorial staff, Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, or any sponsors and SAPMU. Neither does the magazine wish to act as an official medium for communicating opinions of the above mentioned subjects. Authors of the particular articles and pieces are solely responsible for their content.

Cover photo: Filip Pultar in Our American Cousin; photo credit Actofkaa Student Theater, Bratislava 2014

Dear readers, One semester has passed and I am happy to present you with a brand new issue of the Re:Views magazine, with the main topics being celebration of our Department’s anniversary and also of the Gypsywood Players theatre group.

I would like to thank you all for your support after our very first issue came out in early February. Even though it was the first issue we have ever published, we received a lot of support and positive feedback and it very much helped our efforts during preparations of the issue you are currently holding.

I would also like to thank Alumni and Friends of Masaryk University (SAPMU) for providing us with a financial grant that shall help our efforts through June 2016. Their help and support is not only financial, but also personal in terms of providing mentoring and helping us find contacts from which our readers shall also benefit.

This issue is special for one more reason – new contributors joined our team and thus they broadened the scope of our interests and article topics. Our former student Katarína also joined the team as a proofreader, so the team is getting bigger and more varied. If you would like to join us too, please feel free to do so, we are looking forward to all new contributions and contributors!

I hope you are going to enjoy the new articles, please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, and let us know if you have any new ideas or if you would like to give us your feedback!

On behalf of the Re:Views staff, Markéta

Contents KAA History ........................ 4 - 13

The (Brief) History

of KAA ........................... 4 - 9

The History of Canadian

Studies at KAA.............. 10

Interview with Professor

Milada Franková .......... 11

Interview with docent

Tomáš Pospíšil .............. 12 - 13 The Chronicle of GWP ......... 14 - 19 KAA Conference .................. 20 - 25

Creating, Shapping,

Signifying ...................... 20 - 21

Keynote Speakers ......... 22 - 24

Interview with Mgr. Martina

Horáková Ph.D. ............ 25 I Love to See My Students Move on!

..................................... 26 - 29 Study Abroad ........................30 -33 Oxford .................................. 35 - 38 2016 Presidential Elections ...39 - 41 Investigating Language with Corpora ................................. 42 - 45 Reviews ................................ 46 - 51

The Sleeper and the Spindle

......................................... 46 - 47

Far From the Madding Crowd

......................................... 48 - 51 Academic Writing Contest ...52 Romantics Comics ............... 53

4

KAA History

The (Brief) History of KAA

By Tereza Pavlíková and Blanka Šustrová

PhDr. Don Sparling, B.A.

The Department of English and American Studies (KAA) has been here for more than 95 years.

Following the establishment of the university in 1919, it was one of the founding departments of the Faculty of Arts. However, finding out the precise day of the founding of the English Department has proven to be a task more complicated than we imagined. There are no official records accessible. This we learned after checking a number of webpages, the whole Faculty of Arts library, and underneath the KAA couch. Failing in this task miserably, we decided to pay a visit to Don Sparling, who became a member of staff in 1977, to interview him in the hope that he would tell us where we could access the information we were so desperately seeking.

Photo courtesy of Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek

“In the 1980s Professor Hladký said that he was going to write a history of the Department. He claimed that someone else beforehand had started to write it and that whenever anyone attempted to do this, they fell ill and died.”

“No, it’s not accessible anywhere. This is something that has bothered me for a long time. And it’s one of the many projects that I’m involved in now.” This was the point where we found out that attempts to write the Department’s history have always been a bit risky. One might even dare say cursed. “In the 1980s Professor Hladký said that he was going to write a history of the Department. He claimed that someone else beforehand had started to write it and that whenever anyone attempted to do this, they fell ill and died. This is some kind of an old Department legend – though I don’t know if he was just joking (laughs).”

Before coming to Czechoslovakia in 1969, Don studied English Language and Literature at the University of Toronto and at the University of Oxford. He became a member of the English Department in 1977 and after the Revolution in 1989 was elected Head of the Department. From 1977 to 1992 he was a vital part of the Gypsywood Players, acting, directing and producing plays. He is the founder of Canadian Studies in Brno, and KAA students may remember him as the author of English or Czenglish. In 2000 Don left the Department to become the first Director of Masaryk University’s Office for International Studies. These days, he is once again teaching an Introduction to Canadian Studies course at the Department.

Apart from that, he is on the Board of the Spolek absolventů a přátel Masarykovy univerzity, as well as being a member of the team at the Brno Expat Centre, which he cofounded. He also teaches in summer schools organized jointly by Masaryk University’s Centre for International Cooperation and the University of Toronto.

KAA History

5 spent the First World War in Scotland studying theology, and when he returned after 1918, suddenly there was an English Department in Brno in need of an English teacher.

1991 (left to right): B. Tykvová, M. Franková, O. Kříž, J. Hladký, D. Zemenová, E. Golková, (?)

Photo courtesy of prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

As Don told us, Brno’s English Department is probably the oldest in the country. “Everybody in Prague freaks out when you say that. We were founded as the ‘Anglický seminář’. It’s difficult to date the actual foundation: people from the archives would date it from the appointment of the first professor, František Chudoba, in 1920, others from when the first classes opened. In Prague, of course, they were teaching English as a degree subject before then, but they were part of the Department of Germanic Philology. And as far as I know, and Professor Pavel Drábek claims the same, the actual foundation of the separate English Department in Prague came later than our Anglický seminář.”

When František Chudoba was appointed professor, he was in London teaching Czech at the University of London. He was given a year and a half to prepare his lectures, buy books for the Department, and then he came back. “Professor Chudoba was a leading literary scholar; he was in touch with F. X. Šalda and lots of other prominent people. He systematically built up the library and – unusually for the time – he was keen on both British and American literature. He had an account in the main bookstore in Cambridge; every week here in Brno he received the Times Literary Supplement so he knew what new books were published and could order them from Heffers in Cambridge and they would send them here. We still have the register of the books with all the titles entered in Chudoba’s hand.” But the first teaching started even before Professor Chudoba came back from London. It began with lessons of English that were taught by Samuel Kostomlatský. Kostomlatský

During the interwar years, there were some very interesting people who taught at the Department.

Don told us about Stuart Mann, who later became one of the best-known British linguists. It was said about him that he could understand every IndoEuropean language. But there were even more surprises to his persona: “His great love was Albania.

He would be teaching English here during the academic year and then in the summer he would go down to Albania to do research. He published an Albanian dictionary, and a grammar which is still being used in the English-speaking world. And apparently people didn’t know what he was doing in the summer. He would just say ‘I’m going south.’

Another interesting story was when he heard that there were some gypsies encamped just on the edge of Brno. And of course Romani is an Indo-European language. So he decided to meet them and see if he could communicate with them. And he could, apparently. He translated one of the Gospels into

1996 (left to right): Mrs. Sparling, M. Franková, J. Firbas, O. Kříž, M. Růžička w Photo courtesy of prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

this Romani-Moravian dialect and sent it off to London to what was then the British and Foreign Bible Society. Their mission is to translate and publish the Bible in as many languages as possible.

They were overjoyed they had another language and published this Gospel. The society then sent a copy to Mann. They thanked him and asked him if he might be interested in doing some missionary work with these Roma, because he was the only person that understood their dialect (laughs).”

6

1998, celebration of M. Franková’s habilitation and B. Tykvová’s 55th birthday (left to right): V. Vémolová, M. Franková, B. Tykvová, T. Pospíšil, S. Hardy Photo courtesy of prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

KAA History

1997, celebration of J. Hladký’s professorship, M. Franková’s M.A. and T. Pospíšil’s doctorate (left to right): D. Sparling, (?), T. Pospíšil, E. Golková, J. Hladký, M. Franková P w Photo courtesy of prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

“Apparently in 1968 there were people at the Faculty Another interesting person, who was at the that were very engaged in the Prague Spring activities. department from around 1924 until 1930, was Of course some were against it, but these differences Simeon Potter. He was one of the key people involved didn’t develop into any bitter personal conflicts. in the popularization of English in Czechoslovakia The Dean at the time said that he was going to do between the wars. At that time, in every larger city everything possible to ensure that the minimum of there were “Anglo-American Clubs” for people who people were kicked out. And that liked English and wanted to helped to set the tone at the Faculty. learn it. The people would I was never told to teach this or meet once a week to talk in “Because the students were going that. It was a very free atmosphere English or to take lessons, they to a capitalist country, God knows and we were very open with the would also have a programme what would happen to them. As a students.” For example, the only of lectures and the club would also boast a little library. These result, we were told we would have exchange programme in the whole clubs published yearbooks to send a teacher with them every of Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s was KAA’s exchange and there was something like year.

So, you know... we sacrificed with the University of Leeds. The a central office here in Brno ourselves (laughs).” students in Leeds studied Russian run by Potter. and also Czech, as a second Slavic language. The agreement with them Professor Chudoba died during the Second was signed around 1966 and every year a certain World War, and when the university reopened, number of students from Leeds would come to Brno Professor Josef Vachek became the new Head to study Czech for ten weeks in spring, and the English of the Department. Vachek was a distinguished Department could send the same number of students linguist from Prague, one of the leading members to Leeds. “We chose the students solely on the basis of the Prague linguistic circle in fact. It was he who of their academic record, because if we attempted created the linguistic tradition at the Department. otherwise, the Communist Party might have stepped Professor Jan Firbas was his student. Vachek, in and interfered. And except for one occasion, we because he was not a communist, had to step down never had any problems with them on the faculty level. after 1948. The next Head that came after him was They said that if we had chosen these people, they Karel Štěpaník, who had studied before the war were going. But because the students were going to under Professor Chudoba, and who remained the a capitalist country, God knows what would happen Head until 1968. to them. As a result, we were told we would have to

KAA History

7

send a teacher with them every year. So, you know... we sacrificed ourselves (laughs). We would always tell the students quite openly that if they wanted to emigrate to the West, they shouldn’t do it during the exchange, as that would be the end of it. And it never happened. One year, about two weeks before we were going, one of the students came to me and said she couldn’t take part in it because the secret police had asked her to submit a report when she came back, and she didn’t want to do this, as she would feel awkward spying on everyone. To me it was clear that presumably every year they must have had a student who was given the same task, so I told

“It was a deeply politically incorrect Department.” her not to worry and just report things like that the students were introduced to the university library in Leeds, that they went on a sightseeing tour to look at York Cathedral, and so on. Of course when we showed them round the Leeds University library we always pointed out the collection of books from ’68 Publishers there … But that didn’t have to be

programme was always a combination with another language. There were two tracks a student could take: a teaching one and a specialized one, which

The Faculty of Arts during the strike in 1989 Photo courtesy of Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek

was (in theory) intended to train translators.

Cultural studies were not taught until the 1990s.

During the period of “normalization”, one had to be careful. “It was a deeply politically incorrect Department. We had three or four ex-communists in it, so naturally these were suspicious people in the eyes of the authorities. And we had virtually no young communists. There were, if I recall correctly, perhaps three of them, but none of them was senior enough to be considered being named the Head of the Department. And so, during most of the 1970s and 1980s, there was no appointed Head of Department.

Instead there was someone who was given the task of running the Department, but not as official Head. In 1986, Zdeněk Masařík from the German

“It was like from a bad spy novel.”

1989 strike, D building

Photo courtesy of Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek

in the report, right?”

At the end of the 1970s, the Department was taking in about twenty students a year, and the entrance exam required only a very good knowledge of English – there was nothing “political” about it.

“I never had more than fifteen students in a class.

In their fourth or fifth year I would probably have five or six of them,” Don remembers. The degree

Department agreed to become the external Head of our Department. He had good connections in the Party, and therefore had the authority to beef up the Department. Several people came into the Department around that time, for example Jana Chamonikolasová and Věra Pálenská. Věra was teaching at the Military Academy back then and the suggestion was that I should meet her and talk to her to see what her English was like. But I couldn’t do this officially, because I was a foreigner. As a person working at the Military Academy, she was forbidden to meet with anyone from

8

KAA History

the West unless she had official permission. So we had to work out this crazy scenario where she would be talking to one of the teachers in the Department and I – ‘by chance’ – would knock on the door and come in, be introduced, and chat with her. This was the kind of idiocy that went on in those days.”

That was not the only funny story Don remembers from the era. “When I was applying to join the Department, I phoned the then acting Head, Josef Hladký, to arrange a meeting at the Faculty. And he said: ‘No. Let’s meet at Rudé náměstí (today’s Moravské náměstí). I’ll be waiting on one of the benches near the university library and I’ll be reading a copy of the Morning Star.’ This was the British Communist Party newspaper. And I thought ‘This is really bizarre!’ But I went there anyway, and saw this figure, just as promised – it was like from a bad spy novel – and I walked up to him and introduced myself. Joe had a wonderful sense of humour – he was one of the reasons the Department was such a pleasant place to be in. The reason he was acting so peculiar was the then Dean at the Faculty of Arts, who was absolutely paranoid about people from the West. One time, he actually called in all the heads of the departments and told them that cars were circling around the Faculty with Western spies in them, listening in to find out what teachers at the Faculty were talking about. So the

of teaching and evaluating. “Before that it was all oral exams, which I personally hated. Because methodologically they’re based on a Central European positivistic concept of knowledge, which is to say there is a certain ‘penzum znalostí’ that you should know, and then the oral exam is designed to find out what you don’t know. I find this perverse. To me an exam

“They claimed that you can’t produce an educated person if he or she studies just one subject.

And I used to say: ‘Do I strike you as illiterate?’” should enable the student to show what he is interested in and what he knows. So one of the things I tried to do after 1989 was to move us towards a more equitable and fairer evaluation system. That was a huge change.

And in the English Department we started doing this before anyone else was.”

The other thing was the need to catch up on at least twenty years of what had been happening in the West.

“There was a whole shift in critical theory, cultural theory, post-colonial theory, and there were whole new areas which were considered valid to study, for example film. We began introducing new areas and

“To me an exam should enable the student to show what he is interested in and what he knows.” last thing Joe wanted was for the Dean to learn that I was applying for the job. In the end we completely bypassed him and went to one of the Vice-Rectors, who was very favourable and open, and had the authority to get me into the Department.”

After the Velvet Revolution, Don became Head of the Department, and, as expected, the Department went through some changes. One of the biggest changes was in the number of students. In 1990 instead of 25, 125 students could be admitted. There was also a shift towards more Western methods

1991, 70th birthday of prof. Jan Firbas (left to right): J. Chamonikolasová, J. Hladký, Mrs. Firbas, J. Firbas, L. Pantůčková, D. Sparling, (?)

Photo courtesy of prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

new subjects and of course the possibilities grew beyond the point that every student would be expected to do all the things, as was the case before. Eventually we got to the point where the students could choose their track according to their preferences.”

KAA History

9

The other thing that was introduced, and was amazingly successful, was single-subject English.

However, when it was introduced in 1990, there was huge opposition at the Faculty. “They claimed that you can’t produce an educated person if he or she studies just one subject. And I used to say: ‘Do I strike you as illiterate? Am I uneducated?’ Because I had studied just one subject in Toronto.” The single-subject degree programme offered more specialized courses, so the education given was very broad. It was also extremely popular, as ours was the only English Department in the country that had anything like this. There were usually six hundred or so applicants for twenty-five places. A special entrance exam was designed for them that demanded more thought and creativity. “The students in the single-subject English programme were phenomenal. But in the end it was cancelled by a decision of the Vědecká rada. The main argument was that it was ‘not part of the tradition of Czech higher education.’ Of course ten years later it’s the norm.

We were literally ten years ahead of everybody else.

And we were bitterly criticised and prevented from continuing with it.”

All of these changes helped establish the educational methods at this Department as they are today.

Nowadays, single-subject English is indeed the norm, and as far as we know, interviews with potential teachers do not occur at Rudé náměstí anymore.

Every year around 200 new students are accepted.

The Department is buzzing with activity, in February it hosted the 10th Brno International Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies under the theme “Creating, Shaping and Signifying” (you can read a report from it in this very issue), and it is about to open a new MA degree programme in Northern American Studies in the near future. The current

1989 strike - in the middle Dr. Miroslav Pospíšil and Professor Petr Osolsobě, on the right Professor Jiří Voráč Photo courtesy of Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek

1989 strike - C building

Photo courtesy of Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek

Head of the Department, Jeffrey Vanderziel, has been serving in this position since 2001. He succeeded Jiří Rambousek, who had been the Head from 1999.

Today the Department also has two students’ clubs.

ESCape (English Students’ Club), currently led by Bára Orlická, was founded in 2004. Every year it organizes student parties, book fests, mock elections, muffin sales, the Creative Writing Contest, and newly also the Student Conference IDEAS. And Book Club, currently led by Tom Hájek, which was founded in 2012, and which organizes weekly Meet-Up Mondays, study groups, and issues its monthly newspaper The KAArdian.

The Department is also proud of its theatre company, the Gypsywood Players, which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary and commemorated it, along with the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, with the performance of a stage version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Read more about it in the GWP history article in this issue!

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KAA History

The History of Canadian Studies at KAA

By Tereza Pavlíková and Blanka Šustrová

It all started in 1985. At that time the fourth and fifth year students had the possibility to take optional courses, and that was when Don Sparling decided to start teaching courses on Canada. Each year he created a different course. At the time, this was not very easy, because the only books he had were his own, with no possibility of photocopying and sharing. He used to go to Canada every second year and he would spend a lot of time in second-hand bookstores trying to find cheap paperback copies, as there was no financial support for this endeavour at the time. But the students liked the courses, since they were a kind of unusual window on the West.

After 1989, the Canadian government provided money for the development of these courses and Don was able to start meeting people engaged in Canadian Studies in other countries. This led to establishing the Central European Association for Canadian Studies, whose headquarters are here in Brno. There are more than 5,500 Canadian books in the Faculty of Arts library

(including both English and French titles), which is, incidentally, even more than the University of Vienna has. Another person who played an important part in establishing Canadian Studies in Brno is Professor Petr Kyloušek from the Romance Languages and Literatures Department. He wrote the History of French Canadian and Quebec Literature (Dějiny francouzsko-kanadské a quebecké literatury), an exceptional piece of work since there are very few places in the world where there is a history of Francophone Canadian literature written in the local language.

Over the years, there have been more than 15 teachers teaching Canadian Studies courses and today more than a dozen Bachelor’s and Master’s theses in Canadian Studies are written every year. This year, Canadian Studies in Brno celebrated its 30th anniversary at the 10th Brno International Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies and the Department is planning to open a Master’s degree in the field of North American Studies, which will incorporate much Canadian material, in the near future.

Canadian Studies in Brno - Brief Timeline 1985 First Canadian Studies course introduced (at the Department of English and

American Studies) - the beginning of Canadian Studies in Czechoslovakia 1990 Canadian Studies Centre established at Masaryk University 1990s Canadian Studies courses introduced in other departments at the Faculty of Arts (Romance

Languages and Literatures, Philosophy) as well as at the Faculty of Education (English),

Faculty of Science (Geography) and Faculty of Social Studies (Political Science) 1998 1st International Conference of Central European Canadianists 2000 9th European Seminar for Graduate Students in Canadian Studies 2003 Central European Association for Canadian Studies established, with Secretariat located

at Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University 2005 International conference on “The Imaginary in the Contemporary Quebec Novel” 2007 International conference on “Identity through Art, Thought and the Imaginary in the

Canadian Space” 2010-2013 EU-financed project supporting innovation in the area of North American Studies 2016 Introduction of Master’s degree in North American Studies with major Canadian (planned) (Anglophone and Francophone) component Timeline source: CEACS

KAA History

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Interview with Professor Milada Franková During the communist era, was there any censorship regarding Anglo-American literature?

Of course there was censorship, whether overt or covert, as in all other areas of life.

Were there any students’ clubs at the Department/ Faculty? If yes, did you take part in any of them? What did the students do there?

When you applied for studying at the Department/ Faculty, what were the entrance exam requirements?

When I applied for studies in 1963, it was an oral entrance exam before a board of four examiners for the double subject studies (English/German – there were no single subject studies in philology). The questions asked were language and general “life and institutions”. The expected level of at least one of the languages was secondary school knowledge.

What courses could you take? Were there more language, literature, or linguistics courses?

The whole five-year course of studies was designed as a double-subject programme with teacher training.

The syllabus was fixed for each subsequent semester; there was no choice in terms of courses or times when they could be taken. The programme included language courses based on textbooks, linguistics including the historical development of English, history of English and American literature, English and American history and life and institutions.

How many students were accepted in the programme?

There were 15 of us in English Major and 15 in German Major. The groups were taught separately, because the division largely meant that the “minor” part of the group were virtual beginners in the other language.

No clubs that I knew of, there were probably some ČSSM (Czech Socialist Youth Union) activities, but I did not take part in them.

Were there any native speakers among the Department’s teachers?

In my time there was Dr. Jessie Kocmanová, who was Scottish and taught us English literature apart from essay writing, and of course she was the mind and driving force behind the student theatre performances at our intensive English courses at Cikháj that developed into the Gypsywood Players later. I also owe dr. Kocmanová thanks for introducing me to contemporary British literature in the 1960s and thereby giving me a life-long interest in an area that is never drying up.

What were the possibilities of employment after finishing your programme?

We were educated and trained to become language teachers in secondary schools and I suppose that many of us did that. After graduation I taught English at a language school for the next twenty years.

Why did you choose English as your programme/ subject?

I wanted to study languages and as I did German at school and took private lessons in English (there was no English in my secondary school), the double subject combination offered in Brno was my coveted choice.

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KAA History

Interview with docent

Tomáš Pospíšil When you applied for studying at the Department/Faculty, what were the entrance exam requirements?

I applied to study at the department in 1979. The requirements basically covered high school level of English and were based on the standard textbooks, which were used across the country in those days. The exams had a written part, which consisted of a dictation by a native speaker and some testing of grammar. The interview had a grammar component and a discussion component, aimed at assessing your oral skills, pronunciation, fluency, as well as some knowledge of the English speaking world. I guess what also mattered was the general impression and the motivation of the applicant.

What courses could you take? Were there more language, literature, or linguistics courses?

In those days the curriculum was fixed, there was no choice on the part of the students to structure their studies, except for the physical education classes, where you could opt for tennis, gymnastics or swimming. So it meant that whatever language you studied – in my case it was English and German – the structure of the studies was always the same: phonetics in the first semester, historical grammar in the seventh semester, etc. The studies had a language component, and a traditional philological mix of various aspects of linguistics and literature. There was no cultural studies to speak of.

How many students were accepted in the programme (each year)?

In my year there were three study groups, with ten students each, combining English with German, Czech and Norwegian. There was no such thing as a free combination of subjects. If you applied, you had to choose one of the three combinations that were offered that year. Neither was it possible to study English as a single subject. The year after they would open different combinations, such as

KAA History

13

Czech, French and Portuguese. Then they would open German and Russian, etc.

Times were getting even harder in the Eighties when the department admitted even fewer students, just one group of ten, or maybe two...

During the communist era, was there any censorship regarding Anglo-American literature?

Of course there was censorship. A friend sent me a couple of English books once, including those

by Orwell, but they never reached me, only a letter announcing that they had been withdrawn from the mail service. However, at the same time a great many books were translated from English and published in those days.

The department was a relative safe haven in this respect. Our teachers were cautious, to be sure (after all the subject of our studies was, by definition, suspect), but their approach to literature and culture was enlightened and undogmatic. Of course they did not analyse Animal Farm or 1984 with us. But we knew about such works from elsewhere.

Were there any students’ clubs at the Department/ Faculty? If yes, did you take part in any of them?

What did the students do there?

I spent four wonderful seasons as a Gypsywood player, and these productions taught me a lot. You were immersed in English most of the time, you learned several parts by heart, and you shared the same goal with a group of like-minded people…

I always regarded this group as a kind of core – or even elite? – of the student body in the department.

At the faculty level I was involved in a student magazine called Fórum both as a contributor and editor. Fórum published short stories, some poetry, interviews and reviews. There were also semi-official poetry and prose readings, called Bluesnění, where folk singers, such as Petr Váša, would also appear, and where it was possible to share texts with some critical edge in regard to how things were in those days.

There was Jessie Kocmanová, a Scotswoman who got married to a Czech RAF pilot and came to Brno to live with him, and there was Don Sparling, a Canadian expat whom you certainly know. Both Jessie and Don were running the Gypsywood Players and were a wonderful source of inspiration for us. Consider this: Jessie Kocmanová’s English was the first real person’s English I heard during the entrance exam dictation in 1979. Of course I had the radio and records, but my teachers until then were all non-native speakers.

What were the possibilities of employment after finishing your programme?

The Brno language school was an option, and other schools, too. But English was not taught everywhere, so there were not as many positions in fact. You could be employed at a factory, too, processing their manuals or translating various technical texts their research units might be interested in. One could have tried to apply for more prestigious and interesting jobs elsewhere, such as diplomacy or foreign trade, but opportunities such as these depended on the Communist party membership, which was a deal I was not willing to make. And on various personal contacts, too.

So my academic career started modestly, with a research fellowship at the Department of Foreign Languages at Mendel University, where I spent two years teaching English and German to future agronomists, economists and foresters.

Why did you choose English as your programme/ subject?

Because I was good at languages and wanted to stay within the realm of humanities. Both my parents were involved in medicine, and I wanted to avoid the traditional pattern whereby sons of doctors invariably follow in their parents’ footsteps creating little dynasties; as Frank Sinatra once sang: I wanted to do it my way…

Were there any native speakers among the Department’s teachers?

Photographs of prof. Franková and doc. Pospíšil were taken from the KAA webpage.

14

The Gypsywood Players

The Gypsywood Players

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The Gypsywood Players

Take a few brave students; add a bucket of enthusiasm, a scoop of craziness, a dash of patience, quite a bit of creativity, a cup of hard work, and a whole lot of fun! Shake properly. Result? A wonderful project exploring the potential of young people at our university and keeping a great legacy alive.

Our American Cousin, 2013; Eva Ptašková and Lukáš Lacko as Florence Trenchard and Sir Edward Trenchard Photo courtesy of Actofkaa Student Theater

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The Gypsywood Players

The Pocket Chronicle of The Gypsywood Players Gypsywood Players (although the name was adopted only a year later). “So on the spot she just decided let’s do a play. So she picked out a five or six actors and found a text of some kind and they put on this play there,” recalls Don Sparling. As it turned out, it was the most remarkable thing she could have done.

By Barbora Orlická and Tomáš Varga

The founder of the GWP, Jessie Kocmanová

(foto: GWP archive)

It all began in 1965 in a small village called Cikháj when a nice lady from Scotland got an idea. She was none other than Jessie Kocmanová. Jessie arrived in Czechoslovakia after 1945 with her husband, a Czech airman Vincenc Kocman. She became a member of the Department of English and American Studies and she was also involved in a theatre production at the British Council in Brno in 1947. After it closed down in 1948, she turned her attention elsewhere. Eventually, her interest in theatre found its practical outlet during one of the intensive English weeks in Cikháj where she decided to chase away boredom with the very first production of the

The cast of the very first play - The Dear Departed (Stanley Houghton), 1965 (foto: GWP archive)

Don joined the group in 1977. It was in fact only two weeks after he joined the Department itself. The group left for Cikháj to rehearse Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Don’s beginnings were both humorous and a little frustrating: “Playing a Shakespearian clown is one of the most frustrating things in theatre because it’s filled with all sorts of puns that nobody understands… But anyway it was a great introduction to Gypsywood.” Despite the initial shock, Don immediately became close friends with Jessie and together they directed many of the GWP plays. He took part in seventeen different productions, Jessie in over twenty.

As of today, The Gypsywood Players is the longestfunctioning student group at the Faculty of Arts. It celebrated its 50th anniversary this past March and more than four hundred people have already participated in the company during its long history. Many of the current staff members of the Department of English and American studies were at some point involved in the production, either as students of the Department or already as teachers, providing guidance to the younger

Former GWP member and current staff member doc. Naděžda Kudrnáčová (née Holíková), My Fair Lady, 1978 (foto: GWP archive)

The Gypsywood Players generations.

The company has tried its talents on dozens of plays of all kinds. The first decade witnessed more traditional plays of Shakespeare or G.B. Shaw, whereas most of the later production up till now focused on modern pieces.

There were comedies, tragedies, musicals, and other genres. At first, the company performed in Cikháj with a rerun at the faculty premises. Later on, the company started using the venues of local theatres in Brno and continues to do so now.

The long string of plays over the five decades was not without interruptions. After 1989 the student life erupted with opportunities and the company lost its central position. The students’ involvement slowly wavered and the company hit a dry spell in 1993.

The fame was briefly rekindled in 1999 when Pavel Drábek and Ondřej Kyas created a unique performance of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Don Sparling considers this performance his favourite from those he experienced as a viewer. “It took two and a half hours and you felt you’ve been in the theatre for ten minutes, it was such an intense experience.” After

17 burden and create the right atmosphere. The play “is very difficult to stage, as it is dead serious and strangely experimental, even paradoxical at moments. And this mumming-like framing established the right kind of communication with the audiences,” recalls Tomáš Kačer who played a priest. The ensemble consisted not only of actors, but it also had a 20-member female choir (playing the chorus of the women of Canterbury). The music was originally composed by Pavel Drábek and

Murder in the Cathedral, 1999 Women of Canterbury (without Petra Kalabisová the Photographer), Knights, Priests and Becket Courtesy of: Dita Dvořáková, Marta Filipová and Petra Kalabisová

Ondřej Kyas who then conducted the music on stage.

The play was immensely successful and the company went to perform in Bratislava. Unfortunately, after the Murder the company fell silent again for a couple of years.

Murder in the Cathedral, 1999 The Knights and the Priests: Joshua Mensch, Milan Pavlas, Ben Williams and Jakub Kučera; Přemek Dohnal, Aleš Rumpel and Tomáš Kačer Courtesy of: Dita Dvořáková, Marta Filipová and Petra Kalabisová

seeing the play on different occasions in England, Don condemned the play as impossible to be put on successfully. The Gypsywood Players’ production convinced him otherwise. “The production here was amazing, it worked at every level.”

The play itself is a serious piece, styled as a Greek tragedy, but the GWP performance was framed by two St. George’s plays which helped to ease the artistic

Another attempt for the company’s revival occurred in 2005 with A Bohavian Fairy Tale written and directed

by Matthew Nicholls. Once again it was an isolated event and it wasn’t until the autumn of 2012 that the company finally caught fresh wind for its sails. Tomáš Kačer, then a fresh Ph.D. graduate, was approached by a student from the Department who initiated the resurrection. Tomáš decided to supervise the new project and created a link between the older generation of the Gypsywood Players and the young blood. The play was chosen and Tomáš went on to prepare the first auditions in seven years. More than 20 students signed up and were admitted into the group. The first revival play was Tom Stoppard’s comedy, The Real Inspector Hound. In autumn 2013, Jeff Smith came aboard and became the Artistic Director of the company. That year, the GWP performed Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin and as a prequel, Jeff Smith’s own play Other

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The Gypsywood Players

The Real Inspector Hound (Tom Stoppard): (left to right, back) Shani Anuradha, Otakar Svitavský, Lucie Černá, Jan Čapek, Denisa Šantová, Anna Drahná, Tomáš Hájek, Haneen Al Khatib, Radovan Košč, Petra Kovaříková, (front) Agáta Kišová, Kristýna Mlynářová.

Photo courtesy of GWP archiv

than that, Mrs. Lincoln? In autumn 2014, Jeff directed the musical adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Since the revival, The Gypsywood Players have become an official course available to all students of the Department to enrol into. Needless to say, the students don’t participate merely for the credits. While the membership is purely voluntary and everyone who wants to participate is welcome, there is also a true dedication expected of any soul that decides to join the company. There is an immense amount of work involved in every production and the participation in the company allows students to experience the entire

The current Artistic Director Jeff Smith

repertoire of roles necessary for running a theatre company. Not only acting, but directing, managing, lighting, and costume designing are vital roles that cannot be underestimated. Everyone becomes a piece of a puzzle and together they create a unique experience of amateur theatre. A lot of the current members have participated in two or more of the recent plays which suggests that The Gypsywood Players are once again a true theatre company. (And you never know, even a humble stage hand might eventually achieve the lofty rank of Company Manager).

Under the leadership of two skilled theatrologists the company celebrated two very important anniversaries

Animal Farm 15.12.2014: Revival Photo courtesy of GWP archiv

Photo courtesy of GWP archiv

The Gypsywood Players

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in the 2014/15 academic year. First the company commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution with George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the very same play the company put on in November 1989, and a few months later they marked the 50th anniversary of the company itself by hosting a gathering of the former members.

The musical adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm was chosen as a celebration of both the Revolution and the company itself. When The Gypsywood Players performed the play in 1989, it immediately became very popular and they ended up translating the play into Czech, thus actively participating in the turbulent changes in the society.

Our American Cousin (Tom Taylor) ensemble: (left to right) Ondřej Novotný, Romana Juriňáková, Monika Ščípová, Petra Kovaříková, Tereza Šmilauerová, Monika Jančovičová, Šárka Nováková, Martin Mareš, Michal Lévy, Filip Pultar, Jakub Chupík, Márkéta Tomášková, Lukáš Lacko, Anežka Kalužová, Anna Drahná, Radovan Košč, (down left to right) Denisa Šantová, Eva Ptašková, Agáta Kišová, (lying) Dora Rodriguez.

Photo courtesy of Barbora Orlická

On March 7, the company held a special performance of Animal Farm celebrating the company’s 50th anniversary. The event was organised by Don Sparling, Tomáš Kačer, Jeff Smith, and Jeff Vanderziel with the help of the current student management of the Gypsywood Players. More than a hundred alumni and former members of the company attended the performance and the subsequent banquet held in one of the newly reconstructed buildings of the Faculty of Arts.

The event took place in P.O.Hviezdoslav’s theatre – the former venue of the Slovak National Theatre. The company had the honour of performing on the same stage as many of the most famous Slovak actors. In the Spring of 2015 the company performed Animal Farm in Stará Aréna in Ostrava. Despite the fact that their “farm” had to shrink to a quarter of its previous size, the company managed splendidly and the new space allowed for a unique experience for both the actors and the audience.

The Gypsywood Players seized numerous opportunities to go on tour. The most recent tours were to Bratislava in the Spring of 2014 and to Ostrava in the Spring of 2015. In Bratislava, the Gypsywood Players attended a small festival of English drama organised by ActofKAA – the theatre company of the Department of English and American studies in Bratislava – performing Our American Cousin and Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln?

It all arose from boredom, but the company has never been boring! It survived changing regimes, missing actors, cancelled venues, lost props and many more disasters, but it has kept its place at the Department of English and American Studies and hopefully it will survive another half a century and more!

The original production of Animal Farm, 1989 Courtesy of: Digitální knihovna fotografií MU

Performance of Animal Farm in Ostrava, 2015 Courtesy of: Butrix Photography©

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KAA Conference 2015

At the reception; photo by P. Čučka

Creating, Shaping, Signifying

By Martina Krénová, Alena Vrabcová, Boleslav Žemlík

From February 5 to February 7, 2015 the 10th Brno Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies took place at the premises of the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University. The conference was a great opportunity for many international scholars to gather and present their academic papers and ideas and also for some of our students to witness and experience the atmosphere of the academic gathering. It also provided the opportunity for the students to actively participate in organization of such an event and be a right hand to the Department Organizing Committee. We interviewed one of the members of the committee, Martina Horáková, to provide an insight into the history and significance of the conference as well as personal experience.

The Brno Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies has had a continuing tradition since the first conference that took place in 1986. In comparison with the early years, when the conference was attended mostly

by Czech and Slovak scholars, the recent years have become more international. The goal of the 10th Conference Creating, Shaping, Signifying was to further establish itself as an international and interdisciplinary conference and to attract scholars from various parts of the world. The participants had a possibility to address the topic of this year’s conference in the fields of linguistics, literary and cultural studies, translation studies and ELT methodology.

The conference was indeed a remarkable event with a great number of participants and visitors.

Some of the members of our editorial staff participated in the organization of the conference so we had an opportunity to interact with the participants and we can confirm that many of them praised the organization, the smoothness, technology and the atmosphere. During the day scholars attended the plenary sessions and panels according to their preferences and in the evening the debates unofficially continued in a relaxed atmosphere at the reception. On Thursday the participants joined for the official reception where they learned a little about the history of the conference and enjoyed networking.

KAA Conference 2015 Also glasses were raised to celebrate 30 years of Canadian Studies in Brno. On Friday night the deepening of the interdepartmental and international relations continued.

Everybody at the conference had an opportunity to attend the plenary session of the keynote speakers; the rest of the participants presented their papers in the panels. There was one setback to the panels: sometimes it occurred that one wanted to see two presentations that were being presented at the same time in different rooms.

Since there were too many presentations to cover in this magazine issue, we will cover only some of them we picked. The keynote speakers will be covered as one article.

Many of our department’s professors and doctoral students presented their scholarly papers in all the fields; you can look at the abstracts of their papers here. The theme of the conference covered a very broad area, the contributors in the linguistics dealt with many different topics such as Szilárd Szentgyörgyi’s “How Do Movie Characters’Accents Reflect Linguistic Stereotypes and Prejudices?” In the field of literary and cultural there were numerous

21 remarkable presentations, e.g. Tihana Klepač’s “Mary Helena Fortune: Waif Wanderer or a Cross-dresser with a mission?” a presentation about one of the earliest female detective writers, and Dobrota Pucherová’s “Dissent and Resistance in Contemporary African Writing”.

Eva Skopečková covered an interesting topic in translation studies – “Translation and Language Learning: Untapped Potential of Functionalist Approach to Translation in the Foreign Language Classroom”. The variety of topics covered at the conference enriched the knowledge and experience of many of the contributors as well as the visitors.

To conclude, we would like to thank Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D. for the interview and Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek and Petr Čučka, DiS. for the photos and, on the behalf of all the participants, we would like to praise the Department Organizing Committee and the students for their great job. Do not forget to follow the Department website for upcoming conferences and do not pass the opportunity to be a part of such an experience, because it is truly enriching.

MK

Don Sparling giving his speech at the reception; photo by Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek

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KAA Conference 2015

Keynote Speakers The 10th Brno conference held five keynote speakers of different academic interests, as the conference was a collective project of all the research areas of KAA. Because of this, keynote speakers of different academic interests were chosen and invited. Thus, for example, for the translation studies oriented audience, the highlight of the conference was Anthony Pym’s speech, while those interested more in culture and US politics had probably eagerly expected the talk of Udo Hebel. In this article, we will briefly sum up who they are and what were the topics of their talks.

ARITHA VAN HERK At the very beginning of the conference a Canadian professor Aritha van Herk, who is at the same time a well-known novel writer, gave a speech. Her studies deal with the relation between women, societal norms and familial expectations. In her presentation called “Erasure and Vanishment: the Writer Dances with Absence” she discussed the changing position of a book in people’s lives today. She described how, in our modern age, with all the technical inventions, the book lost its uniqueness and fixed position in the world and is now interconnected with other aspects of our semi-virtual reality.

EIJA VENTOLA The second plenary speaker was Professor Eija Ventola from Aalto, Finland. Currently she teaches at the School of Business, Department of Management Studies and in her research she focuses on how the various languages, texts, discourses and other forms of communication behave in the context of international business. Her study falls within the linguistic field, therefore she was introduced by Mgr. Jan Chovanec, Ph.D. Ventola’s talk “Do Visualization and ‘Internettization’ Challenge Text in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching? Does Language

Eija Ventola; photo by P. Čučka

KAA Conference 2015 Matter?” was designed as a suggestion for English language teachers, and it was based on a project she did with her students. She stressed the importance of the Internet and the new meaning it creates. She said, that we (as teachers) should “use the Internet as an opportunity” and not only as just another tool.

As an example she introduced a project made by the students, who created a semi-virtual interactive game or application, a map, which anybody can access, visit particular places and perform respective tasks.

Thus he or she learns the language and discovers something about the great musician of Finnish history, Jean Sibelius. She concluded her speech by saying, that “we need the proper equipment to develop learning environments,” to create a “theoretical scaffolding for the students.”

ANTHONY PYM The third speaker, and this time the “star” of translation studies, was Anthony Pym. He is a wellknown translator and Professor of Translation and Intercultural Studies at Rovira i Virgili University in Spain, and he gave a presentation on “Literacy as an Aim for Translation” in which he mentioned that nowadays translation is being viewed as a “bad, bad, bad” method for teaching.

According to the research he spoke about, the most used and lauded method in teaching a foreign language was a communicative method and the least used and praised one was a grammar-translation method.

The most important sentence (at least for the teachers who are interested in translation) that could have been heard that day in Brno, however, challenged the results the audience could have seen in one of the graphs: “You should not think that translation is the opposite of language learning.” With these words, Anthony Pym reacted to Mr. Eric Pickles’ (a British Conservative Party politician) statement that “if you translate for immigrants, they will not learn English.” The main point of Pym’s presentation was to raise awareness of the importance of literacy in translation. Pym gave several examples illustrating the misunderstandings caused by wrong translations or interpretations and he also pointed out the fact that even if we give the ready-made translations to non-native (immigrant) people, we can still help them to learn the language by e.g. developing their

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A panel session; photo by Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek

vocabulary.

Pym developed his “translation-in-teaching idea” further when he presented a scale which displayed ten countries and how much they use translation in their English language classes. The first place belonged to Finland where the translation is being used in teaching English and Finland (surprisingly?) also ranked first in the second scale that showed which countries have the best language-proficiency index.

Even more surprising then is the fact that Germany, according to the graph, does not use translation in teaching, however, it has a very good proficiency index. How is it possible? As Anthony Pym explains, in Germany, the Grammar-translation method has been redefined and it is now called mediation (Sprachmittlung). Pym clarifies that mediation is seen as a communicative method of teaching and as something “more than a translation.”

UDO HEBEL Professor Udo Hebel from the Regensburg University was the fourth keynote speaker. He is the Chair of American Studies at his home university, but throughout his career he gave lectures at more than six other universities in both Europe and North America. His speech was called “Framing Obama: Transnational Iconographies of an American President”, and as the title suggests, he presented the audience several sets of images of current US president Barack Obama in contrast with some of his predecessors, especially John F. Kennedy. Hebel’s idea was to draw our attention to the similarities between the history and the present as many presidential photos look similar. Presidents depicted

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KAA Conference 2015

The opening; photo by P. Čučka

as army leaders, sportsmen, turkey saviours, and heads of their families. Some of the pictures look like ordinary snapshots from Obama’s life, without any further reference or relevance. But a thorough research shows that the scenes of the photos may be carefully arranged, the images rigorously taken and in the end finely picked and only then they are ready to be published. According to Hebel, presidential pictures are “iconic and bound in a matrix of cultural meaning.” This “interpictoriality” is not unique to US presidents only but, as Hebel hinted, with Obama’s wife, Michelle, the situation is the same.

In conclusion, it is important to realise, that what at first sight may look simple or meaningless, may in reality be in various ways, deliberately or not, interconnected with other previous pictures, not only photos, but paintings, drawings or moving pictures, and it is good to be aware and not underestimate this fact.

in Taiwan” was a title of the fifth plenary speech, delivered by a Taiwan Professor Chiou-Lan Chern.

She is a Professor of English at National Taiwan Normal University, and her specialization is English teaching, methodology and language skills. She cooperates with Taiwan Ministry of Education, which, together with the Ministry of Culture enabled her to give a lecture in Brno. She discussed the problems and advantages of globalization in connection with English language teaching and the implementation of English to primary and secondary schools. She referred to her homeland, which turned out to be an advantage, because the audience could compare this environment with the one at their home universities and maybe get a glimpse of what future could bring to schools as well.

All the plenary speeches were widely attended and showed the topics and fields of scholarly discussion of today – multiculturalism and the rise of new technologies and its (dis)advantages.

AV, BŽ

CHIOU-LAN CHERN “The Impact of Globalization on English Education

A panel session; photo by Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek

Udo Hebel; photo by P. Čučka

KAA Conference 2015

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Interview with Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D. You were one of the main organizers of this year’s conference, but before we talk about this, what could you tell us about the history of this Brno international conference?

The history goes back to the 1980s when it was intended mostly for Czech and Slovak academics but as years went by it became more internationalized.

The importance of these conferences lies, on the one hand, in showcasing our department’s research, but also in bringing interesting research to us, so to speak.

What was so significant about this year’s conference?

It is the biggest conference for Anglophone studies scholars in the Czech Republic and I think what’s quite unique about it is that it is one of the more general, traditional philological conferences where all disciplines – literature, linguistics, cultural studies, translation, teaching ESL – complement each other and/or even combine in some of the presentations.

Could you tell us something from behind the scenes, for example how do you choose the topic of the conference?

Hmm…, ‘behind the scenes’ is quite boring because it is simply a lot of work and time going into organizing such venture and since it is quite a prestigious and representative event, you want everything to work out well in the end. I liked the way we were able to work as a team with my colleagues Honza Chovanec, Filip Krajník, and Renata Kamenická, so when, for example, we were looking for an overall theme, which should have been focused but at the same time general enough so that various fields and topics could fit in, we simply closed ourselves in a room and brainstormed until we had it.

What is the main goal of the conference?

I guess it is always the same – to bring scholars together, give them time and space to exchange ideas and to network, to listen to one another and ask questions, to let them be inspired….

Could you tell us the approximate number of the participants, and visitors and how has this changed from the first year?

There were about 160 scholars giving papers and the overall number was about 210 people. As far as I know these numbers are similar, or only slightly higher compared to the last conference.

How often does the conference take place?

Once in five years.

How long does it take to organize such a conference and how much effort do you have to put in it?

We had to send out a call for papers roughly a year before. Then the work came and went in waves but as the dates approached it got really intense – a month before we were practically doing nothing else.

When comparing to other years: what went well, and what feedback have you received from the participants and visitors?

The conference seems to have been well received; we had positive comments from a number of people, including a very favourable ‘review’ on the Canadian scholar Linda Warley’s blog.

And personally, what did you enjoy most about this year?

In the end I liked the various skills I had to use and develop during the process of organizing this, stretching from honing a small talk with the Canadian Ambassador down to catering for 200+ people and making sure toilets were cleaned every day and wellsupplied. But I think the moment we enjoyed most was when everything was over and we could breathe out with relief... :-)) MK

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Bára Kratochvílová

I Love to See My Students Move on!

In the spring issue of Re:Views we present you with another inspiring story of a KAA student who has made it in the professional world and managed to use the knowledge and skills acquired at KAA to make a career. Barbora Kratochvílová, a perspective owner of a language school and a passionate teacher, proves that language teaching does not have to be something KAA students do only to pay the bills, but something that can become a real career and a vocation too.

When did it first occur to you to found a language school and why?

I don‘t think it ever „occurred“ to me. I started thinking about opening the place where we are now last year and then we opened up in September.

But it was more of a natural development of things to me. I first started teaching when I was 15 in a language school where I also studied English. Then I was teaching privately at home or at my students‘ places, as everyone does. During my first year at university I started teaching courses in our house as well, as we had an extra room which I could change into a classroom for up to 6 students. Then there were more and more people, I started to need some more teachers and for some 2 years it was me and two girls helping me teaching children. But it wasn‘t manageable in only 1 classroom in my house anymore and I started thinking about moving to a bigger place. I found the place we are now in and it worked. I‘m not saying it was easy, especially the opening and reconstruction of the place itself. But I never think of it as „planning to open a business“.

I was lucky that my students seem to like me a lot and spread the information.

What were the biggest problems when setting up your school?

The most difficult was the actual hard work preparing the classrooms, looking for people, making a new web page and logo, advertisement and also managing all the paperwork. But paperwork is a different story.

The thing is that I was gone last spring semester, studying in Stockholm. I came back to the Czech Republic in middle of July, so I had 2 months to sign the contract, and start doing everything. We opened on 12th September, but 4 weeks before that we were still taking down and building walls. As I‘ve said it

Barbora Kratochvílová

Barbora Kratochvílová is a student of the master teaching program at KAA, FF MU and she is also the founder of a language school ‘Jazyková škola S Bárou’ in Zastávka u Brna. was all a bit crazy because of the limited time I had to do everything and I was rather stubborn and wanted everything to be perfect. It was a lot of hard work and stress to get everything done in time.

Was there anything unexpected that occurred while you were setting up the school?

Most people didn‘t believe it could be done, so maybe the most surprising thing is that we managed to

Bára Kratochvílová

finish everything in time and it mostly worked out well and without problems. I got the wrong colour and then size of tables in one of the classrooms, but those things just happen.

Now I am going to ask you about what you actually face when you go independent as a teacher of English.

You have a lot of people coming in with completely different needs or ideas and sometimes it takes a lot of knowledge and experience to help them find the right way.

I think the beginnings are most difficult as you need to learn a lot of things, for example about the market of English textbooks, the format of different tests that your students are preparing for and so on.

You have a lot of people coming in with completely different needs or ideas and sometimes it takes a lot of knowledge and experience to help them find the right way.

Could you describe what running a language school actually looks like in everyday life?

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It mainly takes communication with the students and the teachers. I sometimes find it difficult to divide my time and energy between communicating with students, answering emails, solving their requests, working with the teachers, managing the websites, preparing classes, teaching and doing the paperwork; even though I am not completely alone in the papers, I carry most of the details about students in my head, so nobody can really do it all without me. Any changes in the schedules are quite complicated. I have people calling, emailing and texting me all the time that someone is ill, someone is on a business trip and wants to come at a different time or double the classes next week ... That is probably the most difficult and stressful, because if I made a mistake I could have a student coming to the language school with no teacher there or 2 students coming to one teacher‘s class at the same time. That is my everyday nightmare. Then it is ordering books and everyday things – running out of coffee is bad! It is a million little things I check every day in the classrooms. If I am not in the school for 2 days, it is like forever.

While studying at KAA, you also participated in the Erasmus study programme. How did you manage to keep up your brand during that time?

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I have actually spent 2 semesters abroad, one in Germany on Erasmus and one in Stockholm as a

I want my students to work quite a lot and do a lot of homework. In my experience, the more homework, the more students actually do them. freemover. But I was coming home every 6 weeks at least and always teaching for the few days I was in CZ. So I gave out homework for 6 weeks and my 2 teachers went on teaching children. But my students were really nice and waited for me to come back.

What is actually your methodology? Do you use any of the special methods? Is your teaching team following any set of methodological rules or is it up to the teachers themselves to use their own teaching styles?

I do not believe in any extreme or „magical“ methods and L21 only teaching. That was also what I studied in my bachelor thesis and loved the topic. So we DO use L2 teaching – using only the target language in lessons L1 teaching – using some of the mother tongue of the student to provide them with eexplanations vand translations 1 2

Bára Kratochvílová some L12 (of course only as needed and depending on the students‘ level, but that is a topic for a whole study) and even translations to English for practice. I am also a big fan of graded readers, I have had students who read extensively and you could see how much faster they were moving on. I want my students to work quite a lot and do a lot of homework. In my experience, the more homework, the more students actually do them.

For most of my regular students English has become an everyday activity and I think it is the best you can ask. Of course there are exceptions with people who really don‘t have the time, but that‘s not the majority.

And as for teachers, I usually ask them to see at least one of my own classes at the beginning to give them an idea what the people are used to and what they expect. I check a bit what homework they give, so they follow the same structure that I do. But everybody is different and their teaching styles are different as well. I can‘t make a teacher a copy of me and wouldn‘t even want to, of course. It seems to me now that the teaching styles of my best and most popular teachers vary greatly. But that‘s fine because the students also prefer different kinds of teaching. Thus I want my teachers to follow the structure that I have set, but otherwise, as long as the students are happy with their classes and they have good results, I let them have some freedom. I am glad that they come and ask me quite often whether I agree with doing this and that or what I think about it, so it works well. I am happy to say that we cooperate as a team, share activities that have worked well in the classes or ask each other for help and advice. I believe the most important thing is having a team of good teachers which is also not an easy thing.

What actually makes you decide for one applicant or the other?

That‘s difficult. It is all together, experience, education (university / language certificates), but also how I feel about the person. I need them to be reliable, quite independent and mainly nice to the students. But it is hard to say beforehand whom the students are going to love and whom not. I have had a good hand choosing people by now, luckily, but we are always looking for good English teachers! Also, I have noticed during my job interviews that when you ask good and experienced teachers about the textbook they like to use, you usually get a long and passionate monologues

Bára Kratochvílová

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about what they like and hate about this and that particular textbook…

Do you use textbooks in your courses? If so, which ones are your favourites?

What are your plans for the future? Do you plan to keep on teaching at your language school after you graduate? Do you like to be your own mistress or would you consider working as an employee one day?

For teaching adults I love English Files. We have switched to the new ones - English File Third Edition.

I have to say they have improved them in some parts, made them more modern, but there are things that were better in the older ones, called New English Files. Nothing is ever perfect, but it is a really nice textbook. With the older kids we use English Plus, it is a book meant for language schools and grammar schools specialising in English. Small kids use Superminds; we started with them this year, and like them. But with the small children it is a slightly different story. I have found out that their tastes change very suddenly as they mature! What was cute and amazing 2 months ago suddenly becomes stupid.

We like the Superminds books as they are interesting for the more and less mature ones altogether. You see - a teacher could talk about textbooks forever.

I am planning to keep on working on ‘Jazyková škola s Bárou’ of course. It is hard work, but I do like being my own mistress and there are still many things I would like to do and improve for my students.

What do you enjoy most about being a teacher? And do you have any kind of motto, something you try to stick to and pass to your students as well?

I like helping my students, seeing them move on. I like to see that being able to understand and speak English changes their lives. I want them to like English, enjoy the work and be proud of how much they have learned and how good they are! That is probably the best thing about it all.

All photos courtesy of http://www.sbarou.cz/

30

Study Abroad

Study Abroad

Study Abroad

31

The World Is Out There

By MarkĂŠta Ĺ onkovĂĄ

Have you always felt you want to experience more, beyond the horizons of your world here? Have you always felt that there is so much more to experience, to see, and to learn? Have you always felt you want to fully embrace your student life and to go on an adventure you will never forget? Then study abroad is your path!

We, as students of the Department of English and enriching experience that concerns not only and American Studies, have the immeasurable study exchanges, but also work placements and advantage of speaking a language that is the thanks to the recent changes in the program new lingua franca. Thus, but of course not only structure, you can participate more than once because of that, we are able to go more or less during your studies. If the university of your anywhere in the world knowing choice is not listed, there is we can always find somebody no reason to despair. For Even if the process might to understand us. Why should example, although at the sometimes seem complicated, you be afraid to take a pen moment KAA does not have do not despair, it is worth it. and a sheet of paper and start Erasmus contracts with many writing your applications for British universities and none various study abroad programs then?

Although Erasmus (now called Erasmus+) is probably one of the most accessible options, it is not the only one.

Masar yk University h a s m any p ar t ne r universities and also departmental agreements with many institutions of higher education worldwide. Moreover, our government has bilateral agreements with countries all over the world, too. Among the different programs you can choose from, there is the Freemovers program which allows you to pick a university of your choice, as well as Erasmus Mundus, CEEPUS, and ISEP, to mention just a few.

Have you already participated in an Erasmus exchange? Or have you recently succeeded in being selected as the next Erasmus student? Then congratulations! Erasmus is a very interesting

with Irish ones, you can still enjoy universities in other countries that are equally excellent and maybe your experience will be even more interesting this way.

If you are interested in English-speaking countries but would like to travel overseas, have a look into the partner universities list , bilateral agreements or ISEP .

They all offer wonderful opportunities to study at interesting places for example in the USA, Canada, or Australia.

Freemovers might also appeal to you, since the choice is wider, even though the application process might be a bit more complicated.

Although the scholarships sometimes seem not to be as generous as the ones you can win with Erasmus exchange, it is still worth to have a look into.

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Study Abroad

The list of the programs and options above is not a definite one, though.

There are also very interesting opportunities to study and work in Canada with more info to be found here . What is not widely known is also a possibility at the Faculty of Arts to apply for “Special Schorlaship� that is designed to help students with study mobility. And if you do not feel like travelling at all, but still would like to enjoy the company of international stu d e nt s , you c an either volunteer for the International Student Club at MU or just go to their numerous events, or you can try applying for any international summer school in the Czech Republic.

All in all, even if the process might sometimes seem complicated, do not despair, it is worth it. And even if you do not succeed in the first selection, apply

University College Cork, Ireland

for another one. Another good idea is not to limit oneself only to English-speaking countries, but to focus on universities that offer courses fitting your academic interests. It will help you later on in your studies and also it may earn you some extra points during the selection, so do not forget to mention in your cover letter why you are choosing the particular university!

Also, get familiar with the webpages of the Center for the International Cooperation and subscribe for their newsletter. You can find there most of the information you

Study Abroad need about particular programs, and in the newsletter that they send out once a month there are always new opportunities to be found, so do not miss it. And if you do not find the information you were looking for there, do not be afraid to contact them directly.

I have personally experienced both an Erasmus exchange as well as one summer school abroad during my bachelor studies.

Especially the summer school at University College Cork, Ireland, was an eye-opening and very enriching experience that persuaded me to study and travel more.

Then, I applied for Erasmus and even though I did not succeed the first time, I did not give up and the next year I got a placement at Keele University, UK. Neither of the programs was really easy to succeed in

33 applying for and the amount of paperwork was sometimes overwhelming, but in the end, it was worth it. I can especially recommend going abroad for a summer school. It is a good opportunity for those who do not feel like studying abroad for a long time, but still want to experience something new. Given the intensity of the program, I feel like benefiting from it more than from any other standard semester course. International summer schools in the Czech Republic are very interesting, too – I participated in one at the Faculty of Social Studies and even though I was still studying at the same university, it felt very different with the international students around. There is no reason to be afraid or to hesitate. Just browse the web, pick the university and go. The world is out there, waiting for you.

All photos by Markéta Šonková Keele Univeristy, UK

34

Oxford

Oxford

Radcliffe Camera

Oxford

35

Stepping into Oxford Shoes

By Anna Formánková

Wet pavements. Red busses. BICYCLES. If you thought that a city centre without cars is a calm and silent city centre you would be terribly mistaken. The narrow lanes, broader streets, hidden passages: all the places are buzzing with life. From lectures into the libraries, a stop by the college to pick up the mail from the pidge, pop into the café for a quick snack and get back in time for the tute: the Oxford student never stops!

What is it like to have the chance to study at the University of Oxford, the ultimate scholarly dream of countless students in the world? It is busy.

Time-consuming. Exciting. You never have enough time to do everything you want. You are constantly torn apart between your department and your college, your free time and your work, running around the city centre trying not to miss a single moment of your precious time here. And it is glorious.

The collegiate system The collegiate system is one of the most important features of University of Oxford, and I wish I had been told just how significant a feature it was before I arrived because it would have saved me a lot of trouble. The university consists of faculties, schools,

Every member of the academia at the University of Oxford has a double affiliation, sometimes verging on double identity: they become members of both the faculty and the department, having obligations and commitments to both bodies. and departments on one hand, and on the other, there are the colleges. While colleges take care of your welfare, overlook your overall progress, and ensure that your university experience is the best possible, faculties provide for your actual teaching and academic supervision. Thus every member of the academia at the University of Oxford has a double

affiliation, sometimes verging on double identity (bordering with schizophrenia): they become members of both the faculty and the department, having obligations and commitments to both bodies – though not always in equal measure. And if you become a fellow or a professor, you receive a double pay: part from your college where you might work as a tutor of undergraduates or college advisor, and the other part from your department where you work on your research, give lectures, and supervise students working in your field. Can you imagine how many things can go wrong? How many emails and memos might just fall through? All the missed calls and issues that nobody solves? And yet the university functions. What is the key asset of Oxford university administration? Mastering the chaos. Left hand might not know what the right one is doing, and yet, the whole organism is running. And it is running fast and forward. have you seen the list of all the brilliant names that studied here lately? No? What about the US National Security Advisor Dr Susan Rice? Or opera singer Dr Ian Bostridge? Or maybe actress Felicity Jones?

Faculties, studies, lectures As for the academic year, it is divided into trimesters at Oxford: Michaelmas (autumn), Hilary (winter) and Trinity (spring). Faculty, or more specifically the department is your main academic “base” when you start studying at University of Oxford. Undergraduate students attend general course lectures which are organised by the department, various lecture series covering various topics for your Papers (let’s not go there, that would be too much detail for such a lovely relaxed article as this one, right), but the main

36 individual teaching is arranged for by the college.

As a graduate student, your education is provided for mainly by the department. Mostly there are closed seminars for a very small number of students which allow for intensive work, discussions, and

What is the key asset of Oxford university administration? Mastering the chaos. presentations. Usually, graduate students work on two longer essays over the course of the first two terms and then write their dissertation which is typically around ten thousand words long – mainly due to the fact that most graduate courses last one year only and it would not be possible to write a more substantial work in such a short time. But if you still have free time on your hands you can attend undergraduate lectures – even as a graduate student – which are open to everyone, no matter what your subject actually is and on what level you are studying at the moment. Even the professors sometimes attend their colleagues’ lectures.

Oxford

College A college is an independent unit within the federative collegiate system of the university. There are tens of colleges at Oxford, varying in the courses they support, wealth, size, and number of students they have, the smallest ones may have less than 20 students while the others may admit hundreds of them. Not all colleges accept students in all courses, usually there is a list of courses and specialisations that each college supports, the number and variation depending on the specialisations of their senior members (and therefore, potential tutors), tradition, as well as on money. Each of the colleges is funded independently, usually through the estates and land they own, but it might as well be through shares in various companies and concerns, or maybe from a share in London O2 Arena; based on this system, there are inevitable differences in the amount of funding each college has at hand.

If you become an undergraduate (BA) student, basically all your teaching is arranged for by your college. You attend general course lectures, but you are also assigned a tutor, senior member of the

First quad at Jesus College

Oxford college who is a specialist in your field, with whom you arrange for individual sessions (tutorials, in Oxonian slang “tutes”). At graduate level you consult two or three supervisors, each of them helping you with one of your big essays or dissertation.

Apart from your tutor/ supervisor, you also have a college advisor. No matter what level your studies are, you are assigned a member of the college, usually a senior member as well, who either works in the same field as you do or had a similar career path, and therefore, knows what it is like to study the course you attend. The college advisor is interested in your welfare at the university, from your academic advancement to social integrity to personal issues.

Thus whenever you have any problem which needs to be solved you have a chance to contact this more

Once you become a member of the college it is your place to stay, there are the people you stick with; your college becomes your new family. experienced person who should be able to give you a piece of advice or provide the necessary support.

Which is a wonderful concept; the more when you arrive at the university as an exchange student and then you find out that your study programme actually does not exist (which happened to myself).

At that moment you are grateful for any support.

(Thank you so much, Dennis.)

The social aspect of a college was an absolutely new discovery for me. Once you become a member of the college it is your place to stay, there are the people you stick with; your college becomes your new family. You can never imagine how quickly you develop the sense of belonging and pride. After three weeks at Oxford I knew that my college was the best of them all, no matter what I actually knew about the rest. You get your pin, your college hoodie and nobody can fool with you anymore. Even if you do not live right on the college grounds, you still have your pidge (= pigeon hole) at the lodge where all your mail is delivered to.

37 The sense of integrity is even intensified by the fact that you are not only member of a college as such, but there is also a specific “Room” you belong to: Junior Common Room (JCR) for undergraduates, Middle Common Room (MCR) for graduate (MA) students and DPhils (aka doctoral students), and Senior Common Room (SCR) for post-graduate fellows, professors, and other senior members of the college. In each room there are several elected representatives who take care of welfare, sports, events and many more. At Jesus College, we have at least one MCR event each week during the term and it is a great opportunity to catch up with your fellow MCR members.

Life As a student you are very busy. If you attend lectures, seminars, consult tutors or work on your dissertation, the workload is usually rather big and libraries become your best friends. The magic of the word “work” is astounding and for a Czech student absolutely unique. At Oxford everybody is studying hard and everyone understands what it is like to have a deadline approaching fast, since they have all been there. Nobody will judge when you say you need to leave the wine party earlier or spend the Saturday evening at home reading. The fact that others actually respect your attitude towards your studies is an unbelievable truth for a Czech student, but at Oxford nobody will hold you by the sleeve trying to make you stay “a bit longer.”

Nobody will judge when you say you need to leave the wine party earlier or spend the Saturday evening at home reading.

But Oxford does not at all mean studies only. The events at your room allow you to get to know your fellow college members who usually come from all across the academic spectrum and thus you get to meet a lot of people from various different fields, not limited to your department only. Each college have their own bar and if you get to make friends at your department who belong to other colleges you can end

38

Oxford

Jesus College was one of the first five colleges, along with Brasenose, Hertford, St Catherine‘s and Wadham, which started admitting both men and women in 1974.

up boppin’ (aka partying; party = bop) with them at their college! And night life is certainly not limited to college bars only, there are numerous pubs, clubs and cocktail bars all around the town.

However, night life is not everything (for most people)! Oxford has several museums which are mostly free to visit, local theatres have varied programmes of plays and concerts on; you can also do tours around other colleges (Fancy popping into the Exeter College to see J.R.R. Tolkien’s Oxford home?)

– those are usually free for university students as well. Oxford is a place which photographers must love because of all the amazing buildings and lovely pebble stone paths... Though I have to admit these seem extremely romantic in theory, in practice, there is not a decent way of walking across them. Not even in hiking boots. And now imagine walking around in high heels.

If you are not afraid of water, punting is a good alternative to walking; you just sit in a boat and row down the stream enjoying the views. Apart from

walks across the pebble stone (really, pebble stones, not cobble stones) paths and rowing in currents of the Thames, riding a bike is the most common way of getting around the town. The number of bikes on literally every corner is unbelievable; and if you need to drop into Tesco to get groceries or stop by the local Oxfam bookshop to check whether someone have not donated the one book you really need, bicycle is the best vehicle to use.

What is it like to study at University of Oxford? It’s a challenge. The whole system is so different to the one you are used to; people are coming to study there from all around the world and you are simply one of them. But it does not feel strange or lonely, because you have the sense of community thanks to the fact that even though you are a stranger, you get a chance to belong. On Sunday you meet your friends for brunch at the MCR, then you pop into Tesco to grab your 1 of 5 and pass the afternoon working in one of the libraries. And you feel that it is time well-spent.

All photos are courtesy of Anna Formánková.

2016 Presidential Election

39

The 2016 Presidential Election and Campaign Financing

By Jan Zajíček

If all goes well and Barack Obama‘s term does not end prematurely, November 8, 2016, is the date America will know the name of its 45th president. It might be former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner of the Democratic Party. Or it might be one of the Republicans: former governor of Florida and a member of the Bush clan Jeb Bush, folksy governor of New Jersey Chris Christie, libertarian senator from Kentucky Rand Paul, or even one of the Tea Partiers, like Texan senator Ted Cruz. A year and a half is eons in politics, so it is pointless to make predictions at this point. But to rise to the highest office in the United States requires much more than just debating skills and a good political record. Before the primaries, debates, intense campaigning, and all other activities aimed at winning the favor of the voters start, presidential hopefuls have to compete for the favor of the donors – someone who can actually pay for all the campaigning, since there is much less exposure without the money.

Political campaigns in the United States are mostly funded by Political Action Committees (PACs).

PACs are organizations that collect contributions

from donors and then finance all kinds of political campaigns – campaigns for or against state or federal politicians, ballot initiatives, or legislation. Before 2010, the McCain-Feingold Act limited the amount of money that could be donated to a PAC by an individual donor (an individual or an organization). But in 2010, the infamous Supreme Court case Citizens United

This election is probably going to be the most expensive election in history. vs. Federal Election Commission took place. The Supreme Court voted in favor of Citizens United, a conservative political organization, arguing that limiting the amount of money a donor can contribute to a PAC is an infringement on the right to free speech, even if the donor is a large corporation, since corporations are just collectives of individual who all should be protected under the First Amendment.

The ruling effectively rendered McCain-Feingold meaningless, lifting limits on contributions of forprofit corporations and labor unions to PACs. Opponents of the ruling argue that this leads to a http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/US20-back.jpg

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2016 Presidential Election

quid pro quo situation. They argue that politicians tend to pass or oppose laws the donors want them to and that since most contributions are made by a small percentage of donors, wealthy individuals and corporations tend to influence decisions of politicians much more than actual citizens. The core of their argument is that money does not equal speech – when a corporation gives money to a PAC, it is not a free

Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who have been financing campaigns for a long time, are planning to spend $899 million on the 2016 race. speech act and therefore it is an action that can be regulated by the government without violating the First Amendment. Many people across the political spectrum are determined to change the current system.

A liberal Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig with his Mayday PAC wants to gain support in Congress and amend the Constitution. An organization called ‘Take Back Our Republic’ wants to win support of conservatives in order to limit the impact PAC money has on politics.

In order to get an insight into the 2016 presidential election, it is necessary to take a look at where the money flows. This election is probably going to be the most expensive election in history. More than $2 billion was spent on both 2012 presidential campaigns.

Right now, the 2016 hopefuls are racing for the money.

Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are leading at the moment. But apart from the partisan establishment, there is a third group that could put a lot of money into the race. Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who have been financing campaigns for a long time, are planning to spend $899 million on the 2016 race. Their preferences? Someone who could carry out their libertarian agenda: deregulating the economy, lifting labor protection laws, abolishing minimum wage, lowering taxes. Jeb Bush and other Republicans are currently competing for the money of the Koch Brothers and their associates.

When it comes to presidential election, there is also a lot of “free” exposure, i.e. debates on TV, attention of the mainstream press, or any other kind of appearance in the media that does not require campaign money.

This means that the candidate that raises the most money does not necessarily have to win. In theory, a presidential candidate has to be visible just enough so they can make the most compelling argument for why

Photo credit DonkeyHotey, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/ donkeyhotey/6681996931/in/set-72157628278836615“

2016 Presidential Election they should become the next president. But in order to get the “free” exposure, an opportunity to make the argument, a candidate has to gain attention of the media, which is next to impossible without a wellfunded campaign. The problem is that the media do not have an incentive to give each candidate the same coverage, since most people only care about those candidates who have a shot at winning. Naturally, the media is going to cover only those candidates that have a well-funded campaigns behind them.

41 and energy on pleasing a very particular kind of voter – the donor. Donors fund campaigns and campaigns are essential for gaining the support of voters. In the end, voters have the final say in who will be elected the next president. But voters will be given a choice between eligible candidates and the choice will be formulated by donors.

Jan Zajíček

Many people question the current status quo, where the only plausible choice is the choice between Democrats and Republicans, since the two main parties run well funded electoral machines that crush any candidate who does not have D or R next to their name

This can be frustrating for third party candidates who do not have the privilege of being invited to participate in the debates, on TV etc. Many people question the current status quo, where the only plausible choice is the choice between Democrats and Republicans, since the two main parties run well funded electoral machines that crush any candidate who does not have D or R next to their name. And there are virtually no public institutions that would give third party candidates at least a small chance of running against partisan candidates. For example the Commission on Presidential Debates, an institution that organizes public presidential debates, is a private non-profit organization sponsored by private donations. Former third party candidate Jill Stein called this institution out for making “mockery of democracy” after she had been arrested for entering the Hofstra University during the time of a presidential debate from which she was barred, just like all other third party candidates.

The 2016 presidential election may seem like a far away event, it is not even clear who is going to represent the two parties. But the race has already begun. The current system of financing political campaigns demands that presidential hopefuls spend their time

Jan is a graduate of the Department of English and American Studies who plans on returning to school this fall to pursue his MA degree. During the first year of his studies, he started to follow American and British politics and he quickly became obsessed.

His main academic interests are political philosophies of the anglosphere and modern American history, but he also recognizes how useful an honest linguistic research can be.

Because he grew up without television, Jan loves to watch a good movie and to discuss it passionately with friends. And then there is music. Jan has been an active DJ of Breakbeat and Drum and Bass for 5 years now. He is also a proud member of an elite DJ formation called Redrum Crew.

42

Investigating Language with Corpora

Investigating Language with Corpora

By Zuzana Halgašová

Are you looking for an accessible analysis method for your diploma thesis, or just looking for a translation of a particular phrase? Where other methods fail, a well-suited corpus might be the key to success.

Have you ever wondered about a language problem that your dictionary was unable to solve? Normally, you would turn to a native speaker, but what if there is no one at hand?

You might also try to look for your answers in the deep dark jungle of the Internet, which, however, has several pitfalls. Searching the Internet effectively requires mastering the art of full text searching. And even when you find what you were looking for, there is often

Fig. 1 Words ending with -oholic Source: Sketch Engine

no or very little information about the text – the author, his or her native language, date of publication, and other important features of the text background remain unknown to us.

You can imagine it as looking for an answer in a heap of torn pages and books without covers.

Another option is to use computer software to search in a corpus – a large, but neat bookshelf of carefully selected authentic texts annotated with relevant information.

The search results for a particular string of characters (word, phrase, or even punctuation mark) can be then described in terms of their frequency (how often they appear in the corpus) and context (in what environment they appear most frequently).

The use and study of corpora in linguistics date back to the 1960‘s, when Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis compiled the Brown Corpus1. The original corpus data back then were stored on punched cards readable by keypunch machines. The technological advances of the coming decades naturally fostered the development and employment of corpus-based approaches to analysis of language use, and thus the applicability of corpus methods is much broader nowadays. In lexicography it is used for

Investigating Language with Corpora compiling general reference dictionaries (Collins COBUILD2 as the historically first one, with most major dictionary publishers following) and for building specialized glossaries. In the field of language teaching and learning, corpora can be used for studying texts written by language learners, or in the classroom, as a tool providing the students with naturally occurring examples of vocabulary. Sociolinguists can study the correlation of factors such as age, gender, language proficiency, or language variety with differences in language use. A historical (diachronic) approach may also be taken in case the contents of a corpus are annotated with time data. Translation studies are primarily interested in parallel corpora, i.e. original texts aligned with their translations in one or more languages, and comparable corpora, which contain texts of the same genre, length, subject field, and/or historical period in two or more languages or language varieties. Most often the electronic corpora contain written texts, but there are

Fig. 2 Word Sketch for ‘word’ Source: Sketch Engine

43 also corpora of spoken language transcribed into text.

The availability and user-friendliness of corpora has also improved significantly. One of the freely accessible corpus tools for the English language has been developed at Brigham Young University. The BYU interface contains four corpora of American English (COCA – Corpus of Contemporary American English3, COHA – Corpus of Historical American English4, TIME Magazine Corpus5, Corpus of American Soap Operas6), BNC – British National Corpus7, Canadian Strathy Corpus8, and two corpora of global English (Wikipedia Corpus9, and GloWbE corpus of web-based English10).

Perhaps the most widely used corpus tool among the students of Masaryk University is the Sketch Engine11, developed by Lexical Computing Ltd. Thanks to their co-operation with the Natural Language Processing Center at the Faculty of Informatics, all students and employees of MU can benefit from free unlimited access 12 to more than 200 corpora in various languages available through this tool (including the kacen and kac2en parallel corpora compiled at the Department of English and American Studies at MU). Apart from basic functions such as listing concordances (searched words in their contexts) or listing words according to their frequencies, it enables users to create custom

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Investigating Language with Corpora

Fig. 3 Concordance ‘phrase in context’ Source: Sketch Engine

corpora from either manually collected texts or from texts available on the Internet, and also to explore the language use through so called Word Sketches (automatically derived tables that describe the collocational behaviour of individual words)13 or through the Corpus Query Language (CQL). In 2014, a new tool called the SkELL14, 15, has emerged, thus completing the Sketch Engine toolbox with a language learning tool.

Since autumn 2011 the Department of English and American Studies has been offering three courses where students can learn to work with corpora. These are Introduction to Corpus Linguistics (AJ12051) for BA students; Corpus Linguistics (AJ22058) for MA students; and an e-learning course Exercises in Corpus Use (AJ02007) for both BA and MA students. The first two courses are also open to students of fields other than English philology and

translation. In case you decide to employ a corpus-based method in your research, you may discuss your ideas and questions with the lecturers of the mentioned courses (PhDr. Jarmila Fictumová; James Edward Thomas, M. A; Mgr. Alena Tomešová; and Mgr. Petr Sudický).

To conclude, at least some of the recent corpus-based theses written by our students deserve mentioning: Mgr. Romana Ambrožová has studied the issue of false friends in her master‘s thesis under the supervision of Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek16; and Bc. Kristýna Štěpánková has investigated learner translation errors in her bachelor‘s thesis supervised by PhDr. Jarmila Fictumová17. Both these theses employed a parallel text aligner Hypal18, 19, designed by Mgr. Adam Obrusník, a doctoral student at the Department of Physical Electronics.

Investigating Language with Corpora

45

References 1: Francis, Winthrop Nelson, and Henry Kučera. A Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English. Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University, 1963-1964.

Zuzana Halgašová

2: Sinclair, John McHardy. Collins COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database) English Language Dictionary. London: Collins, 1987. Print.

3: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ 4: http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/ 5: http://corpus.byu.edu/time/ 6: http://corpus.byu.edu/soap/ 7: http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ 8: http://corpus.byu.edu/can/ 9: http://corpus.byu.edu/wiki/ 10: http://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/ 11: Kilgarriff, Adam, Petr Rychlý, Pavel Smrž, and David Tugwel. ‘The Sketch Engine’. In Proceedings of the Eighth EURALEX International Congress. 6-10 July 2004. Thiery Fontanelle et al. (eds.). Liege: University of Liege, 2004. PDF. 12: Access is granted upon registration at http://ske.fi.muni. cz/.

13: Kilgarriff, Adam, Vojtěch Kovář, Simon Krek, Irena Srdanović, and Carole Tiberius. ‘A Quantitative Evaluation of Word Sketches’. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth EURALEX International Congress. 6-10 July 2010. Anne Dykstra & Tanneke Schoonheim (eds.). Leeuwarden/Ljouwert: Fryske Akademy – Afûk, 2010. PDF. 14: Baisa, Vít and Vít Suchomel. SkELL: Web Interface for English Language Learning. In Eighth Workshop on Recent Advances in Slavonic Natural Language Processing. Brno: Tribun EU, 2014. pp. 63–70. ISSN 2336-4289. PDF. 15: The tool is available at http://skell.sketchengine.co.uk/ run.cgi/skell 16: Ambrožová, Romana. “Between True and False Friends: Corpus Analysis of Students‘ Translations.” MA thesis.

Masaryk University, 2014. Print.

17: Štěpánková, Kristýna. “Learner Translation Corpus: CELTraC (Czech-English Learner Translation Corpus).” BA thesis. Masaryk University, 2014. Print.

18: The aligner interface is accessible at http://hypal.eu/ hypal. The thesis describing the employed algorithm was supervised by James Edward Thomas, M.A. 19: Obrusník, Adam. “A hybrid approach to parallel text alignment.” BA thesis. Masaryk University, 2013. Print.

Zuzana came to Brno from the wild wild east of Slovakia to study MA in English Language and Literature after completing bachelor‘s degree in translation and interpreting for the European institutions at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in her hometown, Košice.

Currently, she is working hard to finish her MA in the translation programme.

Since childhood, she preferred to play with words (and computers) to toys, which is probably the reason why lexicology and pragmatics attracted her interest, but after corpus linguistics crossed her path, she can now openly admit being truly in love with studying language. Besides constantly improving her English and Czech, she loves listening to Polish songs, deciphering what her father and grandfather are talking about in Hungarian, trying to survive in Spain or Portugal with knowledge of French, and only recently, discovering how similar Dutch is to English and German. If you don‘t catch her changing various sitting positions in front of her computer or preparing a nice teapot of oolong, she might be belly dancing in the gym beneath Špilberk or drinking coffee in the dormitory café. She also loves taking care of her little jungle of aloes and herbs. But when there is something she can really call ‘free time’, she wouldn‘t trade being at home with her family for anything.

46

Review

The Sleeper and the Spindle

By Lucie Horáková

At the end of 2014, Neil Gaiman published a new book, called The Sleeper and the Spindle, and many Gaiman fans rejoiced. Because some of them are also in our editorial board, the candidate for the spring Re:Views issue suggested itself. As a piece to review, The Sleeper and the Spindle is quite problematic – how to review a book only few pages long, whose message cannot be analysed without revealing a substantial part of the story? So instead of a classic review, the editorial board of Re:Views decided to share the views of three of its members about the book itself.

Tereza: What first captured me about The Sleeper and the Spindle, were, as expected, the beautiful illustrations by Chris Riddell – if I remember correctly, the most famous one (as seen above) is now hanging in the bedroom of Neil and his wife Amanda Palmer. The illustrations accompany, and even enrich, the story in a beautiful way. The story itself is a mash-up of two fairytales we all know, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, but in spite of this the story feels far from familiar. After all, Gaiman

is a proud follower of Angela Carter, fully aware of the fact that fairytales are a loaded gun, not only describing, but also shaping the world around us.

He invites the reader to look at things differently and reconsider the traditional image of princesses and knights in shining armour.

Lucie: When looking at the illustration that was used as a promo picture for The Sleeper and the Spindle (shown above), the readers might very well expect

Review a queer retelling of Sleeping Beauty. Many a reader was disappointed to find out this is not exactly the case. This situation shows how much the reading of a novel or a story is connected to reader’s expectations and how promotion and marketing shapes them. It is not up to us to judge if in this case the readers were intentionally mislead or if it was only an unhappy coincidence, nevertheless, the damage was done. So if you haven’t read The Sleeper and the Spindle yet, please, bear in mind, it is not a story about how a princess fell in love with another princess – but it is not a bad story because of that! What the picture also reveals is that this is a story focused on women – they are the heroines of this modern fairytale and they do not need princes or any other heroes to save them. Gaiman decided to break one of the basic rules of most of the classic fairytales – that males are the ones being in focus, acting, saving and later being celebrated for it – and empowered women as the independent heroines of his story. And this is as powerful message as a queer heroine could be.

Martina: Even if not a number one Gaiman fan, everyone can undoubtedly find something of an interest in The Sleeper and the Spindle, if only “just” illustrations. It looks like another tale with epic illustrations, but actually it is a story that can speak to all generations. Most people are probably familiar with the most famous picture (shown above) but other pictures are not any less beautiful or admirable.

And the story is everything and nothing one might have expected. Everything because Neil Gaiman does not disappoint with giving something told and re-told hundreds of times a new twist; he replaces the prince with the princess thus giving the story a whole new direction and nothing because it is not a queer love story of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty that one might have expected after seeing the famous picture, but it is a story of a woman as strong, brave and smart as any other hero of the classic fairytales.

At the beginning, she is a heroine about to be wed to her Prince Charming which is supposed to be a highlight of her life as many little girls are still being told nowadays, but instead she decides not to be identified by her wedding and goes on a quest to save the princess. The ending is even more compelling; it sends a message that any woman has the power over the decisions on her life and does not have to follow the rules of the still mostly male-centred society.

47 Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is a British author, who has lived in the USA since 1992. He started his career as a journalist and the written word, in its every possible form, has been his tool of the trade ever since. The scope of Gaiman’s work is truly broad. He writes novels (such as American Gods), stories for children (Coraline), graphic novels (Sandman), poems (Blueberry Girl), short stories (Fragile Things), non-fiction (Don‘t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker‘s Guide to the Galaxy Companion), film screenplays (Beowulf), TV-series screenplays (Dr. Who), video games screenplays (Wayward Manor), songs (The Last Temptation) and many more. After he started dating the American musician and performer Amanda Palmer (whom he married in 2011) he became kind of a singer as well and the married couple often hosts cultural events together. In his writing, Neil Gaiman often uses literary allusions, pastiche, elements of fantasy, sci-fi and horror to create stories that bear universal appeal.

Gaiman is also very active in the area of human rights and in 2014 he visited some of the most problematic areas in Syria under the patronage of UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency). Gaiman’s personal beliefs and his oeuvre are tightly connected – both in his stories and with his actions he makes his readers question the things they take for granted, shows them the power of the written word and promotes compassion, respect and understanding. He can be easily spotted because of his love for black T-shirts, messy hair, and his extravagant wife, who often appears by his side.

PHOTO: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictur es/2014/10/16/1413464591093/25284718-c769-4a99-bf1a-11dde87b434a-2060x1236.jpeg PHOTO: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Kyle-cassidy-neil-gaiman-April-2013. jpg

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Review

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

By Sára Dobiášová

Drama from the Victorian England In Victorian England, the independent and headstrong Bathsheba Everdene attracts three very different suitors: Gabriel Oak, a sheep farmer; Frank Troy, a reckless Sergeant; and a prosperous and mature bachelor William Boldwood. The classic story, created by Thomas Hardy and published in 1874, is coming into the Czech cinemas in July 2015.

The words of the film’s creator Thomas Vinterberg speak clearly. According to him, the film is to be „raw and revolutionary“ and at the same time avoiding to be another British period movie, „with lovely clothes and nice fireplaces.“ The Danish filmmaker - Thomas Vinterberg - is one of the founders of Dogme 95: a set of rules dedicated to reintroducing the element of risk in filmmaking. While his works have never become mainstream production, his reputation for encouraging naturalistic performances makes him an excellent choice for this task. To maintain the British element in the film, Hardy’s book has been adapted to screen by David Nicholls, an English novelist and screenwriter, who penned a TV version

While his works have never become m ai nstre am pro du c ti on , h i s reputation for encouraging naturalistic performances makes him an excellent choice for this task. of Hardy’s Tess of The D’Urbervilles in 2008 for the BBC as well as another Victorian classic by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations in 2012.

The story itself offers many opportunities to look deeper into the human nature. Bathsheba Everdene, the main female protagonist, is only half-aware of her extraordinary beauty. Her life does not resemble any of the lives lived by her

Encounter with Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts)

female contemporaries. She manages to run her own farm and seeks no man to help her with it. On the contrary, she plays with hearts of three different men who cross her path in the story, thus forming not the infamous „love triangle,“ but a precarious and complicated „love square“.

The danger of her capricious play is enhanced by the obvious differences between her suitors.

The most prominent of them is by no means Gabriel Oak, a modest shepherd struggling to gain his independence as a farmer. He is a recurring character, appearing every time Batsheba is in danger or in need of help. This character is brought into life by a Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts. Modest, young, and sincere Gabriel Oak forms a striking contrast to Batsheba’s other suitors: Sergeant Troy, played by Tom Sturridge, is young, ruthless and vain, whereas farmer Boldwood, portrayed by

Review

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Meeting William Boldwood (Michael Sheen)

Michael Sheen, is middle-aged and constraint, yet his love for Batsheba fills him with „... a fearful sense of exposure“ and he plunges into maniacal obsession at the mere possibility of making his beloved Miss Everdene his wife.

Apart from its Danish director, the film features mainly a British cast. Batsheba Everdene is played by Carey Mulligan, who received an Oscar nomination in 2009 and recently appeared as Daisy in the screen adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. She can be

One of the central concerns of Hardy’s writing was the problem of modernity in a society that was rapidly becoming more and more industrial. remembered for her role of Kitty, a younger sister of Elizabeth Bennet, in the 2005’s screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Her leading role in the film Far from the Madding Crowd is further enhanced by her performing in a soundtrack to the first trailer. Together with

her co-star Michael Sheen, they perform a traditional folk song „Let No Man Steal Your Thyme“. The song was obviously not chosen without purpose. The bunch of thyme is generally described as being a euphemism for the girl’s virginity. The true meaning with regard to the topic of the film seems to be much broader than that. The nature symbolism inherent in its lyrics seems to warn young girls of the dangers in taking false lovers. The introductory song, dating back to the 17th century, reflects the destiny of Bathsheba’s relationships.

One of the central concerns of Hardy’s writing was the problem of modernity in a society that was rapidly becoming more and more industrial. The title Far from the Madding Crowd suggests avoidance of the life in a city, crowds and industry. Hardy tries to draw a portrait of what he saw as an endangered way of life. On the other hand, Bathsheba Everdene can be seen as a prototype of a modern woman.

She is independent not only in spirit, but also financially. This allows Hardy to use her

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Review

Batsheba (Carey Mulligan) at her farm at Weatherbury

character to explore the dangers that such a woman must inevitably face: losing both her identity and her way of life through marriage.

Although Thomas Hardy set most of his works in the location of Wessex, Weatherbury being known as a coulisse for the drama Far from the Madding Crowd, the film itself was shot in Dorset, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and London. The grassy valleys of Dorset have remained almost unchanged over the course of the last century, which makes them a perfect filming location. The key locations include Sherborne, West Bay, Mapperton House and Forde Abbey. These locations have remained closely connected with Hardy all his life.

Once he described his birthplace as „partly real, partly dream country.“ He was deeply inspired by its country folk and its contrasting landscapes.

The music for the film was composed by Craig Armstrong. The Scottish composer has recently completed soundtracks for such films as The Great Gatsby or The Incredible Hulk and was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2010 for his services to the

music industry. It is worth mentioning that he is about to work on Paul Mc Guigan’s new film adaptation of Frankenstein, another classic of British literature, starring Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy.

„David Nicholls’ smart and compelling reworking of Hardy’s classic has found its ideal counterpart in the hugely talented Thomas Vinterberg. The incomparable Carey Mulligan – the perfect Batsheba – sits at the heart of a mouth-watering cast who will do justice to this rich and irresistible tale.“ Since Far from the Madding Crowd is one of the crucial works of Thomas Hardy, it is no surprise that there have already been several adaptations of this literary work before. The most famous of them was probably the adaptation of 1967, directed by John Schlesinger and featuring Julie Christie as Batsheba, Alan Bates as

Review

51 Film info:

• • •

• •

in Czech cinemas: from 9th July 2015, directed by Thomas Vinterberg screenplay: David Nicholls starring: Carey Mulligan, Michael Sheen, Juno Temple, Matthias Schoenaerts, Tom Sturridge, Hilton McRae IMDB profile movie trailer

Gabriel Oak, Terence Stamp as Sergeant Troy, and Peter Finch as William Boldwood. The upcoming film tries to form a contrast to its previous adaptations. The choice of the Danish director is by no means a daring endeavour.

BBC producer Christine Langan adds: „David Nicholls’ smart and compelling reworking of Hardy’s classic has found its ideal counterpart in the hugely talented Thomas Vinterberg. The incomparable Carey Mulligan – the perfect Batsheba – sits at the heart of a mouthwatering cast who will do justice to this rich and irresistible tale.“

Sára Dobiášová

Sára is a student at the Department of English and American Studies where she pursues BA English Language and Literature. In her BA thesis she would like to focus on semantics and morphology. She believes her future career lies in teaching English, especially at secondary schools. She is interested in other languages as well, namely French and German. She tries hard to push her knowledge of these two languages a step higher. She likes reading books in their original language. Outside school she enjoys drawing and sometimes playing the piano.

The heroine on a date with Sergeant Troy (Tom Sturridge)

© Twentieth Century FOX

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Academic Writing Contest

Your Creative Voice – Academic Writing Contest Call Every now and then there comes the time when some of us feel like analysing a particular issue, but having no course to write the essay for. This way the interesting topic is regrettably put aside to perhaps come back to later. Such topics usually concern contemporary works that are a part of current pop culture but, due to their nature, are not always (or not yet) a part of university curricula. For this reason we have decided to create a space for such ideas. Therefore, if you ever feel the urge to discuss religion in Game of Thrones, feminism (or the lack of it) in Fifty Shades, or the role of flower crowns in Hannibal fandoms, you may do so in Re:Views.

We are creating a space for your original academic voice, giving you a chance to write a response paper on a different pop culture phenomenon in every issue and rewarding the best efforts.

And since the very first contest simply asks for something grand, please feel free to write a response paper on: HARRY POTTER The topics from which you can choose are as follows: 1. The concept of fate in HP 2. Languages and/or communication in HP 3. Muggles and/or muggle-born wizards as minorities in HP 4. Free choice – any topic you wish to discuss, connected to the HP universe And by universe, we do mean all the pieces. Books (including The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch Through the Ages, and the sadly-yet-not-existing and still-only-imaginary Hogwarts: A History), films, fanfiction, Pottermore... Your response paper may include any and all of them.

The paper should be in MLA, double-spaced, and 500-1000 words long.

And the reward for your toilsome effort? The three winning works will get published here in Re:Views and, what is more, the winning authors will also be awarded a prize: there is a copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Quidditch Through the Ages, or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them waiting for the winners!

Please send your submissions to re.views.magazine@gmail.com by 30 September 2015.

Good luck to you all, we are looking forward to your contributions!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8d/Fantastic_beasts.JPG http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/82/Tales_of_Beedle_the_Bard.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8b/Quidditchthroughtheages.jpg

Romantics Comics

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Based on Blanka Šustrová‘s idea, Carried out by Katarína Gažíková Photo courtesy wikipedia.org