Speaking Through a Tongue Pulled Back from the Mouth: The Use of Bakhtin's Concept of the Novel in Secondary School Literature Teaching

This thesis aims to enrich Czech literature teaching with ideas from Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel and to use this as a basis for creating teaching materials and activities. It is based on the belief that reading and interpreting novels is a unique experience and skill that should be systematically developed in teaching and cannot be replaced by reading short excerpts. Bachtin's concept of the novel, with its emphasis on dialogue, counterbalances the traditional school understanding of literature as a storehouse of information. The theoretical part of the work presents the key concepts of Bachtin's theory of the novel (dialogue, social language, heteroglossia, author's intention) and shows their use in specific examples. The didactic part deals with motivations for reading and the specific demands that the novel places on the reader. It is based on the concept of dialogical teaching (K. Šeďová) and didactic interpretation (L. Lederbuchová). The final part of the thesis offers interpretative insights into the novels A Hero of Our Time (M. J. Lermontov), The Goddam Gypsy (R. Lee), and Honzlová (Z. Salivarová), supplemented by suggestions for teaching materials and activities. Themes such as the search for identity and the conflict between the individual and the language of power play an...