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LITERARY ANALYSIS IN THE LATIN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION Literární text ve výuce latiny - PhD Thesis - Mgr. Bořivoj Marek Abstract The secondary teachers of Latin, both Czech and foreign, focus on the language instruction, which they provide with discussions of Roman history and culture to make the lessons more interesting and varied, as far as the limited number of classes permits. The literature instruction, however, and literary analysis, which could achieve the purpose just as well, are mostly omitted, since there has long been a serious lack of theoretical and methodological guides to the didactics and secondary instruction of Roman literature. The aims and objectives of this thesis are manifold. First, the importance of Roman literature is outlined. Then, relevant curricular documents are examined and aims of the Latin literature instruction are defined. Next, the skills needed for comprehending the Latin text are described and methods of selecting a suitable reading material are considered. Finally, an original curriculum of Roman literature instruction is proposed, offering multiple detailed suggestions of how to work with a literary Latin text of various difficulty levels and composed in all the main genres of Roman literature.

This paper consists of the translation and analysis of Chapters 1-15 of Book V of Historiarum adversus paganos libri VIII by Paulus Orosius. The analysis is based on a comprehensive commentary on linguistic and stylistic aspects of the texts examined, and on a thorough factual commentary. The linguistic commentary concentrates on the composition of the Fifth Book, on the construction of discourse by the means of particles and other discourse markers, as well as on the linguistic features and peculiarities distinctive for the author, his age and the genre of historiography (such as specifically Late Latin syntax, non-Classical vocabulary, rhetorical figures, tropes and other stylistic features). The factual commentary contains a detailed description of the events mentioned in the text and their historical context. Close attention is paid to the character of the author's narrative, his approach to the historical data, choice of the events that interest him most as well as the way in which the author portraits them as mutually connected. Among the questions important for the commentary are whether he follows the wider tradition of Roman historiography or if and in which way the author's own opinions and persuasions are reflected in his work. This section also comments on the relation between Orosius'...