Cultural Imagination: The Science Fiction Genre Impact upon Our Mental Concepts of the Future

This diploma thesis deals with the study of the collective imagination. It studies and observes variable linkages between spectator as well as productive imagination to the cultural environment, as they occur during the second half of the twentieth century, overlapping into the twenty-first century. The primary areas of research are predominantly literary and film works of the science fiction genre. The research is conducted using mainly discoursive analysis method, however, the thesis has its theoretical groundings in media studies, partly also in the fields of political theory, in the theory of fictional worlds, intercultural studies and philosophy of science. Employed approaches are purposefully tied to more or less closed case studies, which form the thematic content of individual chapters