Download or read book Central Europe Through the Lens of Language and Politics written by Tomasz Kamusella and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1980s, Central Europe re-emerged as a concept of socio-political analysis in samizdat publications brought out in the region when the Cold War division of the continent into Eastern and Western Europe still stood fast. This concept of a newly found self-definition among Central Europe's literati and dissidents was brought to the wider attention of the West in 1984 by the Czech(oslovak) writer Milan Kundera in his seminal essay published in the New York Review of Books (Kundera 1984). To some it was a revelation that Central Europe could be a world unto itself, while others criticized this concept as a political delusion. More nationally-minded critics also saw it as a tool for a potential renewed German domination over the region. They reiterated how during the First World War Mitteleuropa had been a blueprint for building an economic-cum-political bloc in Central Europe under the joint control of Germany and Austria-Hungary (Naumann 1915). The breakup in 1989 of the Soviet bloc gave a lease of political reality to Central Europe. However, following the 1993 founding of the European Union (EU) the region's freshly postcommunist states applied for membership in this union, seen as a synonym of the West or, more exactly, of Western Europe. The Central European wish to join the European Union was a desire to become part of Western Europe. The curiously changing membership of the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) vindicates this view. Founded in 1992 by Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, the original member states promptly left it when they joined the EU in 2004. Nowadays, CEFTA embraces Albania, Moldova, and the post-Yugoslav states that have not joined the EU yet.--
Download or read book Words in Space and Time written by Tomasz Kamusella and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With forty-two extensively annotated maps, this atlas offers novel insights into the history and mechanics of how Central Europe’s languages have been made, unmade, and deployed for political action. The innovative combination of linguistics, history, and cartography makes a wealth of hard-to-reach knowledge readily available to both specialist and general readers. It combines information on languages, dialects, alphabets, religions, mass violence, or migrations over an extended period of time. The story first focuses on Central Europe’s dialect continua, the emergence of states, and the spread of writing technology from the tenth century onward. Most maps concentrate on the last two centuries. The main storyline opens with the emergence of the Western European concept of the nation, in accord with which the ethnolinguistic nation-states of Italy and Germany were founded. In the Central European view, a “proper” nation is none other than the speech community of a single language. The Atlas aspires to help users make the intellectual leap of perceiving languages as products of human history and part of culture. Like states, nations, universities, towns, associations, art, beauty, religions, injustice, or atheism—languages are artefacts invented and shaped by individuals and their groups.
Download or read book Central Europe Through the Lens of Language and Politics written by Tomasz Kamusella and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Politics and the Slavic Languages written by Tomasz Kamusella and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last two centuries, ethnolinguistic nationalism has been the norm of nation building and state building in Central Europe. The number of recognized Slavic languages (in line with the normative political formula of language = nation = state) gradually tallied with the number of the Slavic nation-states, especially after the breakups of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. But in the current age of borderless cyberspace, regional and minority Slavic languages are freely standardized and used, even when state authorities disapprove. As a result, since the turn of the 19th century, the number of Slavic languages has varied widely, from a single Slavic language to as many as 40. Through the story of Slavic languages, this timely book illustrates that decisions on what counts as a language are neither permanent nor stable, arguing that the politics of language is the politics in Central Europe. The monograph will prove to be an essential resource for scholars of linguistics and politics in Central Europe.
Download or read book The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe written by T. Kamusella and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-12-16 with total page 1167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work focuses on the ideological intertwining between Czech, Magyar, Polish and Slovak, and the corresponding nationalisms steeped in these languages. The analysis is set against the earlier political and ideological history of these languages, and the panorama of the emergence and political uses of other languages of the region.
Download or read book A Guide to Spatial History written by Konrad Lawson and published by Olsokhagen. This book was released on 2022-01-07 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide provides an overview of the thematic areas, analytical aspects, and avenues of research which, together, form a broader conversation around doing spatial history. Spatial history is not a field with clearly delineated boundaries. For the most part, it lacks a distinct, unambiguous scholarly identity. It can only be thought of in relation to other, typically more established fields. Indeed, one of the most valuable utilities of spatial history is its capacity to facilitate conversations across those fields. Consequently, it must be discussed in relation to a variety of historiographical contexts. Each of these have their own intellectual genealogies, institutional settings, and conceptual path dependencies. With this in mind, this guide surveys the following areas: territoriality, infrastructure, and borders; nature, environment, and landscape; city and home; social space and political protest; spaces of knowledge; spatial imaginaries; cartographic representations; and historical GIS research.
Download or read book Doing Spatial History written by Riccardo Bavaj and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a practical introduction to spatial history through the lens of the different primary sources that historians use. It is informed by a range of analytical perspectives and conveys a sense of the various facets of spatial history in a tangible, case-study based manner. The chapter authors hail from a variety of fields, including early modern and modern history, architectural history, historical anthropology, economic and social history, as well as historical and human geography, highlighting the way in which spatial history provides a common forum that facilitates discussion across disciplines. The geographical scope of the volume takes readers on a journey through central, western, and east central Europe, to Russia, the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire, and East Asia, as well as North and South America, and New Zealand. Divided into three parts, the book covers particular types of sources, different kinds of space, and specific concepts, tools and approaches, offering the reader a thorough understanding of how sources can be used within spatial history specifically but also the different ways of looking at history more broadly. Very much focusing on doing spatial history, this is an accessible guide for both undergraduate and postgraduate students within modern history and its related fields.
Download or read book English Language Teaching through the Lens of Experience written by Christoph Haase and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of this volume in our ongoing series has shifted from the technological advances that were the topic of numerous papers in the previous book to more rigorous and empirical research, especially in the linguistics and methodology section. While the former is represented by the majority of papers, methodology still manages to surprise with new findings in often-overlooked areas, such as how to address students with impairments in English Language Teaching (ELT), the use of gesture, and the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The linguistics section starts out with a look at academic English as a lingua franca (ELF) practices, native and non-native English varieties and ELT, pragmatic markers and hedging, and corpora. The compact literary section correlates with the diversity inherent in the field and concerns ethnic writing, indigenous storytelling, animality and elaborations on postmodernist fiction. As such, this collection of research papers will bring topics and approaches to the attention of a wide spectrum of practitioners as both an impetus and inspiration.
Download or read book Creating Nationality in Central Europe 1880 1950 written by Tomasz Kamusella and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Upper Silesia was the site of the largest formal exercise in self-determination in European history, the 1921 Plebiscite. This asked the inhabitants of Europe’s second largest industrial region the deceptively straightforward question of whether they preferred to be Germans or Poles, but spectacularly failed to clarify their national identity, demonstrating instead the strength of transnational, regionalist and sub-national allegiances, and of allegiances other than nationality, such as religion. As such Upper Silesia, which was partitioned and re-partitioned between 1922 and 1945, and subjected to Czechization, Germanization, Polonization, forced emigration, expulsion and extermination, illustrates the limits of nation-building projects and nation-building narratives imposed from outside. This book explores a range of topics related to nationality issues in Upper Silesia, putting forward the results of extensive new research. It highlights the flaws at the heart of attempts to shape Europe as homogenously national polities and compares the fate of Upper Silesia with the many other European regions where similar problems occurred.
Download or read book The Study of Language and the Politics of Community in Global Context written by David L. Hoyt and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age of rising nationalism and expanding colonialism, the science of language has been intimately bound up with questions of immediate political concern. Taken together, the essays in this volume suggest that the emergence of language as an autonomous object of discourse was closely connected with the consolidation of new and sometimes competing forms of political community in the period following the French Revolution and the global spread of European power. This is the common thread running through the seven individual studies gathered here. By deliberately juxtaposing the European, academic configuration of modern linguistic research with the more practical, extra-European activities of missionaries, colonial officials, or East Asian literati, the authors explore the tensions between forms of linguistic knowledge generated in different geopolitical contexts, and suggest ways of thinking about the role of social science in the process of globalization.
Download or read book Languages and Nationalism Instead of Empires written by Motoki Nomachi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume probes into the mechanisms of how languages are created, legitimized, maintained, or destroyed in the service of the extant nation-states across Central Europe. Through chapters from contributors in North America, Europe, and Asia, the book offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the rise of the ethnolinguistic nation-state during the past century as the sole legitimate model of statehood in today’s Central Europe. The collection’s focus is on the last three decades, namely the postcommunist period, taking into consideration the effects of the recent rise of cyberspace and the resulting radical forms of populism across contemporary Central Europe. It analyzes languages and their uses not as given by history, nature, or deity but as constructs produced, changed, maintained, and abandoned by humans and their groups. In this way, the volume contributes saliently to the store of knowledge on the latest social (sociolinguistic) and political history of the region’s languages, including their functioning in respective national polities and on the internet. Languages and Nationalism Instead of Empires is a compelling resource for historians, linguists, and political scientists who work on Central and Eastern Europe.
Download or read book A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe written by Balázs Trencsenyi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-10 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of political ideas and discourses. Its principal aim is to make these cultures available for the global 'market of ideas' and revisit some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such. The present volume is the final part of the project, following Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century', and Volume II, Part I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Short Twentieth Century' (1918-1968) (OUP, 2018). Its starting point is the defeat of the vision of 'socialism with a human face' in 1968 and the political discourses produced by the various 'consolidation' or 'normalization' regimes. It continues with mapping the exile communities' and domestic dissidents' critical engagement with the local democratic and anti-democratic traditions as well as with global trends. Rather than achieving the coveted 'end of history', however, the liberal democratic order created in East Central Europe after 1989 became increasingly contested from left and right alike. Thus, instead of a comfortable conclusion pointing to the European integration of most of these countries, the book closes with a reflection on the fragility of democracy in this part of the world and beyond.
Download or read book Center Stage written by Philipp Ther and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grand palaces of culture, opera theaters marked the center of European cities like the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. As opera cast its spell, almost every European city and society aspired to have its own opera house, and dozens of new theaters were constructed in the course of the "long" nineteenth century. At the time of the French Revolution in 1789, only a few, mostly royal, opera theaters, existed in Europe. However, by the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nearly every large town possessed a theater in which operas were performed, especially in Central Europe, the region upon which this book concentrates. This volume, a revised and extended version of two well-reviewed books published in German and Czech, explores the social and political background to this "opera mania" in nineteenth century Central Europe. After tracing the major trends in the opera history of the period, including the emergence of national genres of opera and its various social functions and cultural meanings, the author contrasts the histories of the major houses in Dresden (a court theater), Lemberg (a theater built and sponsored by aristocrats), and Prague (a civic institution). Beyond the operatic institutions and their key stage productions, composers such as Carl Maria von Weber, Richard Wagner, Bedřich Smetana, Stanisław Moniuszko, Antonín Dvořák, and Richard Strauss are put in their social and political contexts. The concluding chapter, bringing together the different leitmotifs of social and cultural history explored in the rest of the book, explains the specificities of opera life in Central Europe within a wider European and global framework.
Download or read book Weimar through the Lens of Gender written by Julia Roos and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book will make a valuable contribution to the field of German history, as well as the histories of gender and sexuality. The argument that Weimar feminism did bring about tangible gains for women needs to be made, and Roos has done so convincingly." ---Julia Sneeringer, Queens College Until 1927, Germany had a system of state-regulated prostitution, under which only those prostitutes who submitted to regular health checks and numerous other restrictions on their personal freedom were tolerated by the police. Male clients of prostitutes were not subject to any controls. The decriminalization of prostitution in 1927 resulted from important postwar gains in women's rights; yet this change---while welcomed by feminists, Social Democrats, and liberals—also mobilized powerful conservative resistance. In the early 1930s, the right-wing backlash against liberal gender reforms like the 1927 prostitution law played a fateful role in the downfall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism. Weimar through the Lens of Gender combines the political history of early twentieth-century Germany with analytical perspectives derived from the fields of gender studies and the history of sexuality. The book's argument will be of interest to a broad readership: specialists in the fields of gender studies and the history of sexuality, as well as historians and general readers interested in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Julia Roos is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. Jacket art: "Hamburg, vermutlich St. Pauli, 1920er–30er Jahre," photographer unknown, s/w-Fotografie. (Courtesy of the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte.)
Download or read book A Critical History of Health Films in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond written by Victoria Shmidt and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-21 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The burgeoning scholarship on Western health films stands in stark contrast to the vacuum in the historical conceptualization of Eastern European films. This book develops a nonlinear historical model that revises their unique role in the inception of national cinematography and establishing supranational health security. Readers witness the revelation of an unknown history concerning how the health films produced in Eastern European countries not only adopted Western patterns of propaganda but actively participated in its formation, especially with regard to those considered “others”: Women and the populations of the periphery. The authors elaborate on the long “echo” of the discursive practices introduced by health films within public health propaganda, as well as the attempts to negate and deconstruct such practices by rebellious filmmakers. A wide range of methods, including the analysis of the sociological biographies of filmmakers, the historical reconstruction of public campaigns against diseases and an investigation into the production of health films, contextualizes these films along a multifaceted continuum stretching between the adaptation of global patterns and the cultivation of national authenticities. The book is aimed at those who study the history of film, the history of public health, Central and Eastern European countries and global history.
Download or read book The Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa written by Yvonne Zivkovic and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how postwar writers in Austria and Yugoslavia re-imagined Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism.
Download or read book When Buildings Speak written by Anthony Alofsin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The canonical inventors of International Style have long dominated studies of modern European architecture. But in this text, Anthony Alofsin broadens this scope by exploring the rich yet overlooked architecture of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states.
