Download or read book Remaining Relevant After Communism written by Andrew Wachtel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-02 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than any other art form, literature defined Eastern Europe as a cultural and political entity in the second half of the twentieth century. Although often persecuted by the state, East European writers formed what was frequently recognized to be a "second government," and their voices were heard and revered inside and outside the borders of their countries. This study by one of our most influential specialists on Eastern Europe considers the effects of the end of communism on such writers. According to Andrew Baruch Wachtel, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of fledgling societies in Eastern Europe brought an end to the conditions that put the region's writers on a pedestal. In the euphoria that accompanied democracy and free markets, writers were liberated from the burden of grandiose political expectations. But no group is happy to lose its influence: despite recognizing that their exalted social position was related to their reputation for challenging political oppression, such writers have worked hard to retain their status, inventing a series of new strategies for this purpose. Remaining Relevant after Communism considers these strategies—from pulp fiction to public service—documenting what has happened on the East European scene since 1989.
Download or read book After Memory written by Matthias Schwartz and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.
Download or read book Writing Postcommunism written by D. Williams and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-16 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Postcommunism explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight.
Download or read book Central and Eastern Europe After Transition written by Wojciech Sadurski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have national identities changed, developed and reacted in the wake of transition from communism to democracy in Central and Eastern Europe? Central and Eastern Europe After Transition defines and examines new autonomous differences adopted at the state and the supranational level in the post-transitional phase of the post-Communist area, and considers their impact on constitutions, democracy and legal culture. With representative contributions from older and newer EU members, the book provides a broad set of cultural points for reference. Its comparative and interdisciplinary approach includes a useful selection of bibliographical resources specifically devoted to the Central Eastern European countries' transitions.
Download or read book Writing the Yugoslav Wars written by Dragana Obradovic and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-11-14 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Writing the Yugoslav Wars, Dragana Obradović analyses how the Yugoslav wars of secession helped shape the region’s literary culture. Obradović argues that the crisis of the country’s disintegration posed an ethical challenge to self-identified postmodernists. This book takes a transnational approach to literatures of the former Yugoslavia that have been, since the 1990s, studied separately, in line with geopolitical divisions. This post-socialist conflict was one of the moments that reshaped postmodernism for both local and international thinkers, much in the same way modernism was shaped by World War I and the advent of mechanized warfare.
Download or read book Coming of Age Under Martial Law written by Svetlana Vasileva-Karagʹozova and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do historical cataclysms affect the social conditioning of young people? How do individuals born in the same period come to form an identifiable "generation"? How do coming-of-age stories create a sense of community and generational identity? Coming of Age under Martial Law: The Initiation Novels of Poland's Last Communist Generation addresses these questions, examining a selection of post-1989 coming-of-age novels authored by the generation of Polish writers whose transition from adolescence to adulthood coincided with Poland's transition from communism to liberal democracy.BR> Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova argues that when cataclysms of any nature overlap with the sensitive period of maturation into adulthood, they disrupt the natural rhythm of society's self-renewal. In the case of the Polish '89ers, the generational clash with their predecessors did not produce the anticipated generational change in leadership, but a pathological role reversal: the elders refused to give up their leadership positions, while the young were stifled in their development and occupied marginal social spaces. This social imbalance is profoundlly reflected in the content and themes of the novels produced by this younger generation, as the author shows. Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova is an assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas.
Download or read book The Fall of the Iron Curtain and the Culture of Europe written by Peter I. Barta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of communism in Europe has tended to be discussed mainly in the context of political science and history. This book, in contrast, assesses the cultural consequences for Europe of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, the book examines the new narratives about national, individual and European identities that have emerged in literature, theatre and other cultural media, investigates the impact of the re-unification of the continent on the mental landscape of Western Europe as well as Eastern Europe and Russia, and explores the new borders in the form of divisive nationalism that have reappeared since the disappearance of the Iron Curtain.
Download or read book Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989 written by Sabrina P. Ramet and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 643 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of the communist monopoly across Central and Southeastern Europe in 1989-1990 initiated a process of rapid change. This updated second edition comprehensively describes the post-communist trajectory of the states of Central and Southeastern Europe, encompassing democratization, privatization, corruption, and war.
Download or read book Polish Literature as World Literature written by Piotr Florczyk and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully curated collection consists of 16 chapters by leading Polish and world literature scholars from the United States, Canada, Italy, and, of course, Poland. An historical approach gives readers a panoramic view of Polish authors and their explicit or implicit contributions to world literature. Indeed, the volume shows how Polish authors, from Jan Kochanowski in the 16th century to the 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, have engaged with their foreign counterparts and other traditions, active participants in the global literary network and the conversations of their day. The volume features views of Polish literature and culture within theories of world literature and literary systems, with a particular attention paid to the resurgence of the idea of the physical book as a cultural artifact. This perspective is especially important since so much of today's global literary output stems from Anglophone perceptions of what constitutes literary quality and tastes. The collection also sheds light on specific issues pertaining to Poland, such as the idea of Polishness, and global phenomena, including social and economic advancement as well as ecological degradation. Some of the authors discussed, like the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz or the 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, were renowned far beyond the borders of their country, while others, like the contemporary travel writer and novelist Andrzej Stasiuk, embrace regionalism, seeing as they do in their immediate surroundings a synecdoche of the world at large. Nevertheless, the picture of Polish literature and Polish authors that emerges from these articles is that of a diverse, cosmopolitan cohort engaged in a mutually rewarding relationship with what the late French critic Pascale Casanova has called “the world republic of letters.”
Download or read book Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post Yugoslav States written by Igor Štiks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1914 and the present day the political makeup of the Balkans has relentlessly changed, following unpredictable shifts of international and internal borders. Between and across these borders various political communities were formed, co-existed and (dis)integrated. By analysing one hundred years of modern citizenship in Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav states, Igor Š tiks shows that the concept and practice of citizenship is necessary to understand how political communities are made, un-made and re-made. He argues that modern citizenship is a tool that can be used for different and opposing goals, from integration and re-unification to fragmentation and ethnic engineering. The study of citizenship in the 'laboratory' of the Balkands offers not only an original angle to narrate an alternative political history, but also an insight into the fine mechanics and repeating glitches of modern politics, applicable to multinational states in the European Union and beyond.
Download or read book The Making of Dissidents written by Victoria Harms and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents demonstrates how Hungary’s Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989. But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding.
Download or read book The Political Novel in the South Slavic Intercultural Context written by Ethem Mandic and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-18 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Political Novel in the South Slavic Intercultural Context investigates the problem of the genre of the most elusive literary genre: the political novel, and the presence of “political” in novels of South Slavic literature, primarily in the intercultural South Slavic social context, as well as in the context of contemporary history of Southeast and Central Europe. This genre in the South Slavic inter-literary context has not yet been scientifically and systematically studied and presented, although there are critical and scientific reviews that indicate its presence in literary production. The best novels from the canonical South Slavic authors Miroslav Krleža, Mihailo Lalić, Oskar Davičo, Miodrag Bulatović, Ivo Andrić, Meša Selimović, Borislav Pekić, Mirko Kovač, Danilo Kiš, and others included in this book thematize the political concepts of the twentieth century, so in the broadest sense they can be considered within the genre of political novel, including its subgenre variants. The political novel in South Slavic literatures (in the intercultural context) in general is a specific genre of the novel in relation to the political novel written in the West, an inter-literary phenomenon that was a critique of the Titoist regime and a literary response to the poetics and politics of social realism. It is conditioned by specific historical-political and social movements during the twentieth century. The narrative of the political novel is a poetic resistance to ideological consciousness and a dogmatic view of reality.
Download or read book The Routledge History of East Central Europe Since 1700 written by Irina Livezeanu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Covers territory from Russia in the east to Germany and Austria in the west, exploring the origins and evolution of modernity in this region"--Provided by the publisher.
Download or read book Centre and Periphery Roots and Exile written by Friedemann Sallis and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2012-08-06 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the impact place and displacement can have on the composition and interpretation of Western art music, using as its primary objects of study the work of István Anhalt (1919–2012), György Kurtág (1926–), and Sándor Veress (1907–92). Although all three composers are of Hungarian origin, their careers followed radically different paths. Whereas, Kurtág remained in Budapest for most of his career, Anhalt and Veress left: the former in 1946 and immigrated to Canada and the latter in 1948 and settled in Switzerland. All three composers have had an extraordinary impact in the cultural environments within which their work took place. In the first section, “Place and Displacement,” contributors examine what happens when composers and their music migrate in the culturally complex world of the late twentieth century. The past one hundred years produced record numbers of refugees, and this fact is now beginning to resonate in the study of music. As Anhalt himself forcefully asserts, however, not all composers who emigrate should be understood as exiles. The first chapters of this book explore some of the problems and questions surrounding this issue. Essays in the second section, “Perspectives on Reception, Analysis, and Interpretation,” look at how performing acts of interpretation on music implies bringing the time, place, and identity of the musician, the analyst, and the teacher to bear on the object of study. Like Kodály, Kurtág considers his work to be “naturally” embedded in Hungarian culture, but he is also a quintessentially European artist. Much of his production—he is one of the twentieth century’s most prolific composers of vocal music—involves the setting of Hungarian texts, but in the late 1970s his cultural horizons expanded to include texts in Russian, German, French, English, and ancient Greek. The book explores how musicologists’ divergent cultural perspectives impinge on the interpretation of this work. The final section, “The Presence of the Past and Memory in Contemporary Music,” examines the impact time and memory can have on notions of place and identity in music. All living art taps into the personal and collective past in one way or another. The final four chapters look at various aspects of this relationship.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature written by Caryl Emerson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-10 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian literature arrived late on the European scene. Within several generations, its great novelists had shocked - and then conquered - the world. In this introduction to the rich and vibrant Russian tradition, Caryl Emerson weaves a narrative of recurring themes and fascinations across several centuries. Beginning with traditional Russian narratives (saints' lives, folk tales, epic and rogue narratives), the book moves through literary history chronologically and thematically, juxtaposing literary texts from each major period. Detailed attention is given to canonical writers including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, as well as to some current bestsellers from the post-Communist period. Fully accessible to students and readers with no knowledge of Russian, the volume includes a glossary and pronunciation guide of key Russian terms as well as a list of useful secondary works. The book will be of great interest to students of Russian as well as of comparative literature.
Download or read book Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe written by Agnieszka Gutthy and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe is a collection of articles discussing authors whose homelands range from the former Soviet Union to the former Yugoslavia. For the purposes of this book, East and Central Europe comprise Russia, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Romania, and former Yugoslavia. These writers were exiled as a result of unbearable political climates - be it nations of the Communist block, including former Yugoslavia torn by its civil wars, or in the case of Poland, its partitioning by neighboring powers in the nineteenth century. No other book has collected such a variety of discussions from this geopolitical region, featuring authors who chose exile over the extinguishment of their individuality. Organized by theme and geography, this book will be of interest to a wide group of readers: from the topic of exile to research in Slavic (Czech, Polish, Russian, and post-Yugoslav), Romanian, German, and comparative literature. Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe is a valuable supplement to courses in Eastern and Central European history, as well as a primary text for courses in East and Central European literature.
Download or read book The Novel and Europe written by Andrew Hammond and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the ways in which fiction has addressed the continent since the Second World War. Drawing on novelists from Europe and elsewhere, the volume analyzes the literary response to seven dominant concerns (ideas of Europe, conflict, borders, empire, unification, migration, and marginalization), offering a ground-breaking study of how modern and contemporary writers have participated in the European debate. The sixteen essays view the chosen writers, not as representatives of national literatures, but as participants in transcontinental discussion that has occurred across borders, cultures, and languages. In doing so, the contributors raise questions about the forms of power operating across and radiating from Europe, challenging both the institutionalized divisions of the Cold War and the triumphalist narrative of continental unity currently being written in Brussels.
