Download or read book The Dissident Politics in V clav Havel s Vanek Plays written by Carol Strong and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dissident Politics in Václav Havel’s Vaněk Plays: Who Is Ferdinand Vaněk Anyway focuses on Ferdinand Vaněk, a semi-autobiographical character created by Václav Havel and featured in a series of nine plays written by Havel himself and three other dissident writers – Pavel Kohout, Pavel Landovský, and Jiří Dienstbier. By exploring the ‘Vaněk experience,’ Carol Strong details a multi-episodic, absurdist journey that provides an ‘insider’s view’ of the challenges facing those daring enough to question the status quo, a view that remains relevant today. Strong’s contention is that the lines found in these plays served as a ‘secret language’ of dissent in Cold War Czechoslovakia, which called the citizenry to contemplate the need for societal reform. As the plays were written at a time when the work of Havel and other dissidents were banned, the plays were never performed publicly, but through clandestine living room performances and the sharing of samizdat scripts the plays found an audience. Select phrases were indeed whispered throughout underground networks and helped forge a sense of oppositional solidarity among potential activists. Strong’s argument is that the ‘Vaněk experience’ metaphorically highlights how official power mechanisms are among the least insidious forms of societal power, as the state must follow predictable patterns of legal jurisprudence. By contrast, non-governmental forms of power – as exercised by one’s fellow citizens through informal social channels – can challenge oppositional actors more because of the personal tone they adopt. Using this approach, Strong presents a timelessly relevant critique of modern society with its consumerist / conformist tendencies.
Download or read book The Van k Plays written by Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight powerful contemporary Czech plays along with four illuminating commentaries by their authors are presented in this volume. The plays are unusual in that all share the same protagonist, the "dissident" writer, Ferdinand Vanek. In Czechoslovakia, these plays can only circulate in faded, dog-eared typescripts. These clandestine "unbooks" have become a vital force in currenc Czech literature. It is especially gratifying, therefore, to present the Vanek plays in a book which will endure. When Vaclav Havel first invented his fictional playwright to entertain his friends in 1975, he had no idea that Vanek would be "taken over" by three of them--all real Czech writers. Between them, Havel, Pavel Kahout, Pavel Landovsky, and Jiri Dienstbier have made what Havel has called the "Vanek principle" into a public property. The plays explore the "realism of the strange," mixing fact and fiction, levity and seriousness. While Vanek says little in the plays, his silence is an eloquent retort to the falsehoods of bureaucratic language and jargon. Vanek has greater freedom than his creators. Havel and Dienstbier continue to live in the Eastern Bloc, while Kohout and Landovsky, both now residents of Vienna, cannot return. Their corporate character, however, has managed to travel all over the world. The Vanek plays have been staged in many European countries as well as the United States. With the exception of the three plays by Havel, these translations have been especially prepared for this volume. The Vanek Plays will be of interest to stduents of contemporary theatre, producers, directors, and anyone concerned with the deep divisions of our modern world and literature's response to it.
Download or read book The Memorandum written by Václav Havel and published by Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 1980 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Memorandum is a remarkably witty assault on the madness of "efficiency" peculiar to total bureaucracy. In a large office, and unknown to the Managing Director, a new language called Ptydepe is installed as the official means of inter-office communication
Download or read book The New Right in the New Europe written by Seán Hanley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-08-07 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the emergence of centre right parties in Eastern Europe following the fall of communism, focusing primarily on the case of the Czech Republic. Although the country with the strongest social democratic traditions in Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic also produced the region’s strongest and most durable party of the free market right in Václav Klaus’ Civic Democratic Party (ODS). Seán Hanley considers the different varieties of right-wing politics that emerged in post-communist Europe, exploring in particular detail the origins of the Czech neo-liberal right, tracing its genesis to the reactions of dissidents and technocrats to the collapse of 1960s reform communism. He argues that, rather than being shaped by distant historical legacies, the emergence of centre-right parties can best be understood by examining the responses of counter-elites, outside or marginal to the former communist party-state establishment, to the collapse of communism and the imperatives of market reform and decommunization. This volume goes on to consider the emergence of right-wing forces in the disintegrating Civic Forum movement in 1990, the foundation of the ODS, the right’s period in office under Klaus in 1992-97, and its subsequent divisions and decline. It concludes by analyzing the ideology of the Czech Right, and its growing euroscepticism.
Download or read book Dissidents in Communist Central Europe written by Kacper Szulecki and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph traces the history of the dissident as a transnational phenomenon, exploring Soviet dissidents in Communist Central Europe from the mid-1960s until 1989. It argues that our understanding of the transnational activist would not be what it is today without the input of Central European oppositionists and ties the term to the global emergence and evolution of human rights. The book examines how we define dissidents and explores the association of political resistance to authoritarian regimes, as well as the impact of domestic and international recognition of the dissident figure. Turning to literature to analyse the meaning and impact of the dissident label, the book also incorporates interviews and primary accounts from former activists. Combining a unique theoretical approach with new empirical material, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary history, politics and culture in Central Europe.
Download or read book Balkanistica written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Czech German Relations and the Politics of Central Europe written by Jürgen Tampke and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-12-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of World War Two, approximately three million Sudeten-Germans were expelled from their homes in the former Czechoslovakia because of their part in the dismemberment of the Czechoslovak Republic by Nazi Germany in 1938-39. For many years their representatives, the Sudeten-German Association, attempted in vain to redress the wrong done to their people. However, the end of the Cold War has given a new impetus to their campaign. Currently they attempt to block Czech entry into the EU unless there is restitution of confiscated properties. Jürgen Tampke tells the story of the Sudeten-Germans from the beginning of their settlement seven hundred years ago in what is now the Czech Republic to current times.
Download or read book The Post traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor written by Magda Romanska and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its international influence, Polish theatre remains a mystery to many Westerners. This volume attempts to fill in current gaps in English-language scholarship by offering a historical and critical analysis of two of the most influential works of Polish theatre: Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Akropolis’ and Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘Dead Class’. By examining each director’s representation of Auschwitz, this study provides a new understanding of how translating national trauma through the prism of performance can alter and deflect the meaning and reception of theatrical works, both inside and outside of their cultural and historical contexts.
Download or read book Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transitional Economies written by Valentine M. Moghadam and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countries covered in the empirical case studies are Russia, Estonia, Poland, the Czech and Slovak republics, the former East Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria.
Download or read book Performative Democracy written by Elzbieta Matynia and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: fresh appreciation of the events of 1989 as we approach their 20th anniversary in 2009 Performative Democracy explores a potential in political life that easily escapes theorists: the indigenously inspired enacting of democracy by citizens. Written by one who experienced an emerging public sphere within Communist Poland, the book seeks to identify the conditions for performativity-performing politics--in public life. It examines a broad spectrum of cultural, social, and political initiatives that facilitated the non-violent transformation of an autocratic environment into a democratic one. Examples of performativity range from experimental student theater, through the engaged political thinking of dissident Adam Michnik, the alternative culture, and the Solidarity movement, to the drama of the Round Table Talks (and their striking parallels in South Africa), and finally, the post-1989 efforts of feminist groups and women artists to defend the recently won right of free public discourse. The book argues that performative democracy, with its improvisational mode and imaginative solutions, deserves a legitimate place in our broader reflections on democracy. Matynia describes how two apparent miracles of recent history-that communism in Poland was brought down without violence and that apartheid in South Africa was ended without a bloodbath-were the results of hard work and a new approach to change that she calls "performative democracy." Matynia reveals amazing parallels between the drama of Poland's Round Table Talks in 1989 and the Truth Commissions in South Africa in 1994. Matynia describes how experimental student theater groups, though subsidized by a totalitarian regime afraid of any authentic public life, created little pockets of public space for free and meaningful expression that were augmented by uncensored underground publishing and further expanded by the Solidarity movement into a democratic society within the totalitarian state. Matynia describes in a personal way how in the 1970s student theater groups planted the seeds of an authentic public sphere, how underground publishers nurtured freedom of expression and social criticism, and how, after democratic elections, women artists in the 1990s fought to sustain the newly won right to free public discourse. Matynia traces in vivid human terms the democratic aspirations and practices that led to democratic change in Poland but went largely unnoticed by western media and policymakers.
Download or read book Largo Desolato written by Václav Havel and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Leopold Nettles, the hero of Largo Desolato, is the author of a book that contains a troublesome paragraph laying him open to arrest on charges of disturbing the intellectual peace. Pressed by the government to recant, Nettles is tortured by internal demons as well as external ones. Vaclav Havel has created a vivid and terrifying portrait of the writer in the totalitarian state that is as real and immediate as today s headlines."
Download or read book The Theatre Guide written by Trevor R. Griffiths and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2003 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With over 500 entries on the most important plays and playwrights performed today, The Theatre Guide provdies an anuthoritative A - Z of the contemporary theatre scene. From Aristophanes to Mark Ravenhill, The alchemist ot The Talking Cure, the guide is both biogrpahically detailed and critically curent, while an extensive cross-referencing system allows for wider perspectives and new discoveries. Stimulating, observant and informative, The Theatre Guide is an essential companion and reference tool for anyone with an active interest in drama.
Download or read book The Increased Difficulty of Concentration written by Václav Havel and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Letters to Olga written by Václav Havel and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vaclav Havel is one of the most important European writers of our time. In 1979 he was sentenced to four and a half years of hard labour for his involvement in the Czech human rights movement, Charter 77. In prison he was allowed to write to his wife, Olga, once a week. He used the opportunity for profound reflections, on theatre, society and philosophy. These letters form a remarkable document, and a work of lasting value.'From Havel, we learn that the true heroes of our time are those who stay the course.' Bruce Chatwin
Download or read book The Memorandum written by Václav Havel and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolves around the invention of a new bureaucratic language, Ptydepe, which is adopted by an organisation despite the fact that few employees seem to understand it.
Download or read book Calculation and Coordination written by Peter J Boettke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2000-11-23 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays from one of the major Austrian economists working in the world today brings together in one place some of his key writings on a variety of economic issues.
Download or read book Across the Atlantic written by Luisa Passerini and published by P.I.E-Peter Lang S.A., Editions Scientifiques Internationales. This book was released on 2000 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the result of an experiment in advanced teaching and learning which took place as a joint effort of the Departments of History at the European University Institute, Florence, and at New York University in the years 1996-1999. The experiment brought together fifteen graduate students and six professors from the two institutions, and included two workshops and a conference, in which also other scholars participated. Junior and senior scholars explored how and to what extent reciprocal exchanges between Europe and the USA in the period from the end of the XVIIIth century to the present were connected with and meaningful for their researches. The papers that have emerged from this approach also discuss the methodology of history: issues such as the relations between representations, identities, material production and consumption are challenged. The reciprocity of European representations of America and of American visions of Europe comes out clearly as does the impossibility of studying the symbolic considering the material and vice versa.
