Download or read book Letters Postcards Email written by Esther Milne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-02-27 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original study, Milne moves between close readings of letters, postcards and emails, and investigations of the material, technological infrastructures of these forms, to answer the question: How does presence function as an aesthetic and rhetorical strategy within networked communication practices? As her work reveals, the relation between old and new communication systems is more complex than allowed in much contemporary media theory. Although the correspondents of letters, postcards and emails are not, usually, present to one another as they write and read their exchanges, this does not necessarily inhibit affective communication. Indeed, this study demonstrates how physical absence may, in some instances, provide correspondents with intense intimacy and a spiritual, almost telepathic, sense of the other’s presence. While corresponding by letter, postcard or email, readers construe an imaginary, incorporeal body for their correspondents that, in turn, reworks their interlocutor’s self-presentation. In this regard the fantasy of presence reveals a key paradox of cultural communication, namely that material signifiers can be used to produce the experience of incorporeal presence.

Download or read book Guardians of the Nation written by Pieter M. Judson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades leading up to World War I, nationalist activists in imperial Austria labored to transform linguistically mixed rural regions into politically charged language frontiers. Using examples from several regions, including Bohemia and Styria, Judson traces the struggle to consolidate the loyalty of local populations for nationalist causes.

Download or read book Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe written by Pieter M. Judson and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The hundred years between the revolutions of 1848 and the population transfers of the mid-twentieth century saw the nationalization of culturally complex societies in East Central Europe. This fact has variously been explained in terms of modernization, state building, and nation-building theories, each of which treats the process of nationalization as something inexorable, a necessary component of modernity. Although more recently social scientists gesture to the contingencies that may shape these larger developments, this structural approach makes scholars far less attentive to the "hard work" (ideological, political, social) undertaken by individuals and groups at every level of society who tried themselves to build "national" societies." "The essays in this volume make us aware of how complex, multi-dimensional and often contradictory this nationalization process in East Central Europe actually was. The authors document attempts and failures by nationalist politicians, organizations, activists, and regimes from 1848 through 1948 to give East-Central Europeans a strong sense of national self-identification. They remind us that only the use of dictatorial powers in the 20th century could actually transform the fantasy of nationalization into a reality, albeit a brutal one."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Andrea Fraser written by Rhea Anastas and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Language Diversity in the Late Habsburg Empire written by Markian Prokopovych and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collective volume seeks to approach the practice of language diversity in multi-ethnic urban societies of Austria-Hungary and place it both within its local and its larger European context, and within the broader studies of multilingualism and multiculturalism.

Download or read book The Architecture of Modern Culture written by Wolfgang Müller-Funk and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These collected essays contain fundamental contributions to contemporary cultural analysis and theory as well as exemplary interpretations of film, literature and other media. Central issues of current cultural studies are addressed: cultural narratives, cultural identity, collective memory and post-colonial thinking. The oeuvre of cultural and literary critic Wolfgang Müller-Funk encompasses historic analyses such as readings of Broch, Canetti and Musil, and the heritage they passed on. Other essays move from the beginning of the 20th to the 21st century and address questions of space, time and globalization discussing, for example, Walter Benjamin and 9/11.

Download or read book Budweisers Into Czechs and Germans written by Jeremy King and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of a single town in Bohemia casts new light on nationalism in Central Europe between the Springtime of Nations in 1848 and the Cold War. Jeremy King tells the story of both German and Czech-speaking Budweis/Budæjovice, which belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy until 1918, and then to Czechoslovakia, Hitler's Third Reich, and Czechoslovakia again. Residents, at first simply "Budweisers," or Habsburg subjects with mostly local loyalties, gradually became Czechs or Germans. Who became Czech, though, and who German? What did it mean to be one or the other? In answering these questions, King shows how an epochal, region-wide contest for power found expression in Budweis/Budæjovice not only through elections but through clubs, schools, boycotts, breweries, a remarkable constitutional experiment, a couple of riots, and much more. In tracing the nationalization of politics from small and sometimes comic beginnings to the genocide and mass expulsions of the 1940s, he also rejects traditional interpretive frameworks. Writing not a national history but a history of nationhood, both Czech and German, King recovers a nonnational dimension to the past. Embodied locally by Budweisers and more generally by the Habsburg state, that dimension has long been blocked from view by a national rhetoric of race and ethnicity. King's Czech-Habsburg-German narrative, in addition to capturing the dynamism and complexity of Bohemian politics, participates in broader scholarly discussions concerning the nature of nationalism.

Download or read book Postcards written by David Prochaska and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines postcards as images that are carriers of text, and textual correspondence that circulate images across boundaries of class, gender, nationality and race. Discusses issues concerning the concrete practices of production, consumption, collection and appropriation.

Download or read book Challenging the Monolingual Mindset written by John Hajek and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume challenges the monolingual mindset by highlighting how language-related issues surround us in many different ways, and explores the tensions that can develop in managing and understanding multilingualism. The book features analysis and discussion on the use of languages across a range of contexts, including post-migration settlement, policy, education, language contact and intercultural communication.

Download or read book Czechs Germans Jews written by Kateřina Čapková and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of national identities, always a key issue in the modern history of Bohemian Jewry, was particularly complex because of the marginal differences that existed between the available choices. Considerable overlap was evident in the programs of the various national movements and it was possible to change one's national identity or even to opt for more than one such identity without necessarily experiencing any far-reaching consequences in everyday life. Based on many hitherto unknown archival sources from the Czech Republic, Israel and Austria, the author's research reveals the inner dynamic of each of the national movements and maps out the three most important constructions of national identity within Bohemian Jewry - the German-Jewish, the Czech-Jewish and the Zionist. This book provides a needed framework for understanding the rich history of German- and Czech-Jewish politics and culture in Bohemia and is a notable contribution to the historiography of Bohemian, Czechoslovak and central European Jewry.

Download or read book The Habsburg Empire written by Pieter M. Judson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A EuropeNow Editor’s Pick A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year “Pieter M. Judson’s book informs and stimulates. If his account of Habsburg achievements, especially in the 18th century, is rather starry-eyed, it is a welcome corrective to the black legend usually presented. Lucid, elegant, full of surprising and illuminating details, it can be warmly recommended to anyone with an interest in modern European history.” —Tim Blanning, Wall Street Journal “This is an engaging reappraisal of the empire whose legacy, a century after its collapse in 1918, still resonates across the nation-states that replaced it in central Europe. Judson rejects conventional depictions of the Habsburg empire as a hopelessly dysfunctional assemblage of squabbling nationalities and stresses its achievements in law, administration, science and the arts.” —Tony Barber, Financial Times “Spectacularly revisionist... Judson argues that...the empire was a force for progress and modernity... This is a bold and refreshing book... Judson does much to destroy the picture of an ossified regime and state.” —A. W. Purdue, Times Higher Education “Judson’s reflections on nations, states and institutions are of broader interest, not least in the current debate on the future of the European Union after Brexit.” —Annabelle Chapman, Prospect

Download or read book Uses of Literature written by Rita Felski and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-23 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses of Literature bridges the gap between literary theory and common-sense beliefs about why we read literature. Explores the diverse motives and mysteries of why we read Offers four different ways of thinking about why we read literature - for recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock Argues for a new “phenomenology” in literary studies that incorporates the historical and social dimensions of reading Includes examples of literature from a wide range of national literary traditions

Download or read book Biography Between Structure and Agency written by Volker Rolf Berghahn and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While bookstore shelves around the world have never ceased to display best-selling "life-and-letters" biographies in prominent positions, the genre became less popular among academic historians during the Cold War decades. Their main concern then was with political and socioeconomic structures, institutions, and organizations, or-more recently-with the daily lives of ordinary people and small communities. The contributors to this volume-all well known senior historians-offer self-critical reflections on problems they encountered when writing biographies themselves. Some of them also deal with topics specific to Central Europe, such as the challenges of writing about the lives of both victims and perpetrators. Although the volume concentrates on European historiography, its strong methodological and conceptual focus will be of great interest to non-European historians wrestling with the old "structure-versus-agency" question in their own work. Contributors: Volker R. Berghahn, Hartmut Berghoff, Hilary Earl, Jan Eckel, Willem Frijhoff, Ian Kershaw, Simone Lässig, Karl Heinrich Pohl, John C. G. Röhl, Angelika Schaser, Joachim Radkau, Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, Mark Roseman, Christoph Strupp and Michael Wildt.

Download or read book Kidnapped Souls written by Tara Zahra and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the nineteenth and into the early decades of the twentieth century, it was common for rural and working-class parents in the Czech-German borderlands to ensure that their children were bilingual by sending them to live with families who spoke the "other" language. As nationalism became a more potent force in Central Europe, however, such practices troubled pro-German and pro-Czech activists, who feared that the children born to their nation could literally be "lost" or "kidnapped" from the national community through such experiences and, more generally, by parents who were either flexible about national belonging or altogether indifferent to it. Highlighting this indifference to nationalism—and concerns about such apathy among nationalists—Kidnapped Souls offers a surprising new perspective on Central European politics and society in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on Austrian, Czech, and German archives, Tara Zahra shows how nationalists in the Bohemian Lands worked to forge political cultures in which children belonged more rightfully to the national collective than to their parents. Through their educational and social activism to fix the boundaries of nation and family, Zahra finds, Czech and German nationalists reveal the set of beliefs they shared about children, family, democracy, minority rights, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Zahra shows that by 1939 a vigorous tradition of Czech-German nationalist competition over children had created cultures that would shape the policies of the Nazi occupation and the Czech response to it. The book's concluding chapter weighs the prehistory and consequences of the postwar expulsion of German families from the Bohemian Lands. Kidnapped Souls is a significant contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of modern nationalism in Central Europe and a groundbreaking exploration of the ways in which children have been the objects of political contestation when national communities have sought to shape, or to reshape, their futures.

Download or read book Early Modern Jewry written by David B. Ruderman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Modern Jewry boldly offers a new history of the early modern Jewish experience. From Krakow and Venice to Amsterdam and Smyrna, David Ruderman examines the historical and cultural factors unique to Jewish communities throughout Europe, and how these distinctions played out amidst the rest of society. Looking at how Jewish settlements in the early modern period were linked to one another in fascinating ways, he shows how Jews were communicating with each other and were more aware of their economic, social, and religious connections than ever before. Ruderman explores five crucial and powerful characteristics uniting Jewish communities: a mobility leading to enhanced contacts between Jews of differing backgrounds, traditions, and languages, as well as between Jews and non-Jews; a heightened sense of communal cohesion throughout all Jewish settlements that revealed the rising power of lay oligarchies; a knowledge explosion brought about by the printing press, the growing interest in Jewish books by Christian readers, an expanded curriculum of Jewish learning, and the entrance of Jewish elites into universities; a crisis of rabbinic authority expressed through active messianism, mystical prophecy, radical enthusiasm, and heresy; and the blurring of religious identities, impacting such groups as conversos, Sabbateans, individual converts to Christianity, and Christian Hebraists. In describing an early modern Jewish culture, Early Modern Jewry reconstructs a distinct epoch in history and provides essential background for understanding the modern Jewish experience.

Download or read book Toward Modernity written by Jacob Katz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume throw light on one of the central problems of modern Jewish historiography: How has Jewry and Judaism survived the crisis of the breakup of Jewish traditional society, the transition from the dosed, ghetto existence into a more or less open environment? The process of development, starting in eighteenth-century Germany, gradually encompassed the entire world of European Jewish experience.Toward Modernity compares modernization in Germany with its counterparts in other countries to see if the German-Jewish development had any influence on what transpired elsewhere. The authors explore the history of Jewish modernization in Russia, Galicia, Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Holland, France, England, Italy, and the United States. Topics covered include: the political and social authority of Jewish community institutions; external impediments and internal inhibitions for Jews to be absorbed by the dominant culture; the relationship of the state to the Jewish community; educational and religious reform; the influence of the rational scientific worldview; and the possibility of inclusion in the emerging middle classes.Contents: Jacob Katz, Introduction; Emanuel Etkes, Immanent Factors and External Influences in the Development of the Haskala Movement in Russia; Israel Bartal, 'The Heavenly City of Germany' and Absolutism a la Mode D'Autriche: The Rise of the Haskala in Galicia; Robert S. Wistrich, The Modernization of Viennese Jewry: The Impact of German Culture in a Multiethnic State; Hillel J. Kieval, Caution's Progress: The Modernization of Jewish Life in Prague, 1780-1830; Michael Silber, The German Jewish Experience and Its Impact on Hungarian Jewry, 1780-1870; Michael Graetz, The History of an Estrangement between Two Jewish Communities: German and French Jewry during the Nineteenth Century; Joseph Michman, The Impact of German-Jewish Modernization on Dutch Jewry; Lois C. Dubin, Trieste and Berlin: The Italian Role in the Cultural Politics of the Haskalah; Todd M. Endelman, The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England; Michael A. Meyer, German Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century America.

Download or read book Creating the Other written by Nancy M. Wingfield and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historic myths of a people/nation usually play an important role in the creation and consolidation of the basic concepts from which the self-image of that nation derives. These concepts include not only images of the nation itself, but also images of other peoples. Although the construction of ethnic stereotypes during the "long" nineteenth century initially had other functions than simply the homogenization of the particular culture and the exclusion of "others" from the public sphere, the evaluation of peoples according to criteria that included "level of civilization" yielded "rankings" of ethnic groups within the Habsburg Monarchy. That provided the basis for later, more divisive ethnic characterizations of exclusive nationalism, as addressed in this volume that examines the roots and results of ethnic, nationalist, and racial conflict in the region from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives.