The Dissident Politics in Václav Havel’s Vanek Plays PDF Download
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Author: Carol Strong
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793650217
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
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.
Author: Carol Strong
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793650217
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Carol Strong
Publisher: Politics, Literature, & Film
ISBN: 9781793650207
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Strong's book focuses on a series of plays, all featuring the dynamic literary character, Ferdinand Vaněk - a semi-autobiographical representation of Czechoslovakia's 'Dissident Turned Post-Communist President, ' Václav Havel. Interpreting these plays as a collective call for c...
Author: Erik Trump
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666908215
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
The Architecture of Survival: Setting and Politics in Apocalypse Films offers a compelling exploration of how popular films and TV series from the past two decades use architectural spaces to comment on socio-political issues. The authors harness varied theoretical perspectives to demonstrate how, through set design, these works suggest that certain kinds of architecture support human development, community, and freedom, while other kinds separate us from our fellow humans and make democratic politics impossible. The clean lines of modernist design serve in films such as Contagion and Ex Machina as a metaphor for the sanitized, sterile politics that drive disaster. In The Walking Dead apocalypse survivors favor traditional architectural styles when rebuilding society, a choice that symbolically affirms their democratic principles. The massive walls and super-gentrification as seen in Elysium and Army of the Dead divide humanity, with those on one side wielding illegitimate power. Empty streetscapes intensify loneliness, alienation, and the destruction of civil norms. "Smart cities," offering a blend of high-tech surveillance and big data, erode social capital and community in Her and Transcendence. The book concludes with a somewhat hopeful glimpse into architecture’s potential to mitigate the catastrophic adverse effects of climate change, as seen in films like Zootopia.
Author: Michael Harris
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666940143
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
If our near future sometimes feels like a dystopian sci-fi movie, that’s because it is. In Come With Me If You Want to Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, Michael Harris reveals the hidden-in-plain-sight meanings of the greatest science fiction films of the past fifty years, the ways in which they predicted the future that we are increasingly living in, but how we can still avoid the worst of what they warned us about. The 1970s saw the start of a new wave of science fiction that predicted environmental destruction, out-of-control technology, and escalating political crises. These were not the fantastical imaginings of filmmakers, they were based on rising environmental consciousness and solid scientific research. The explanation of why we didn’t heed these warnings might be the most important story of our time – and now our future. Each chapter focuses on a classic sci-fi film: among them Blade Runner, Terminator 2, 12 Monkeys, Brazil, , Soylent Green, and the Back to the Future series; these films are used to consider our likely environmental, technological, and political future. But taking sci-fi seriously again could help us to regain our power to create different tomorrows guided by practical utopianism, and to imagine new science fictions for a better world. If you’re wondering what the future holds, maybe you’ve already seen it.
Author: David Caute
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351498363
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
David Cautes wide-ranging study examines how outstanding novelists of the Cold War era conveyed the major issues of contemporary politics and history. In the United States and Western Europe the political novel flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, the crisis years of economic depression, fascism, the Spanish Civil War,the consolidation of Stalinism, and the Second World War. Starting with the high hopes generated by the Spanish Civil War, Caute then explores the god that failed pessimism that overtook the Western political novel in the 1940s. The writers under scrutiny include Hemingway, Dos Passos, Orwell, Koestler, Malraux, Serge, Greene, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Strikingly different approaches to the burning issues of the time are found among orthodox Soviet novelists such as Sholokhov, Fadeyev, Kochetov, and Pavlenko. Soviet official culture continued to choke on modernism, formalism, satire, and allegory. In Russia and Eastern Europe dissident novelists offered contesting voices as they engaged in the fraught re-telling of life under Stalinism. The emergence of the New Left in the 1960s generated a new wave of fiction challenging Americas global stance. Mailer, Doctorow, and Coover brought fresh literary sensibilities tobear on such iconic events as the 1967 siege of the Pentagon and the execution of the Rosenbergs.
Author: Daniel Brennan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004332197
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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Book Description
The book considers Václav Havel’s body of writing as a cohesive whole offering a consistent political philosophy. This bold claim is backed up through a close examination of Havel’s plays, letters, essays and aphorisms. The political philosophy that a close reading of Havel reveals is a liberal one. However, Havel is not the run-of the-mill liberal having influences from the field of phenomenology, Masaryk, Husserl, Levinas Patočka and Heidegger which give him a nuanced view of the self. Havel sees the self as something always being formed. Hence for Havel man has an ability to ‘shake’ his current state and invite transcendence into his life. This agonistic process reveals our responsibility and liberates the self from forces which coerce behaviour.
Author: Václav Havel
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802133076
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Gathered together here for the first time are seven plays that span Havel's career from his early days at the Theater of the Balustrade through the Prague Spring, Charter 77, and the repeated imprisonments that made Havel's name into a rallying cry and propelled him to the leadership of his country. They include The Garden Party, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, Mistake, the Vanek trilogy of Audience, Unveiling, and Protest, and the first fully corrected English version of The Memorandum--the play that won Havel the Obie for Best Foreign Play in 1968.
Author: Elisabetta Tarantino with the collaboration of Carlo Caruso
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527557200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
This book deals with a topic that is gaining increasing critical attention, the literature of nonsense and absurdity. The volume gathers together twenty-one essays on various aspects of literary nonsense, according to criteria that are deliberately inclusive and eclectic. Its purpose is to offer a gallery of “nonsense practices” in literature across periods and countries, in the conviction that important critical insights can be gained from these juxtapositions. Most of the cases presented here deal with linguistic nonsense, but in a few instances the nonsense operates at the higher level of the interpretation of reality on the part of the subject—or of the impossibility thereof. The contributors to the volume are established and younger scholars from various countries. Chronologically, the chapters range widely from Dante to Václav Havel, and offer a large span of national literatures (Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese) and literary genres (poetry, prose, and drama), inviting the readers to trace their own pathway and draw their own lines of connection. One point that emerges with particular force is the notion that what distinguishes literary nonsense is its somehow “regulated” nature. Literary nonsense thus sounds like a deliberate, last-ditch attempt to snatch order from the jaws of chaos—the speech of the “Fool” as opposed to the tale told by an idiot. It is this kind of post-Derridean retrieval of choice as the defining element in semantic transactions which is perhaps the most significant insight bequeathed by the study of nonsense to the analysis of poetry and literature in general.
Author: Silvija Jestrovic
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030432904
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
This book takes Roland Barthes’s famous proclamation of ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of ‘the author’ as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of ‘authorial death’ by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?
Author: Václav Havel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Czech drama
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
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.
