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
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: 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: James F. Pontuso
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461715490
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
More than any other public figure, VOclav Havel has reflected on the opportunities and dilemmas facing humankind as a result of the Communism's collapse. His life serves as an example of responsible and moral action, even at the cost of much personal suffering. In the first book to bring together Havel's life and work, James Pontuso examines the Czech president's political philosophy. Pontuso argues that Havel's life as a dissident and political leader, his political writings, and his plays are part of a whole and must be understood as intimately connected to one another. In this engaging work, Pontuso skillfully explores these connections and explains Havel's prescriptions for political life.
Author: Delia Popescu
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739149571
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
Political Action in Vaclav Havel's Thought: The Responsibility of Resistance, by Delia Popescu, examines resistance to oppression and individual responsibility in political action, all in the context of Vaclav Havel's political philosophy. The famous anti-communist dissident, acclaimed playwright, former President of the Czech Republic, and eminent political thinker argues that there is a certain tendency in modern humanity towards the creation, or at least toleration, of a political system that is invasive and controlling. Not unlike Tocqueville and Arendt, Havel claims that modern liberal democracy contains potential tendencies toward a new form of despotism that capitalizes on modern alienation and social atomization. Political Action in Vaclav Havel's Thought suggests that Havel's theory of individual opposition can be used to secure political freedom under the conditions of modernity. Popescu demonstrates that Havel's idea of attaining true political participation and freedom requires a strong connection between an individually constructed ethics and the realm of politics. On this basis she reveals that a thick notion of morality can be usefully integrated into an account of both private and public accountability. Vaclav Havel's essays, plays, speeches, and letters can therefore be integrated into a coherent political theory which contributes significantly to some of the central debates in modern political thought. Delia Popescu concludes that Havel's theory of individual opposition to totalitarianism may also serve as the foundation for a conception of responsible participation in modern liberal democracies.
Author: Vaclav Havel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315487357
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Designed as an introduction to emergency management, this book includes pieces on: social, political, and fiscal aspects of risk management; land-use planning and building code enforcement regulations; insurance issues; emergency management systems; and managing natural and manmade disasters.
Author: Vaclav Havel
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307369420
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
An astonishingly candid memoir from the acclaimed, dissident playwright elected President after the dramatic Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution — one of the most respected political figures of our time. As writer and statesman, Václav Havel played an essential part in the profound changes that occurred in Central Europe in the last decades of the twentieth century. In this most intimate memoir, he writes about his transition from outspoken dissident and political prisoner to a player on the international stage in 1989 as newly elected president of Czechoslovakia after the ousting of the Soviet Union, and, in l993, as president of the newly formed Czech Republic. Havel gives full rein to his impassioned stance against the devastation wrought by communism, but the scope of his concern in this engrossing memoir extends far beyond the circumstances he faced in his own country. The book is full of anecdotes of his interactions with world figures: offering a peace pipe to Mikhail Gorbachev, meditating with the Dali Lama, confessing to Pope John Paul II and partying with Bill and Hilary Clinton. Havel shares his thoughts on the future of the European Union and the role of national identity in today’s world. He explains why he has come to change his mind about the war in Iraq, and he discusses the political and personal reverberations he faces because of his initial support of the invasion. He writes with equal intelligence and candour about subjects as diverse as the arrogance of western power politics, the death of his first wife and his own battle with lung cancer. Woven through are internal memos he wrote during his presidency that take us behind the scenes of the Prague Castle – the government’s seat of power – showing the internal workings of the office and revealing Havel’s mission to act as his country’s conscience, and even, at times, its chief social convenor. Written with characteristic eloquence, wit and well-honed irony combined with an unfailing sense of wonder at the course his life has taken, To the Castle and Back is a revelation of one of the most important political figures of our time.
Author: Michael Zantovsky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780857898524
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 560
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Book Description
Vaclav Havel was an iconoclast and philosopher-king, an internationally successful playwright who became a political dissident and then, reluctantly, a president. His pivotal role in the Velvet Revolution, the end of Communism and the birth of a modern, west-facing Czech Republic makes him a key figure of the 20th century. Michael Zantovsky, one of Havel's closest friends, explores his remarkable life."
Author: Jeffrey Symynkywicz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875186078
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
A biography of Vaclav Havel, the dissident Czechoslovak playwright who spent years fighting for freedom of expression and eventually was elected president of a free and independent Czechoslovak republic.
Author: John Keane
Publisher: Political Tragedy in Six Acts
ISBN: 0465037208
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 546
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Book Description
An authorized portrait based on interviews with the political leader, those closest to him, and his enemies sets his life against the tumultuous events surrounding his career and demonstrates his contributions to the political and moral arena. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.
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.
