Writing Postcommunism

Writing Postcommunism PDF Author: D. Williams
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137330082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Writing Postcommunism

Writing Postcommunism PDF Author: D. Williams
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137330082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Staging Postcommunism

Staging Postcommunism PDF Author: Vessela S. Warner
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609386787
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
Theatre in Eastern and Central Europe was never the same after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the transition to a postcommunist world, “alternative theatre” found ways to grapple with political chaos, corruption, and aggressive implementation of a market economy. Three decades later, this volume is the first comprehensive examination of alternative theatre in ten former communist countries. The essays focus on companies and artists that radically changed the language and organization of theatre in the countries formerly known as the Eastern European bloc. This collection investigates the ways in which postcommunist alternative theatre negotiated and embodied change not only locally but globally as well. Contributors: Dennis Barnett, Dennis C. Beck, Violeta Decheva, Luule Epner, John Freedman, Barry Freeman, Margarita Kompelmakher, Jaak Rahesoo, Angelina Ros ̧ca, Ban ̧uta Rubess, Christopher Silsby, Andrea Tompa, S. E. Wilmer

Narrating Post/Communism

Narrating Post/Communism PDF Author: Natasa Kovacevic
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134044135
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429

Get Book Here

Book Description
The transition of communist Eastern Europe to capitalist democracy post-1989 and in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars has focused much scholarly attention - in history, political science and literature - on the fostering of new identities across Eastern European countries in the absence of the old communist social and ideological frameworks. This book examines an important, but hitherto largely neglected, part of this story: the ways in which the West has defined its own identity and ideals via the demonization of communist regimes and Eastern European cultures as a totalitarian, barbarian and Orientalist "other". It describes how old Orientalist prejudices resurfaced during the Cold War period, and argues that the establishment of this discourse helped to justify transitions of Eastern European societies to market capitalism and liberal democracy, suppressing Eastern Europe’s communist histories and legacies, whilst perpetuating its dependence on the West as a source of its own sense of identity. It argues that this process of Orientalization was reinforced by the literary narratives of Eastern European and Russian anti-communist dissidents and exiles, including Vladimir Nabokov, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, in their attempts to present themselves as native, Eastern European experts and also emancipate themselves – and their homelands – as civilized, enlightened and Westernized. It goes on to suggest that the greatest potential for recognizing and overcoming this self-Orientalization lies in post-communist literary and visual narratives, with their themes of disappointment in the social, economic, or political changes brought on by the transitions, challenge of the unequal discursive power in East-West dialogues where the East is positioned as a disciple or a mimic of the West, and the various guises of nostalgia for communism.

Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe

Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe PDF Author: Dorota Ko?odziejczyk
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317285999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
A quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and from the vantage point of a post-Cold War, globalised, world, there is a need to address the relative neglect of postcommunism in analysis of postcolonial and neo-colonial configurations of power and influence. This book proposes new critical perspectives on several themes and concepts that have emerged within, or been propagated by, postcolonial studies. These themes include structures of exclusion/ inclusion; formations of nationalism, structures of othering, and representations of difference; forms and historical realisations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience of trauma (involving issues of collective memory/amnesia and the re-writing of history); resistance as a complex of cultural practices; and concepts such as alterity, ambivalence, self-colonisation, dislocation, hegemonic discourse, minority, and subaltern cultures.? Taken together, this volume suggests that some of the methodological instruments of postcolonial criticism can be fruitfully applied to the study of postcommunist cultures and, conversely, that the experience of the Soviet brand of imperialist rule in the form of communism in East-Central Europe can function as an ideological moderator in Third-World oriented, Marxist-inspired, postcolonial discourses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Narrating Post/Communism

Narrating Post/Communism PDF Author: Natasa Kovacevic
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134044143
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines communist and post-communist literary and visual narratives, including the writings of prominent anti-communist dissidents and exiles such as Vladimir Nabokov, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, exploring important themes including how Eastern European regimes and cultures have been portrayed as totalitarian, barbarian and "Orientalist" – in contrast to the civilized "West" – disappointment in the changes brought on by post-communist transition, and nostalgia for communism.

East Central Europe in the Modern World

East Central Europe in the Modern World PDF Author: Andrew C. Janos
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804746885
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Get Book Here

Book Description
A study of East Central Europe and its place in the modern world. Combining narrative with analysis, it presents the past and present of East Central Europe in the larger context of the political and economic history of the continent.

Retroactive Justice

Retroactive Justice PDF Author: István Rév
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804736442
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
The book offers a vast panorama of Communism from the perspective of its collapse, and inspects the world beyond the fall in the distorting mirror of its imagined prehistory—providing in the process a perceptive analysis of a number of the fundamental issues of history writing.

New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature

New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature PDF Author: Frauke Matthes
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031103181
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
The complex nexus between masculinity and national identity has long troubled, but also fascinated the German cultural imagination. This has become apparent again since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the turn of the millennium when transnational developments have noticeably shaped Germany’s self-perception as a nation. This book examines the social and political impact of transnationalism with reference to current discourses of masculinity in novels by five contemporary male German-language authors. Specifically, it analyses how conceptions of the masculine interact with those of nationality, ethnicity, and otherness in the selected texts and assesses the new masculinities that result from those interactions. Exploring how local discourses of masculinity become part of transnational contexts in contemporary writing, the book moves a consideration of masculinities from a "native" into a transnational sphere.

Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture

Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture PDF Author: C. White
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137373075
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this engaging new study, Claire White reveals how representations of work and leisure became the vehicle for anxieties and fantasies about class and alienation, affecting, in turn, the ways in which writers and artists understood their own cultural work.

Underground Modernity

Underground Modernity PDF Author: Alfrun Kliems
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863988
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
The literary scholar Alfrun Kliems explores the aesthetic strategies of Eastern European underground literature, art, film and music in the decades before and after the fall of communism, ranging from the ‘father’ of Prague Underground, Egon Bondy, to the neo-Dada Club of Polish Losers in Berlin. The works she considers are "underground" in the sense that they were produced illegally, or were received as subversive after the regimes had fallen. Her study challenges common notions of ‘underground’ as an umbrella term for nonconformism. Rather, it depicts it as a sociopoetic reflection of modernity, intimately linked to urban settings, with tropes and aesthetic procedures related to Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and, above all, pop and counterculture. The author discusses these commonalities and distinctions in Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, and German authors, musicians, and filmmakers. She identifies intertextual relations across languages and generations, and situates her findings in a transatlantic context (including the Beat Generation, Susan Sontag, Neil Young) and the historical framework of Romanticism and modernity (including Baudelaire and Brecht). Despite this wide brief, the book never loses sight of its core message: Underground is no arbitrary expression of discontent, but rather the result of a fundamental conflict at the socio-philosophical roots of modernity.