Collectivity—Past and Present

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Melissa Mowry

Chapter 1 explains who the Levellers were, and their significance, outlining the Leveller community’s development of a hermeneutics of collectivity as the cornerstone of their demands for political and social justice. It explores the resistance in modern literary history to recognizing the long-term impact of that hermeneutics. Shaped by the powerful events of World War II, modern literary history, it is contended, was coopted by an epistemology of singularity and has struggled over the last half of the twentieth century to “read” and understand the effect of community on the production of knowledge. The chapter outlines the contents of the rest of the book chapter by chapter.

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (S1) ◽  
pp. 7-29
Author(s):  
Martha Lampland

Two wage systems designed to improve productivity among Hungarian workers are compared. The first, calorie money, was a short-term solution to keep workers properly nourished and hard at work in a capitalist economy in the midst of inflationary chaos at the end of World War II. The second, technical norms, was a long-term project initiated by the socialist state to design norms based on workers’ physical capacity in order to extract the greatest amount of effort most efficiently. In both cases, wages were set according to the level of exertion expended by the worker, not by output, which is commonly understood to be the measure of productivity. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to situate the early socialist project in Hungary within a longer history of rationalization and scientific management in the first half of the twentieth century; and (2) to explain how different conceptualizations of labor generate distinct approaches to determining wages and establishing norm rates. This approach draws attention to two central questions: the structural character of the transition to socialism in 1940s Hungary and the historical contingencies of the definition and assessment of work.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Morley

Independent of each other, though contemporaneous, the Anglo-American occupiers of Germany and the newly founded United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization employed culture to foster greater intercultural and international understanding in 1945. Both enterprises separately saw culture as offering a means of securing the peace in the long term. This article compares the stated intentions and activities of the Anglo-American occupiers and UNESCO vis-à-vis transforming morals and public opinion in Germany for the better after World War II. It reconceptualizes the mobilization of culture to transform Germany through engaging theories of cultural diplomacy and propaganda. It argues that rather than merely engaging in propaganda in the negative sense, elements of these efforts can also be viewed as propaganda in the earlier, morally neutral sense of the term, despite the fact that clear geopolitical aims lay at the heart of the cultural activities of both the occupiers and UNESCO.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


Heritage ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 753-781
Author(s):  
Dirk HR Spennemann

Military terrain analysis serves as a tool to examine a battle commander’s view of a battlefield and permits to hindcast some of the rationale for actions taken. This can be augmented by physical evidence of the remains of the battle that still exist in the cultural landscape. In the case of World War II-era battlefields, such terrain analysis has to take into account the influence of aerial warfare—the interrelationship between attacking aircraft and the siting of anti-aircraft guns. This paper examines these issues using the case example of the Japanese WWII-era base on Kiska in the Aleutian Islands (Alaska).


2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANS VAN POPPEL ◽  
INEZ JOUNG

This article describes the long-term trends in marital status mortality differences in the Netherlands using a unique dataset relating to the period 1850–1970. Poisson regression analysis was applied to calculate relative mortality risks by marital status. For two periods, cause-of-death by marital status could be used. Clear differences in mortality by marital status were observed, with strongly increasing advantages for married men and women and a relative increase in the mortality of widowed compared with non-married people. Excess mortality among single and formerly married men and women was visible in many cause-of-death categories, and this became more widespread during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Hypotheses are formulated that might explain why married men and women underwent a stronger decrease in mortality up until the end of World War II.


1995 ◽  
Vol 76 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1331-1341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siegfried Weyerer ◽  
Andreas Wiedenmann

The potential consequence of economic stress most frequently cited in the literature of medical sociology is the increase in the rate of suicide, it probably being the most valid and reliable indicator of collective mental health. To assess the probability of such being the consequence of current economic realignment in the Federal Republic of Germany, we deemed it promising to evaluate the extent to and manner in which economic factors have to date affected the frequency of suicide in Germany. The current study analyzed the effects of four economic variables (growth of the economy, average real income, unemployment and frequency of bankruptcy) on the rates of suicide in Germany from 1881 to 1989. We set the commencement date of the period analyzed as early as possible to include long-term developments as well as the effects of different moderator variables. The annual fluctuations of all four variables, in conformity with our hypothesis, correlated both in the period preceding World War II as well as in the postwar period with those in the rates of suicide. The strongest correlations held for the rate of unemployment and for the frequency of bankruptcy in times of obvious social disintegration coupled with diminished state safeguards against unemployment. Our hypothesis that the effects of economic factors would more strongly influence the rates of suicide by men as opposed to women could not be corroborated.


Author(s):  
Andrew Faulkenberry

In the years following World War II, integral serialist composers declared their intent to defy all previous musical conventions and eradicate all “rem-inisces of a dead world” from their music. Karlheinz Stockhausen was no exception, asserting his desire “to avoid everything which is familiar, generally known or reminiscent of music already composed.” However, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, de-spite its reputation for technical innovation, bears a strong connection to prior musical traditions. In this regard, Stockhausen resembled the neoclassical school of composers that sought to accommodate antiquated musical materials within a modern con-text.To demonstrate these similarities, I apply to Gesang a model of neoclassicism developed by Martha M. Hyde, a scholar on twentieth-century mu-sic. Hyde identifies two modes by which a neoclassi-cal piece “accommodates antiquity”: metamorphic anachronism and allegory. I argue both are present in Gesang. First, Stockhausen adopts elements of the sacred vocal tradition—including a child’s voice and antiphonal writing—and morphs them into something modern. Second, Stockhausen uses the Biblical story on which Gesang is based as an alle-gory for his own conflicted relationship with the mu-sical past. This analysis reframes Gesang’s signifi-cance and connects Stockhausen’s work to seem-ingly unrelated trends in twentieth-century musical thought.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Wilkens

Is "literary fiction" a useful genre label in the post-World War II United States? In some sense, the answer is obviously yes; there are sections marked "literary fiction" on Amazon, in bookstores, and on Goodreads, all of which contain many postwar and contemporary titles. Much of what is taught in contemporary fiction classes also falls under the heading of literary fiction, even if that label isn't always used explicitly. On the other hand, literary fiction, if it hangs together at all, may be defined as much by its (or its consumers') resistance to genre as by its positive textual content. That is, where conventional genres like the detective story or the erotic romance are recognizable by the presence of certain character types, plot events, and narrative styles, it is difficult to find any broadly agreeable set of such features by which literary fiction might be consistently identified.


Author(s):  
Predrag Petrovic

During the twentieth century Serbian poetry was in intensive dialogue with Christian religion, motives and symbols. In the first half of the century, the inspiration to the Christian religion is evident in the poetry of Jovan Ducic and Momcilo Nastasijevic. In the poetry of Momcilo Nastasijevic there are frequent motives from The Book of Revelation and the reference to Christian ethics. Jovan Ducic in the book Lirika (1943) gives a tragic and sublime vision of life, taking on numerous Christian motives. The renewal of the prayer tone in poetry after World War II will appear in Desanka Maksimovic?s collection Trazim pomilovanje (1964). The culmination of Christian religiosity in Serbian literature of the last century is found in the book Cetiri kanona (1996) by Ivan V. Lalic, in which the figure of the Virgin Mary is especially emphasized.


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