Theories of Language

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Fellerer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Implications

This chapter identifies key notions about the nature and workings of language and their wider political implications in Europe from around 1789 to the first decades of the nineteenth century. There are at least three formations, aesthetic and philosophical, linguistic, and political. Even though treated under separate headings for ease of exposition, they are meant to meet in this introduction in response to more granular surveys. The political dimension in particular tends to be left to historians or to philologists who deal with that part of the continent where it first gained real prominence: East and East Central Europe. Thus, after the first two sections on aspects of philosophy and early linguistics, where the focus is on Germany with France and England, the third section on language and nation moves eastwards to the Slavonic-speaking lands, to finally return back, albeit very briefly, to the West. The main purpose of this survey to provide introduction and guidance.

scholarly journals Travel Writing and the Integration of East-Central Europe: John Paget’s Hungary and Transylvania

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Márta Pellérdi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
The West ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Social

John Paget’s travelogue from 1839, Hungary and Transylvania; with Remarks on their Condition, Social, Political, and Economical, makes a clear distinction between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Principality of Transylvania, both under Austrian rule at the time, and the rest of Eastern Europe. In terms of the variety and depth of the descriptions of the social, political, and economic conditions in the East-CentralEuropean country and province, Paget’s comprehensive and objective text stands out from the travelogues written about the region in the nineteenth century. This essay demonstrates that Hungary and Transylvania reveals the author’s intention to rediscover the history and culture of a neglected European nation who have attempted for centuries, successfully, and often unsuccessfully, to orient their politics toward the West rather than the East. It suggests that despite the occasional colonial discourse, Paget’s travelogue is an attempt to economically, politically, and culturally promote the integration of Hungary and Transylvania into the more “civilized” West. (MP)

scholarly journals State of Exception: The Birthplace of Kafka’s Narrative Authority

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Biti
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Political ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Narrative Authority ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
European Nation ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Collateral Effects

Across the postimperial East Central Europe, whose geopolitical space was reconfigured on the model of West European nation-states, unprocessed human residues proliferated as the collateral effects of politically guided national homogenizations. These positional outsiders, who were prevented from becoming legible within the newly established political spaces, take center stage in Kafka’s narratives, not only in the form of their characters but also their narrators and ultimate authority. They passionately attach themselves to the zones of indistinction, which the modern societies’ “egalitarian discrimination” has doomed them to, thus trying to turn their enforced dispossession into a chosen self-dispossession. I argue that Kafka’s narratives owe their elusive ultimate authority precisely to this persistent translation of the political state of exception of his agencies into their literary state of exemption. They are at constant pains to transfigure the imposed state of exception through its peculiar fictional adoption, but Kafka’s ultimate narrative authority nevertheless takes care to keep an edge over their efforts. It is precisely this never-ending gradation of subversive mimicry in Kafka’s works that his postcolonial successor J. M. Coetzee most admired.

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