Zabel Yesayan, “Chronicle – The Role of the Armenian Woman during the War”

Author(s):  
Meriam Belli

Abstract The following is a translation of a lecture delivered in French by Zabel Yesayan at the Engineers Hall on 17 January 1920. The talk was originally published, seemingly without much editing, in the French Revue des études arméniennes 2 (1922): 121–138. The lyricism of this nationalist panegyric and ode to the Armenian woman exposes the author’s raw emotions, as she describes the exodus of Armenians from their homeland during World War I, their struggle, their resilience, and the crimes committed against them. Zabel Yesayan’s speech is altogether révolté – in the sense of moral and political indignation – and righteous. It also reveals with poignant and at times excruciating details, the gendered violence that conventional political narratives often silence about women, especially during genocide. The page numbers referenced below in brackets correspond to the page numbers in the Revue des études arméniennes publication. I have maintained as much as possible the orality of this speech, delivered in florid, melodramatic, nineteenth-century oratory style. I have, however, added punctuation when the lack thereof led to confusion or unintelligibility.

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Rebecca Ayako Bennette

This chapter gives a broad overview of developments within the main areas of psychiatry, the military, and pacifism and provides the necessary background to understand the conditions prevailing in Germany leading up to 1914. It highlights the rising fortunes and expanding purview of psychiatry in the decades before World War I and references the limits of describing the trends as medicalization. It also explores the general prestige of the military and the role of pacifism in imperial German society. The chapter looks at August Fauser and Erwin Ackerknecht's estimations of psychiatry around 1900, which inhabited opposite ends of the opinion spectrum. It analyses attitudes toward the insane that had been lumped with the larger category of the poor over the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
George S. Williamson

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century discourse on myth and its influence on Christian theological and cultural debate from the 1790s to the eve of the First World War. After preliminary comments on the eighteenth century, it examines five ‘key’ moments in this history: the Romantic idea of a ‘new mythology’ (focusing on Friedrich Schelling); the ‘religious’ turn in myth scholarship c.1810 (Friedrich Creuzer); debates over the role of myth in the gospels (focusing on David Strauss and Christian Weisse); theories of language and race and their impact on myth scholarship; and Arthur Drews’ The Christ Myth and the debate over the historicity of Jesus. This chapter argues that the discourse on myth (in Germany and elsewhere) was closely bound to the categories and assumptions of Christian theology, reproducing them even as it undermined the authority of the Bible, the clergy, and the churches.


Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Sandra Kemp

This essay analyses the role of museums in the creation of futures imaginaries and the ways in which these are embedded in socio-political narratives over time (narratives of nation, empire, power, consumption, and home). The essay tests its hypotheses through charting the evolution of the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the soirée—exhibitions and events showcasing technological, scientific, and cultural innovations of the future—from their heyday in the mid nineteenth century to their demise in the early twentieth century. In particular, the essay explores the social, spatial, and temporal organization of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century soirée display spaces as carriers of future worlds. It argues that the creation of futures imaginaries depends on interrelationships between people and objects across space and time, and that the complex web of relations established between words, objects, spaces, and people in exhibitions provides catalysts for ideas, ideologies, and narratives of the future.


2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ombretta Frau ◽  
Cristina Gragnani

Sottoboschi letterari brings together essays about six female writers from the period between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first world war: Mara Antelling, Emma Boghen Conigliani, Evelyn, Anna Franchi, Jolanda, and Flavia Steno. Through the metaphor of the undergrowth, which recalls certain features of Deleuze's rhizome, the book explores the way in which the chosen writers made headway in the literary scene of Italy at the end of the nineteenth century through contributions in the form of narrative, essays, sociology and literary criticism. Apparently conservative, and subscribing to the dominant vision of the role of women in society and in the family, these writers nevertheless made a decisive step towards the modern concept of the female intellectual.


Author(s):  
James R. Hines

This chapter discusses the world of professional skating. The Ice Follies, Hollywood Ice Review, and Ice Capades were founded between 1936 and 1941, years immediately preceding U.S. entry into World War II. Holiday on Ice was founded during the war years. All survived the War and became increasingly spectacular as competition among them led to large casts, elaborate sets, and lavish costumes. These permanently established touring companies that operated with large budgets, professional production staffs, and many of the world's most decorated skaters challenged the role of the amateur club carnival, a tradition dating from the nineteenth century. Carnivals, which had reached their peak in the 1930s, continued well into the postwar era, but their ability to compete with professional shows gradually declined.


Worldview ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 26 (9) ◽  
pp. 4-6
Author(s):  
Robert D. English

If Westerners harbored any doubts about the role of the Catholic Church in sustaining the Polish national spirit, the recent visit of Pope John Paul II to his native land surely laid them to rest. And yet the Church's historic partner in the enterprise of keeping Polish nationalism alive is still generally overlooked. That partner is Poland's national literature.Polish literature helped sustain the nation through centuries of oppression, and its role in the post-World War II epoch has been no less critical. From the Romantic classics of the nineteenth century to a (for Eastern Europe) remarkably free modern literature, Poland's authors and poets are its unsung heroes in the struggle to preserve an independent national culture.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.


2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Henrietta Bannerman

John Cranko's dramatic and theatrically powerful Antigone (1959) disappeared from the ballet repertory in 1966 and this essay calls for a reappraisal and restaging of the work for 21st century audiences. Created in a post-World War II environment, and in the wake of appearances in London by the Martha Graham Company and Jerome Robbins’ Ballets USA, I point to American influences in Cranko's choreography. However, the discussion of the Greek-themed Antigone involves detailed consideration of the relationship between the ballet and the ancient dramas which inspired it, especially as the programme notes accompanying performances emphasised its Sophoclean source but failed to recognise that Cranko mainly based his ballet on an early play by Jean Racine. As Antigone derives from tragic drama, the essay investigates catharsis, one of the many principles that Aristotle delineated in the Poetics. This well-known effect is produced by Greek tragedies but the critics of the era complained about its lack in Cranko's ballet – views which I challenge. There is also an investigation of the role of Antigone, both in the play and in the ballet, and since Cranko created the role for Svetlana Beriosova, I reflect on memories of Beriosova's interpretation supported by more recent viewings of Edmée Wood's 1959 film.


Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.


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