scholarly journals Wyszło, jak wyszło. Porażka i słabość w kulturze Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej [Things Turned Out the Way They Did: Failure and Weakness in the Culture of Central and Eastern Europe]

Author(s):  
Xawery Stańczyk

Things Turned Out the Way They Did: Failure and Weakness in the Culture of Central and Eastern EuropeThe text is the introduction to the new issue of Studia Litteraria et Historica. As such, it presents and conceptualises the category of failure in reference to Central and Eastern Europe in the last few decades of the twentieth century. It outlines the subject matter of respective texts and convergences of the points of view of their authors.Wyszło, jak wyszło. Porażka i słabość w kulturze Europy Środkowo-WschodniejTekst stanowi wstęp do nowego numeru „Studia Litteraria et Historica”. Przedstawia i konceptualizuje kategorię porażki w odniesieniu do obszaru Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej ostatnich kilku dekad XX wieku. Nakreśla tematykę poszczególnych tekstów oraz zbieżności punktów widzenia autorek i autorów.

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39
Author(s):  
Flagg Taylor

Czeslaw Milosz is known either as author of The Captive Mind(1953) or as the accomplished poet and Nobel laureate (1980). Little effort has been made to connect the beautiful and penetrating poet and essayist, so well known in literary circles, with the most astute analyst of the seduction of intellectuals by Communism, so essential for political scientists and historians. It is argued here that there is a remarkable unity of purpose and continuity of themes across the very distinct works in Milosz's corpus. The subject matter of intellectuals and Communism would seem, at first glance, to be an important yet nonetheless isolated matter, central only from the standpoint of understanding postwar Eastern Europe. Milosz reveals that the topic of eastern intellectuals and Communism is a surface manifestation of larger and deeper philosophical problems, including modern science and its effect on the human imagination, and the gulf between the poet and his audience.


Author(s):  
George Pattison

This chapter sets out the rationale for adopting a phenomenological approach to the devout life literature. Distinguishing the present approach from versions of the phenomenology of religion dominant in mid-twentieth-century approaches to religion, an alternative model is found in Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul. These illustrate that alongside its striving to achieve a maximally pure intuition of its subject matter, phenomenology will also be necessarily interpretative and existential. Although phenomenology is limited to what shows itself and therefore cannot pass judgement on the existence of God, it can deal with God insofar as God appears within the activity and passivity of human existence. From Hegel onward, it has also shown itself open to seeing the self as twofold and thus more than a simple subjective agent, opening the way to an understanding of the self as essentially spiritual.


2021 ◽  

This book is devoted to a symbolic event that defined the life and values of several generations. Half a century ago, Czech communists tried to give a new impetus to their country’s system of government by combining socialist values with a rational market economy and the mechanisms of a developed democracy. This effort failed, and the state was occupied by the military. This book is the result of joint efforts by Russian, Czech, and Romanian historians, archivists, and cultural and literary scholars, who—exploring new documents and materials—have reinterpreted these events and their lessons from a present-day perspective. Objectively, the “Prague Spring” is from a bygone era, but it is still a milestone, and many of the problems encountered during the Prague Spring are still relevant today. The authors hope that they have contributed to the historiography of the now-distant events of 1968 and that their contributions will help in analysing the experiences of the past in order to be prepared for the events of the future. This book is aimed at specialists in the history and culture of Central and Eastern Europe, students of higher educational institutions, and the general reader interested in twentieth-century history.


Lituanistica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurynas Giedrimas

The article deals with the households of the nobles and peasants in the first half of the nineteenth century in Užventis parish, Samogitia. In the middle of the twentieth century, John Hajnal and Peter Laslett started researching the history of resident households. The researchers formulated theoretical and methodological foundations for household analysis and encouraged other historians and demographers to undertake similar studies. The researchers who analysed the households of Central and Eastern Europe either refuted or corrected many of the statements proposed by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett and established that the most common household in Central and Eastern Europe was a nuclear household, although in many cases it was also possible to find an extended household. However, it was not clarified at what age people started building new households and which household model dominated in Samogitia. Also, it was not known what the difference between a household of nobles and a household of peasants was. The data on the households of the nobles and peasants also interconnected. The households of landlords were bigger than the households of peasants and the petty nobility, because the menage of a landlord used to be part of the household. After analysing the aforementioned data, it has been discovered that in the first half of the nineteenth century, nuclear household dominated Užventis parish. Extended household models were often found as well. The Catholic inhabitants of Užventis parish married late and had a child every two years. Around 3500 Catholic residents lived in Užventis parish in the first half of the nineteenth century. The analysis of the data showed that nuclear household dominated the Užventis parish in the first half of the nineteenth century.


1994 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 81-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Schiesaro

1. If I had to sum up as concisely as I possibly can the subject matter of this paper, I would probably say that it was originally stimulated by the attempt to understand how Lucretius articulated his didactic plot. What is the plot of a poem that presents itself as analysing nothing less than ‘the nature of things’? It is safe to assume as a starting-point that a didactic poem which intends to revolutionize each and every principle of perception and evaluation of reality cannot remain unaffected by the theoretical views it tries to prove, and that the persuasive impact of those theories on the reader will inevitably be strengthened or weakened by the way the text situates itself in respect to those theories: the poem itself will be the most effective or the most damning example of its own theories.


Author(s):  
William Welstead

Wildlife art does not receive the critical attention that it deserves. In this chapter, William Welstead considers how the images made after close observation in the field incorporate the signs and visual clues that enable us to identify the species, have some idea of what the individuals are doing and how they relate to the wider environment. These are all important factors in building an informed view of the non-human world and establishing how we feel about it. Wildlife artists tread a difficult path between serving science and catering for the affective response of viewers and between the representational and the abstract in depicting their subject matter. Welstead suggests that the way we recognise wildlife by its overall look or ‘jizz’ means that drawings and paintings can capture in a few lines and shapes the essence of the creature. This economical application of lines and colour therefore allows for at least some level of abstraction. The subject would merit further attention from ecocritics.


This chapter presents various aspects of material handling devices. At first, brief guidelines about the way to select various material handling devices is provided, followed by various material handling tasks and equipment. Based on the subject matter of this book, this chapter provides an overview of various intelligent techniques which have been applied to various aspects of intelligent vehicles. The last section provides overviews of all the subsequent chapters.


Author(s):  
James Gouinlock

The philosophy of John Dewey is original and comprehensive. His extensive writings contend systematically with problems in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and education, and philosophical anthropology. Although his work is widely read, it is not widely understood. Dewey had a distinctive conception of philosophy, and the key to understanding and benefiting from his work is to keep this conception in mind. A worthwhile philosophy, he urged, must be practical. Philosophic inquiry, that is, ought to take its point of departure from the aspirations and problems characteristic of the various sorts of human activity, and an effective philosophy would develop ideas responsive to those conditions. Any system of ideas that has the effect of making common experience less intelligible than we find it to be is on that account a failure. Dewey’s theory of inquiry, for example, does not entertain a conception of knowledge that makes it problematic whether we can know anything at all. Inasmuch as scientists have made extraordinary advances in knowledge, it behoves the philosopher to find out exactly what scientists do, rather than to question whether they do anything of real consequence. Moral philosophy, likewise, should not address the consternations of philosophers as such, but the characteristic urgencies and aspirations of common life; and it should attempt to identify the resources and limitations of human nature and the environment with which it interacts. Human beings might then contend effectively with the typical perplexities and promises of mortal existence. To this end, Dewey formulated an exceptionally innovative and far-reaching philosophy of morality and democracy. The subject matter of philosophy is not philosophy, Dewey liked to say, but ‘problems of men’. All too often, he found, the theories of philosophers made the primary subject matter more obscure rather than less so. The tendency of thinkers is to become bewitched by inherited philosophic puzzles, when the persistence of the puzzle is a consequence of failing to consider the assumptions that created it. Dewey was gifted in discerning and discarding the philosophic premises that create needless mysteries. Rather than fret, for instance, about the question of how immaterial mental substance can possibly interact with material substance, he went to the root of the problem by challenging the notion of substance itself. Indeed, Dewey’s dissatisfaction with the so-called classic tradition in philosophy, stemming at least from Plato if not from Parmenides, led him to reconstruct the entire inheritance of the Western tradition in philosophy. The result is one of the most seminal and fruitful philosophies of the twentieth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 243-268
Author(s):  
Julie M. Johnson

AbstractThis article positions multidisciplinary artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis at the center of a web that spans Vienna 1900, the Weimar Bauhaus, and interwar Vienna. Using a network metaphor to read her work, she is understood here as specialist of the ars combinatoria, in which she recombines genre and media in unexpected ways. She translates the language of photograms into painting, ecclesiastical subject matter into a machine aesthetic, adds found objects to abstract paintings, and paints allegories and scenes of distortion in the idiom of New Objectivity, all the while designing stage sets, costumes, modular furniture, toys, and interiors. While she has been the subject of renewed attention, particularly in the design world, much of her fine art has yet to be assessed. She used the idioms of twentieth-century art movements in unusual contexts, some of these very brave: in interwar Vienna, where she created Dadaistic posters to warn of fascism, she was imprisoned and interrogated. Always politically engaged, her interdisciplinary and multimedia approach to art bridged the conceptual divide between the utopian and critical responses to war during the interwar years. Such engagement with both political strains of twentieth-century modernism is rare. After integrating the interdisciplinary lessons of Vienna and the Weimar Bauhaus into her life's work, she shared these lessons with children at Terezín.


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