Leaves of Regret, Flowers of Gloom: Mourning Ghosts and Crafting a Theater of Han in the Dream Journey Narrative

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-34
Author(s):  
Sookja Cho
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Literary Evolution ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Post War ◽  
War Victims ◽  
Writing Practice

Abstract This article scrutinizes the representation of gender and war experiences in seventeenth-century mongyurok (records of a dreamer’s journey), addressing in particular their contribution to a widening of the Korean literary landscape and writing practice of the time. These tales liberated the suppressed voices of war victims, weaving their individual pain and loss into a broader discourse on war, rife with trenchant criticism of those responsible. The article investigates how the dream journey records succeed in drawing such powerful public messages from personal experiences and thus evolve into a strongly critical narrative and a collective releasing of han (grudge). Focusing on female revenants and their mode of storytelling in the Kangdo mongyurok (Record of a Dreamer’s Journey to Kangdo), the article demonstrates how narrative elements, particularly the evocation of sound and the interplay of different ontological realms, foster both social criticism and individual han-releasing. The theatricality of ghostly sounds and performances in the narrative transforms a dismal (post)war reality into an auditorium for voices offering change and healing to both the dead and the living. This powerful storytelling invigorated mimetic interest and provided viable supernatural metanarratives, driving literary evolution forward.

"Karel Fossey voor 't Assisenhof." Een autobiografische getuigenis over een activistenproces

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-179
Author(s):  
Luc Vandeweyer
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Report ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Post War

De activist Karel Fossey schreef een gedetailleerd rapport over zijn twee dagen durend assisenproces. Deze bron is des te belangrijker omdat zijn en vele andere gerechtelijke dossiers  van activisten vernietigd werden in 1940. Bovendien blijkt hij nog heel wat meer autobiografische teksten te hebben geproduceerd. Die werpen niet alleen licht op zijn persoonlijke ervaringen maar ook op het leven in het Duitse kamp voor burgerlijke gevangenen in Holzminden tijdens de tweede helft van de oorlog en op het leven in de naoorlogse Belgische gevangenis.________"Karel Fossey appearing before the Assize Court." An autobiographical testimony about an activist trialThe activist Karel Fossey wrote a detailed report about his two-day trial before the Assize Court. This source is all the more important because his as well as many other legal dossiers of activists were destroyed in 1940. Moreover, it appears that he produced many other autobiographical texts. These not only illuminate his personal experiences, but also the life in the German camp for civil prisoners in Holzminden during the second half of the war as well as life in the post-war Belgian prison.

The Struggle to Fight a Humane War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahr Conway-Lanz
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
International Consensus ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Boomerang Effect ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
War Victims

The Korean War demonstrated the serious problems that the United States had adhering to the new 1949 Geneva Conventions and the severely limited protections that these new treaties provided. The protections for war victims were undermined both by serious gaps in the treaties that failed to provide much safety from bombing to civilians and by US deviations from the agreements in the handling of refugees and prisoners of war. However, Americans did not discard the agreements in the wake of their troubled Korean War experiences. Instead, the war helped to legitimize and lay the foundation for the further internalization of the new laws through their formal implementation, the public controversy they generated, and a boomerang effect of atrocity accusations. Despite failing to provide much protection for Korean War victims, the treaties were part of a broader international consensus-building process that helped to spread humanitarian norms.

Some Lamentation Passages in Sanskrit Poetry (Especially in Kālidāsa’s Mahākāvyas)

2021 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-153
Author(s):  
Mariola Pigoniowa
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Loss Of Consciousness ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Similar Content ◽  
Sanskrit Poetry ◽  
The Dead

The paper gives a detailed comparison of the two Sanskrit lamentation passages, the laments of Aja (Ragh. 8. 37–69) and Rati (Kum. 4.1–38); it is conducted against the background of some other texts with similar content. The laments share a number of similar motifs. When examining the structure of these passages (as well as that of other related texts, not only those written in Sanskrit), the following elements may be discerned: the speakers’ stupor or loss of consciousness; their attempts at self-destruction; an address to the dead in which personal experiences are recalled. The lamenting persons are shown as coming to cry over themselves, thereby embracing some personal memories and finding comfort or protection. Apart from offering words of comfort, the consolatory speeches addressed to them also give an explanation of the causes of their loss (the death of Indumatī or the incineration of Kāma).

scholarly journals Consumption, Consumerism, and Japanese Modernity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Global Study ◽  
New Goods ◽  
Post War

The experience of people in Japan offers a rich body of evidence for a comparative and global study of consumption from early modern, through modern times, and to the postmodern period. One finds ample grist for the mill of economic historians seeking to measure the extent and the shifts in consumption of all manner of goods and services. One also finds sources in abundance from the seventeenth century onwards speaking to the politics and culture of regulating, lamenting, and celebrating consumption. Building on early modern foundations, consumption expanded in the era of self-conscious modernization that followed the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate (1868), with a turn to new goods alongside more widespread use of customary ones. As this happened, attitudes in Japan evolved as part of a global dialogue on consumer life. This article explores consumption, consumerism, modernity, and the post-war ascendance of consumers in Japan.

The Best Years of Our Lives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Aaron Copland ◽  
George Gershwin ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
The Common ◽  
Post War

Hugo Friedhofer’s widely acclaimed score to Best Years of Our Lives successfully evokes an American sound that simultaneously universalizes and authenticates this story of post-war readjustment. He accomplishes this through harmonic and rhythmic approaches indebted to Aaron Copland, but also borrows stylistic devices from jazz, as filtered through the likes of George Gershwin and other concert composers who used the jazz idiom. Friedhofer’s specific use of leitmotif in this film emphasizes the common over the specific, further unifying three stories and generalizing shared post-war experiences.

Political utopia or Potemkin village? Italian travellers to the Soviet Union in the early Cold War

Modern Italy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Lee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Italo Calvino ◽  
Western Society ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Italian Politics ◽  
Post War ◽  
Shed Light

Situated on the border between the capitalist West and Communist East, and with the largest Communist party in Western Europe, Italy found itself at the centre of global ideological struggles in the early Cold War years. A number of Italian writers and intellectuals who had joined the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) during the Resistance had hoped that the party would play a central role in the post-war reconstruction of Italy and were attracted to the Soviet Union as an example of Communism in action. This article centres on accounts of journeys to the USSR by Sibilla Aleramo, Renata Viganò and Italo Calvino. It will argue that although their writings portray a largely positive vision of the USSR, they should not be dismissed as naive, or worse, disingenuous travellers whose willingness to embrace Soviet-style Communism was based on a wholescale rejection of Western society and its values (see P. Hollander's 1998 [1981] work, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society). Rather, the article shows how their accounts of the USSR shed light on the writers' relationship with the PCI and argues that the views expressed in the travelogues emerge from the writers' personal experiences of war and resistance, a fervent desire to position themselves as anti-Fascist intellectuals, and their concerns regarding the direction that Italian politics was taking at a pivotal moment in the nation's history.

The Spanish Civil War: New Approaches and Historiographic Perspectives

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-267
Author(s):  
Eduardo González Calleja
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Military History ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is almost unattainable, but the matter continues to elicit such interest that it remains open to new historiographic trends. For example, the ‘classic’ military history of the conflict, cultivated prominently in recent years by Gabriel Cardona, Jorge Martínez Reverte and Anthony Beevor, does not renounce the microhistory or cultural perspective. These constitute the theoretical framework of the New Military History and its corollary the New Combat History, which combine philological, anthropological, psychological and historiographical perspectives to various degrees. In the specific field of the war experiences pioneered by George L. Mosse, the concepts of brutalisation, barbarisation and demodernisation of military operations, coined by Omer Bartov to describe the particularities of the Eastern campaign during the Second World War, are being used by Spanish historians dedicated to the study of the violence and atrocities of the civil war and post-war. Focusing on the field of political history, government management or diplomacy has been studied almost exhaustively, but this is not the case for the principal phenomenon of political violence in the 1930s in Europe, namely paramilitarisation. It is surprising that the latest studies on the issue at the European level (Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore) do not include any essays on the enormous incidence of paramilitary violence in Spain before, during and after the civil war.

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