scholarly journals Agent 007 za żelazną kurtyną. Fenomen Jamesa Bonda w piśmiennictwie kulturalnym Polski Ludowej

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 289-311
Author(s):  
Robert Dudziński

Agent 007 behind the Iron Curtain: The phenomenon of James Bond in the cultural writings of the Polish People’s RepublicThe topic of the article is the reception of the phenomenon of James Bond in cultural writings from the times of the Polish People’s Republic. Though an average member of the Polish audience could not be directly familiar with the character neither in literature nor in film, the scale of the popularity of the brand in the West meant that the echoes of the so-called Bondomania started to reach countries behind the Iron Curtain. Polish critics and journalists tried to acquaint their readers with the issue and explain it using various interpretative categories.The article attempts to reconstruct these categories and their hierarchy of values. Based on theses formulated by Janet Staiger Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, the author analyses the changes to Polish interpretations and opinions on the Bond phenomenon in subsequent decades and indicates the historical conditions that influenced those changes. The text focuses primarily on two periods: 1964–1971 and the latter half of the 1980s, because it was in those times that the interest of Polish critics in James Bond was particularly strong.

Author(s):  
Mikołaj Kunicki

If the James Bond films were officially unavailable to East European audiences until 1989, the Eastern Bloc did not escape the global reach of the Bond phenomenon. East European spy dramas began to appear during the late 1960s, and they were mostly made for television and not all that distant in spirit from the Bond films. This chapter examines three television series: More Than Life at Stake (1967-1968) from Poland, The Invisible Gun Sight (1973-1979) from the German Democratic Republic, and Seventeen Moments of Spring (1972) from the Soviet Union. While these tales of espionage evince the projections of the west in the east during the Cold War, they reveal foremost the powerful appeal of consumerism behind the Iron Curtain.


2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick O’Brien

This essay has been written to serve as a prolegomenon for a new journal in Global History. It opens with a brief depiction of the two major approaches to the field (through connexions and comparisons) and moves on to survey first European and then other historiographical traditions in writing ‘centric’ histories up to the times of the Imperial Meridian 1783–1825, when Europe’s geopolitical power over all other parts of the world became hegemonic. Thereafter, and for the past two centuries, all historiographical traditions converged either to celebrate or react to the rise of the ‘West’. The case for the restoration of Global History rests upon its potential to construct negotiable meta-narratives, based upon serious scholarship that will become cosmopolitan in outlook and meet the needs of our globalizing world.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-268
Author(s):  
Staša Babić

Modern academic disciplines of anthropology, history and archaeology are founded in the cultural, social, political context of the 18th and 19th centuries, at the times of the colonial expansion of the West European countries. Although demarcated by the objects of their study ("primitive societies", the past according to written sources, or material evidence), all these disciplines are grounded in the need to distinguish and strengthen the modern identity of the Europeans as opposed to the Others in space and time.


Balcanica ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 273-314
Author(s):  
Slobodan Markovich

The paper deals with Western (Anglo-American) views on the Sarajevo assassination/attentat and Gavrilo Princip. Articles on the assassination and Princip in two leading quality dailies (The Times and The New York Times) have particularly been analysed as well as the views of leading historians and journalists who covered the subject including: R. G. D. Laffan, R. W. Seton-Watson, Winston Churchill, Sidney Fay, Bernadotte Schmitt, Rebecca West, A. J. P. Taylor, Vladimir Dedijer, Christopher Clark and Tim Butcher. In the West, the original general condemnation of the assassination and its main culprits was challenged when Rebecca West published her famous travelogue on Yugoslavia in 1941. Another Brit, the remarkable historian A. J. P. Taylor, had a much more positive view on the Sarajevo conspirators and blamed Germany and Austria-Hungary for the outbreak of the Great War. A turning point in Anglo-American perceptions was the publication of Vladimir Dedijer?s monumental book The Road to Sarajevo (1966), which humanised the main conspirators, a process initiated by R. West. Dedijer?s book was translated from English into all major Western languages and had an immediate impact on the understanding of the Sarajevo assassination. The rise of national antagonisms in Bosnia gradually alienated Princip from Bosnian Muslims and Croats, a process that began in the 1980s and was completed during the wars of the Yugoslav succession. Although all available sources clearly show that Princip, an ethnic Serb, gradually developed a broader Serbo-Croat and Yugoslav identity, he was ethnified and seen exclusively as a Serb by Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks and Western journalists in the 1990s. In the past century imagining Princip in Serbia and the West involved a whole spectrum of views. In interwar Anglo-American perceptions he was a fanatic and lunatic. He became humanised by Rebecca West (1941), A. J. P. Taylor showed understanding for his act (1956), he was fully explained by Dedijer (1966), challenged and then exonerated by Cristopher Clark (2012-13), and cordially embraced by Tim Butcher (2014).


The “New Hollywood” that emerged in the late sixties is now widely recognized as an era of remarkable filmmaking, when directors enjoyed a unique autonomy to craft ambitious, introspective movies that evinced a cinematic world of hard choices, complex interpersonal relationships, compromised heroes, and uncertain outcomes. The New Hollywood Revisited brings together a remarkable collection of authors (some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood as it unfolded), to revisit this unique era in American cinema (circa 1967-1976). It was a decade in which a number of extraordinary factors – including the end of a half-century-old censorship regime and economic and demographic changes to the American film audience – converged and created a new type of commercial film, imprinted with the social and political context of the times: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, economic distress, urban decay, and, looming, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency. This volume offers the opportunity to look back, with nearly fifty years hindsight, at a golden age in American filmmaking.


Author(s):  
Marcel Reich-Ranicki

This part recounts how, after they were liberated by the Russians, the author and his wife made their way to Warsaw. He then joined the Communist Party and began working for the Foreign Ministry. But since he did not adhere to the strict policies of the Communist Party, he was eventually imprisoned and dismissed from the party. This dismissal led to his work as a journalist and his return to German culture, and it enabled him to turn his love for German culture into a profession. From 1950 to 1958, he became the foremost Polish literary critic of German literature from the East and the West, and he befriended some of the most important writers and critics of the times, such as Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Mayer, Siegfried Lenz, Heinrich Böll, and many of the members of the famous Group 47.


2021 ◽  
pp. 290-292

This chapter examines Jerold S. Auerbach's Print to Fit (2019). In this book, Auerbach charges that the New York Times consistently slanted its treatment of Israel in ways that discredited its struggle for survival and instead sympathized with the enemies of Zionism. Having assiduously combed through close to a century of articles, editorials, and op-ed pieces, Auerbach has discovered, especially in recent decades, a “preoccupation with Palestinian victimization — even when Israelis were the victims.” Print to Fit is especially harsh in its treatment of two of the Times' stars, the late Anthony Lewis and Thomas L. Friedman for having so often conveyed their own disenchantment with what they held to be the moral and political failings of Israel — in particular, the extension of Jewish settlements into the West Bank. Written from the political periphery of American Jewish life, Print to Fit risks overstating its case by simplifying it.


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