The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia: Observations on the Commentaries by Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg

Slavic Review ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 512-517
Author(s):  
Leopold h. Haimson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Revolution

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia” (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

The Body as Art in Early-Twentieth-Century German Poetry

Monatshefte ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol XCVI (4) ◽  
pp. 503-520
Author(s):  
R. J. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Maurice

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-153
Author(s):  
Finn Fordham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Homosexual Orientation ◽  
The World ◽  
Resonant Term ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Edward Carpenter

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.

The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia

Slavic Review ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leopold H. Haimson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

“The Crusade Is Now Begun in Philadelphia”: Municipal Reformers, Southern Moderates, and African American Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-168
Author(s):  
Julie Davidow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The Body ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Political Machine ◽  
Full Participation

As the twentieth century dawned, social and political reformers increasingly identified the growing black population in Philadelphia as an important underpinning of the city’s corrupt Republican political machine. This article explores the ways in which Philadelphia’s urban political corruption narrative, with its pointed attacks on black partisanship and electoral participation, developed in dialogue with white southerners’ campaigns to frame Reconstruction as a perversion of democracy. Rather than simply solidifying Jim Crow in the South, northern reformers and southern moderates borrowed from each other to shape and articulate an emerging national consensus that African Americans were unfit for full participation in the body politic.

scholarly journals Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
HALLIE LIEBERMAN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Household Appliance ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sex Toys

The electromechanical vibrator originated in the late nineteenth century as a device for medical therapy. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, marketing of vibrators as consumer appliances became pervasive. Ads appeared in the pages ofThe New York TimesandScientific Americanand plastered street cars. Companies marketed vibrators to grandparents, mothers, infants, and young adults. Vibrators are widely sold today, however, as instruments for masturbation, a use that was rarely mentioned but well known before World War II. How was vibrator advertising able to become so ubiquitous during the early twentieth century, despite draconian antiobscenity laws and antimasturbation rhetoric? This article argues that companies achieved this result by shaping the meaning of vibrators through strategic marketing. This marketing overtly portrayed vibrators as nonsexual while covertly conveying their sexual uses through imagery and the sale of phallic, dildo-like attachments.Companies positioned vibrators within two major consumer product categories in the early 1900s: labor-saving household appliances and electrotherapeutic devices. By advertising the vibrator as both a labor-saving household appliance and a sexualized health panacea, companies could slip vibrator ads past the censors, while supplying user manuals that clued consumers into specific sexual uses. In household appliance ads, companies drew on traditional gender roles to present vibrators as emblems of domesticity and motherhood, whereas in electrotherapeutic ads they presented vibrators as symbols of progressive gender roles, the sexualized new woman and the body-conscious “self-made man.”

Frenzied Flappers: The Hysterical Female in Early Twentieth-Century Social Dance

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-350
Author(s):  
Hope Margetts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Distress ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Dance ◽  
Social Dancing ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Tensions ◽  
Social Dances

Abstract It is widely acknowledged that the freer, more sexualized movements of social dancing in the early twentieth century (1900–1929) accompanied the beginnings of female emancipation both socially and politically. However, less explored are the similarities between the provocative, inelegant choreography of such social dances and the symptoms of female hysteria, a medical phenomenon that saw the body as a canvas for mental distress as provoked by social tensions. This essay will address the possible alignment of hysteria and popular social dance in relation to the evolving Modern Woman. It will examine the motivations of modern, ‘hysterical’ dances, and discuss their progressive status in terms of gender by considering perceived psychosomatic interactions within the female dancing body.

New Frankensteins; or, the Body Politic

2017 ◽  
pp. 195-207
Author(s):  
Timothy C. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gothic Novels

In the introduction to his 2001 anthology of ‘New Scottish Gothic Fiction’, Alan Bissett argues that Gothic ‘has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic’ (2001: 6). While virtually every contemporary Scottish author has made use of Gothic elements or tropes in some part of their work, many of the most important recent texts to be labelled ‘Scottish Gothic’ are centrally concerned with such a re-examination of the past. For many authors, however, the past is not to be found in historical events or cultural contexts, but specifically in the interrelation between established Scottish and Gothic literary traditions. Beginning with Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978), one of numerous twentieth-century reworkings of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), many contemporary Gothic novels have explicitly relied on earlier texts; adapting the work of Hogg, Stevenson or even Shelley becomes a way of challenging preconceived notions of stable national and individual identities.

Jerusalem, Bari, Petrograd: the Sites of Pilgrimage and the Russian Church Architecture in the Second Half of Nineteenth – Early Twentieth Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 280-290
Author(s):  
Alexander Y. Polunov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Architecture ◽  
Official Ideology ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Familiar Environment ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Revolution

The article investigates the evolution of Russian church architecture on the sites of mass pilgrimage from Russia – in Jerusalem and Bari (Italy). The changes in churches’ appearance reflected both the artistic quest of Russian architects and transformation of Russian official ideology. The “Byzantine” style which dominated in the church architecture in 1860s and 1870s was replaced by “Russian” and later by “Neo-Russian” styles. The churches abroad served as the instrument of the official ideology representation. Their appearance and interior had also to create familiar environment for the pilgrims. Construction of the churches in “Russian” style was accompanied by the growing attention to the historical details, running sometimes to literal reproduction of historical models. In 1917 this process, as well as the pilgrimage itself, was stopped by the revolution.

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