“A New Enigmatic Language”: The Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm and the Case of Gladkov's Cement

Slavic Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Laursen

Although Cement was a model for later socialist realism, Katerina Clark has argued that Gleb Chumalov does not achieve consciousness, a requirement for later heroes, but instead remains spontaneous. In this essay, Eric Laursen argues against Clark's widely accepted interpretation. By introducing the idea of instinct (class, worker, revolutionary), which Anna Krylova has shown to be central to Bolshevik thought in the early years of the twentieth century, Laursen argues that Gleb does gain consciousness. Gleb does not move from spontaneity to consciousness, however. Instead he learns to control and guide his own instincts and those of others. Two other characters also transform themselves. Gleb's wife Dasha illustrates a similar but distinct path forwomen. Sergei Ivagin, who must abandon conscious thought to first develop instinct, illustrates a different path for the intelligentsia. The attainment of consciousness is presented as a rebirth or maturation and involves the acquisition of “conscious language.” In the party purge at the end, those who speak unconsciously, therefore misleading and confusing the masses, are cast out of the party. The newly conscious Gleb and Dasha, who now speak properly, take their place as leaders.

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-170
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore

Three letters from the Sheina Marshall archive at the former University Marine Biological Station Millport (UMBSM) reveal the pivotal significance of Sheina Marshall's father, Dr John Nairn Marshall, behind the scheme planned by Glasgow University's Regius Professor of Zoology, John Graham Kerr. He proposed to build an alternative marine station facility on Cumbrae's adjacent island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde in the early years of the twentieth century to cater predominantly for marine researchers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Shelagh Noden

Following the Scottish Catholic Relief Act of 1793, Scottish Catholics were at last free to break the silence imposed by the harsh penal laws, and attempt to reintroduce singing into their worship. At first opposed by Bishop George Hay, the enthusiasm for liturgical music took hold in the early years of the nineteenth century, but the fledgling choirs were hampered both by a lack of any tradition upon which to draw, and by the absence of suitable resources. To the rescue came the priest-musician, George Gordon, a graduate of the Royal Scots College in Valladolid. After his ordination and return to Scotland he worked tirelessly in forming choirs, training organists and advising on all aspects of church music. His crowning achievement was the production, at his own expense, of a two-volume collection of church music for the use of small choirs, which remained in use well into the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Erika Fischer-Lichte

Chapter 4 investigates the role of the new image of Greece in the first decades of the twentieth century. ‘A Culture in Crisis: Max Reinhardt’s Productions of Greek Tragedies (1903–1919)’ addresses two problems: first, the new body ideal and its liberation from the restraints imposed on it until then, and, second, the division within society of those who made a cult of their individuality and the rapidly growing masses of the proletariat. While in Reinhardt’s Electra (1903) Gertrud Eysoldt displayed her body as that of a maenad or a hysteric, a number of new devices were developed in Oedipus the King (1910) and the Oresteia (1911), both performed in a circus, which temporarily transformed the masses of actors and spectators into a—theatrical—community. The chapter also discusses Leopold Jessner’s production of Oedipus (1929) as a quest for a ‘philosophical theatre’ (Brecht).


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-324
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Schwartz

AbstractIn the early years of the twentieth century, Life magazine had only approximately one hundred thousand subscribers, yet its illustrated images (like the Gibson Girl) significantly influenced fashion trends and social behaviors nationally. Its outsized influence can be explained by examining the magazine’s business practices, particularly the novel ways in which it treated and conceptualized its images as intellectual property. While other magazines relied on their circulation and advertising revenue to attain profitability, Life used its page space to sell not only ads, but also its own creative components—principally illustrations—to manufacturers of consumer goods, advertisers, and consumers themselves. In so doing, Life’s publishers relied on a developing legal conception of intellectual property and copyright, one that was not always amenable to their designs. By looking at a quasi-litigious disagreement in which a candy manufacturing company attempted to copy one of the magazine’s images, this article explores the mechanisms behind the commodification and distribution of mass-circulated images.


1993 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 529
Author(s):  
Kenneth Teitelbaum ◽  
John W. Meyer ◽  
David H. Kamens ◽  
Aaron Benavot

Mundo Agrario ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (46) ◽  
pp. e130
Author(s):  
Maria-Aparecida Lopes ◽  
Reynaldo De los Reyes Patiño

This paper examines Mexico City’s meat supply system from the 1850s to 1967. During this period, whereas some urban centers in the Americas replaced traditional provisioning methods – abattoir system – with meatpacking companies, Mexico City continued to rely on the municipal monopoly to provide meat for the masses. This study focuses on the role that ranchers, cattle purveyors (introductores), and slaughterhouse (rastro) workers, alongside city officials, played in this process. It shows how these actors evolved accommodating to any authority in power, regardless of ideology. As interest groups, introductores, workers, and ranchers not only delivered a service to city dwellers but with varying degrees of influence, they also provided essential political support to governments. For their part, city officials protected these associations as a means of managing supplies and in the name of public order. Such a mutually beneficial relationship allowed both (interest groups and the municipality) to resist meatpacking conglomerates well into the twentieth century. The work underscores that although at occasions these arrangements facilitated meat provision, in others, they hindered the extension of animal proteins to the working poor – one of the main goals of post-revolutionary Mexico.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Dave Evans

<p>The influence of the mass media is a contentious issue, especially in regards to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in the mid-twentieth century. These melodramatic films have often been viewed by critics as instruments of hegemony. However, melodrama contains an inherent ambivalence, as it not only has a potential for imparting dominant messages but also offers a platform from which to defy and exceed the restraining boundaries imposed by dominant ideologies. An examination of a number of important Golden Age films, especially focussing on their contradictory tensions and their portrayals of modernity, illustrates this. The Nosotros los pobres series serves as an example of how melodramatic elements are incorporated into popular Mexican films and how melodrama could be used as an ideological tool to encourage the state’s goals. Similarly, the maternal melodrama Cuando los hijos se van uses the family to represent the processes of conflict and negotiation that Mexicans experienced as a result of modernization. Consistent with the reactionary nature of melodrama and its simultaneous suggestive potential, the film combines a Catholic worldview with an underlying allegory of moving forward. The issue of progress is also at the centre of a number of films starring iconic actor Pedro Infante, which offer an avenue for exploring what modernisation might mean for male identity in Mexico. His films show a masculinity in transition and how lower-class men could cope with this change. Likewise, the depiction of women in Golden Age film overall supports the stabilising goals of the 1940s Revolutionary government, while also providing some transgressive figures. Therefore, these films helped the Mexican audience process the sudden modernization of the post-Revolutionary period, which was in the state’s best interest; however, the masses were also able to reconfigure the messages of these films and find their own sense of meaning in them.</p>


2019 ◽  
pp. 153-210
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck

This chapter recounts the early years of the Natchez Pilgrimage, a heritage tourism enterprise created by the Natchez Garden Club at the height of the Great Depression. The Pilgrimage dramatized a mix of decades-old southern racial ideology and white historical memory that was repackaged for 1930s consumption. Pilgrimage founder Katherine Miller and other leading clubwomen defined their community’s cultural image, while also redefining the meaning of traditional southern womanhood. The Pilgrimage is also the story of how one southern community’s selective expression of historical memory captivated white tourists eager to immerse themselves in the world of the Old South so vividly portrayed by popular writers and entertainers of the 1930s. The widespread appeal of the Pilgrimage home tours and pageant suggests the power of popular culture to shape a tenacious historical memory that remained in force for much of the twentieth century and lingers even today.


2018 ◽  
pp. 145-152
Author(s):  
Mehran Kamrava

Since the early years of the twentieth century, the Persian Gulf has been viewed as a strategically vital waterway, both for the global economy in general and for the continued prosperity of advanced economies in particular. In the process, the region has become an arena for the emergence of multiple and often overlapping security challenges, many of them indigenous to the area and many imported from abroad. Up until the 2011 Arab uprisings, most of these security challenges revolved around territorial, political, and military competitions and conflicts within and between actors from the region itself and from the outside. While threats and challenges to human security were also present, they were often overshadowed by more immediate and more tangible threats to territorial sovereignty and those posed by various forms of political and military competition between state actors.


2020 ◽  
pp. 16-57
Author(s):  
Erika Hanna

Chapter 1 explores the practices and semiotics of photograph albums. Across the twentieth century, making photograph albums moved from an elite to a popular form, and was especially popular among single young people. Familial and personal histories were curated through selecting photographs, arranging them on the page, and fixing their meaning through captioning. In order to unpack these themes in detail, the chapter focuses on photograph albums depicting three ‘ordinary’ Irish lives. These photograph collections can provide us with a host of information about Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century: about how people used a visual language to narrate their lives; received, assimilated, or resisted social and political discourses; and revealed or concealed family secrets. Each of the subjects made particular choices about the stories they told in their albums, drawing on photographic modes drawn from Kodak convention and the visual rhetoric of Ireland.


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