Young Minds – Young Bodies: The Emotional and the Physical in the Late Soviet Discourse on Aging

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-210
Author(s):  
Alissa Klots ◽  
Maria Romashova
Keyword(s):  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Health Problems ◽  
Welfare System ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Advice Literature ◽  
The 1950S

Abstract This article analyzes the turn to the emotional in advice literature on aging and its reception in the 1950s–1960s. “Positive emotions” were proclaimed a decisive factor in remaining healthy while old and being a productive member of the society. Yet, a close reading of the multiple narratives of aging written by a retired professional propagandist Tatiana Ivanova (1898–1968) reveals a tension between the prescribed “positive emotions” and feelings of sadness and uselessness caused by retirement, unfulfilled promises of the Soviet welfare system and particularly health problems that did not quite fit with the approved repertoire of an aging communist. This article seeks to enrich our understanding of late Soviet subjectivity by focusing not on just “speaking” or “thinking” but also “feeling” Soviet.

Reconsidering Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-406
Author(s):  
Rajiv Gulati ◽  
David Pauley
Keyword(s):  
Da Vinci ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Childhood Memory

Previous considerations of Freud’s 1910 pathography of Leonardo da Vinci have grappled mainly with errors of fact (among them a mistranslation in the study’s signature childhood memory, widely known since the 1950s). Here a more consequential flaw is examined: Freud’s fatefully pathogenic framing of Leonardo’s homosexuality. While few present-day analysts share that perspective in its entirety, Freud’s complex and plausible reconstruction drew wide support in the literature for more than a century and has to date never been subjected to rigorous critique. A close reading of the study, exploring Freud’s perspective and that of later psychoanalysts and historians, seeks to account for the biography’s tenacious grip on the psychoanalytic imagination. In the end, it is argued, the pathography is a failed effort to grapple with an unsettling transformation unfolding around and within Freud: the emergence of the category that eventually would be called the “healthy homosexual.”

Anti Anti-Colonialism: Vernacular Press and Emergent Possibilities in Colonial Zambia

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harri Englund
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Labor Migration ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Eastern Province ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Government ◽  
Colonial Order

AbstractAfrican newspapers published in vernacular languages, particularly papers sponsored by colonial governments, have been understudied. A close reading of their contents and related archival sources provides insights into diverse ways in which the colonized framed and made claims. New kinds of claims were mediated by the government-sponsored vernacular press no less than by nationalists. Just as vernacularism was not nativism, African aspirations that posed no direct challenge to the colonial order did not necessarily entail mimicry. I show also how Europeans who debated a newspaper for Africans in the 1930s Zambia voiced diverse approaches to print culture, addressing a variety of objectives. The newspaper that emerged,Mutende, was replaced by provincial newspapers in the 1950s, and I focus on one of these: the Chinyanja-languageNkhani za kum'mawa, published under African editorship in Eastern Province between 1958 and 1965. Its modes of addressing African publics were neither nationalist nor colonial in any straightforward senses. Its editors and readers deliberated on what it meant to be from the province in an era of labor migration, how African advancement and dependence on Europeans were to be envisaged, and how relationships between women and men should be reconfigured. To hold divergent views on a world in flux, they had to keep something constant, and the order of governance itself remained beyond dispute. But this did not preclude emergent possibilities. The newspaper's columns and letters to the editor reveal claims on novel opportunities and constraints of a sort that mainstream nationalist historiography, with its meta-narrative of anti-colonialism, has rendered invisible.

scholarly journals Trying To Speak: Between Politics and Aesthetics, Darmstadt 1970–1972

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN IDDON
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The West ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
The Press ◽  
Wide Scale ◽  
The 1950S

AbstractIn the historiography of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, the 1970s, when they are examined at all, are generally regarded as a period of stagnation, between the fervour of serial activity in the 1950s and the resurgence of the courses in the 1980s under the banner of various inflections of New Complexity. Yet, in a period of political upheaval after 1968, dissent was felt at Darmstadt too, and protests in 1970 and 1972 saw the institution at its most politically volatile. These protest movements caused the courses’ director, Ernst Thomas, to institute wide-scale changes in their structure and content. Key roles in these protests were taken by journalists: indeed, clear parallels can be drawn between the seemingly egalitarian calls from journalists for Mitbestimmung (co-determination) at Darmstadt and the similar demands being made by their trade unions in the West German federation. Thomas’s failure to deal with journalistic pressure and his heavy-handed treatment of individual protesters (notably Reinhard Oehlschlägel) meant that, shrewd and durable though his reinvention of the courses was, it would be only in 1982, with the accession of a new director, that the press would begin to speak positively about the Darmstadt courses once more. A close reading of these two protests shows the sometime ‘citadel of the avant-garde’ at a distinctly precarious moment in its history. At the time, some felt that such protests could lead to the demise of the courses, and it was far from clear whether Thomas’s reforms would be successful. But, even within this period of uncertainty, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse were anything but stagnant.

scholarly journals Suburban Identity in the Poetry of John Updike

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-54
Author(s):  
Jiří Flajšar
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
John Updike ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Cultural Importance ◽  
Representative Selection ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Suburban Studies ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract This paper provides a close reading of a representative selection of suburban poems by the American writer John Updike (1932–2009). It also draws upon the existing scholarship by suburban studies historians (including Kenneth Jackson, Dolores Hayden, John Archer, and James Howard Kunstler), who have argued for the cultural importance of American suburbia in fostering identity, and develops the argument by literary critics including Jo Gill, Peter Monacell, and Robert von Hallberg, who have championed the existence of a viable suburban tradition in postwar American poetry. By scrutinizing poems from Updike’s early poetry, represented by “Shillington”, up to his closing lyric opus, “Endpoint”, the paper argues that Updike’s unrecognized importance is that of a major postwar poet whose lyric work chronicles, in memorable, diverse, and important ways, the construction of individual identity within suburbia, in a dominant setting for most Americans from the 1950s up to the present.

Dorothy Day's Apologia for Faith after Marx

Horizons ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-213
Author(s):  
Sandra Yocum Mize
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Catholic Worker ◽  
Dorothy Day ◽  
The People ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Catholic Worker Movement ◽  
Political Character

AbstractDorothy Day has received a great deal of attention from contemporary scholars of U.S. Catholicism. This article makes a unique contribution to this growing literature by offering a close reading of Dorothy Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness. The purpose is to highlight the narrative's integrity as a sustained argument in defense of Christian faith transformed by wrestling with the Marxist charge: religion is the opiate of the people. Day deserves credit for a daring approach to Catholic apologetics in the 1950s. The article presents the narrative as a dialectic between the personal and the political, the material and the spiritual, and the natural and the supernatural that resolves itself in a creative synthesis through the Catholic Worker Movement. Day embraces Marxist aspirations and acknowledges their criticism's truth in defending the authenticity of her Catholic commitment. Day simultaneously demonstrates that the Incarnation's reality informs traditional Catholicism with its radical political character.

Nhân Văn—Giai Phẩm and Vietnamese “Reform Communism” in the 1950s: A Revisionist Interpretation

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Zinoman
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Protest Movement ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Party State

This article reexamines Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm (NVGP), a political protest movement led by intellectuals that coalesced in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1956. The article reassesses the development of the movement and the internal composition of its leadership. Through a close reading of the major publications produced by NVGP, the article takes issue with the conventional view, which characterizes the movement as a robust grouping of political dissidents against the party-state. The article shows that NVGP should in fact be seen as a relatively timid strain of the “revisionist” or “reform Communist” movements that emerged throughout the Communist world in the wake of Iosif Stalin's death.

scholarly journals Leedu draama retseptsioon Eestis

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-240
Author(s):  
Anneli Saro
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S

Eesti teatril on ajaloolises plaanis kõige tihedamad sidemed olnud saksa- ja venekeelse ning angloameerika kultuuriruumiga, kuid sidemed lõunapoolsete lähinaabritega on olnud üsna sporaadilised. Käesolev uurimus käsitleb Leedu draama vastuvõttu Eestis ja Eesti teatris. Artikli eesmärgiks on (1) anda statistiline ajalooline ülevaade Eestis ilmunud ja lavastatud Leedu näitekirjandusest ning (2) uurida Leedu draama retseptsiooni Eestis, tuginedes näidendite lähilugemisele, audio- ja videosalvestustele ja ilmunud kriitikale ning tõlgendades nimetatud allikaid Eesti kultuurikontekstist lähtuvalt.Abstract. Anneli Saro: Reception of Lithuanian drama in Estonia. The article has two aims: (1) to give a statistical overview of Lithuanian drama published and staged in Estonia, and (2) to investigate the reception of Lithuanian drama in Estonia, relying on close reading of the plays and analysis of audiovisual recordings and criticism, and interpreting the sources in the Estonian cultural context. The term “reception” here covers the creative work of translators, directors, actors, scenographers, etc., as well as diverse mental activities of readers and spectators. The first part of the article tackles the historical development of cultural relations between Estonia and Lithuania in the field of theatre, listing the Lithuanian plays published and staged in Estonia during different epochs and contextualizing the reception. In the second part, the plays of four influential playwrights are analyzed: works by Juozas Grušas, Kazys Saja, Justinas Marcinkevičius and Marius Ivaškevičius. There are approximately forty Lithuanian plays translated into Estonian, most of them by Mihkel Loodus. Twenty plays have been staged in professional theatres, and twenty have been published, although some are still in manuscript. There are three groups of plays translated into Estonian: (1) plays depicting Soviet society, staged in Estonia in the second half of the 1950s and in the first half of the 1960s, 2) plays depicting Lithuanian history, mostly published as books, and 3) existential plays that form the majority of Lithuanian drama in Estonian.Keywords: Lithuanian drama; Estonian theatre; reception; cultural relations between Estonia and Lithuania

scholarly journals Anxiety and the Voice of Unreason: Reading Foucault with Freud

PhaenEx ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
ADRIAN SWITZER
Keyword(s):  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Individual Psychology ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Voice

The paper focuses on Michel Foucault's early monograph, Maladie Mentale et Psychologie (1954/62); specifically the focus is on the issue of anxiety, which Foucault treats as central to pathological signification. Through a close reading of the text of Maladie Mentale and a comparison of the work to interpretive trends in French psychoanalytic theory in the 1950s and 1960s, the paper argues that anxiety as a discursive phenomenon overruns psychological discourse as well as Foucault's own theoretical engagement of such discourse. In conclusion, the paper finds that the voice of unreason Foucault detects in psychological discourse is the anxiety of theory confined within the limits of individual psychology.

On an Enigmatic Text by Pierre Bourdieu

Paragraph ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérôme David
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Guillaume Apollinaire ◽  
Theoretical System ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Relationship

A largely unknown commentary by Pierre Bourdieu on the poet Guillaume Apollinaire allows us to explore the non-theoretical, and even non-theorized, aspects of the relationship between the sociologist and literature. The present article begins by analysing Bourdieu's 1995 text as an example of close reading or explication de texte emerging, as it were, from a ‘scholastic unconscious’ dating from the 1950s. The article then proceeds to look at other ways in which Bourdieu has had recourse to literary references in his work (as a repertoire of techniques, as rhetorical elements for an argument from authority, as an equivalent or approach to sociological analysis, as ethical models or invocations). The article argues that, over and beyond his sociological objectification of literature, Bourdieu entertained a range of other relations to literature. These cannot be subsumed under a single theoretical system, but emerge at different times and with different, sometimes apparently ‘anachronistic’, effects.

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