scholarly journals "They shall not grow old" and "Mimesis: African soldier"

2021 ◽  
pp. 64-83
Author(s):  
Richard A. Voeltz
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Sound Track ◽  
Sound Recordings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Transcendent Experience ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Digital Film ◽  
Screen Performance

This paper will examine and compare two recent visual explorations of the experience of soldiers in World War I. Director Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old has been called an immersive, haunting and often transcendent experience that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. By using modern digital film technology, he has restored the visuals and added sounds and speech via Automatic Dialogue Replacement, colorized, changed the speed, and brought 3D depth to the old footage from the Imperial War Museum. Jackson has either, using the terminology of William Guynn (Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe), employed this technology to trigger “moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered in its material being”. Or, do these computer generated technological affects, “….stand in for the ‘truth’ and obscure just how constructed the ‘history’ Jackson is telling actually is?” John Akomfrah’s video/sound three screen performance/display installation Mimesis: African Soldier uses silent actors, archive film and photographs, ethnographic sound recordings, new filmed footage with and without actors, and a sound track by Trevor Mathison, to document the experience of those, among many, left out of Jackson’s film: colonial subjects as soldiers. Akomfrah “does not put colour back in the cheeks of the dead”, but rather warns the viewer that remembrance can come in many forms, some of them unrealiable. All of this leads to a conclusion, as Avishai Margalit put it in Ethics of Memory, that “memory…is knowledge from the past. It is not necessarily knowledge about the past.”

Behind the stage of a literary text. ‘Custom is despot among men’

2020 ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
E. N. Tsimbaeva
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Skeletal System ◽  
World War ◽  
Internal Organs ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fiction Writers

The article analyzes physical and physiological problems caused by fashionable clothing in the mid-18th to early 20th cc. that shaped people’s appearances and lifestyles in the past. Affecting the skeletal system and the functioning of internal organs and brain in particular and causing various illnesses, these problems went largely unrecognized by contemporaries, including writers, but would inevitably surface in literary works as part and parcel of everyday life. Without understanding their role, one may struggle to comprehend not only plot twists and characters’ motivations but also the mentality of the bygone era as portrayed in fiction. Chronologically, the research covers the period from the mid-18th c. to World War I. The author only focuses on so-called respectable society (a very tentative term that covers members of the aristocracy and other classes with comparable lifestyles), since it was this group which drew the most attention from fiction writers of the period. The scholar chose to concentrate on the kind of daily realia of ‘noble society’ that permeate works by Russian, English, French and, to some extent, German authors, considered most prominent in Europe at the time.

scholarly journals Preface: The Historical Geography of the Hungarian Nation

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
East European ◽  
The Past ◽  
French And English ◽  
The Subject

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”

The Decline and Promise of American Camping

Heading Out ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Young
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
World War ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
The Past

This concluding chapter offers a review of the key notions developed in the earlier chapters and draws upon this enhanced understanding to offer an explanation for why camping's popularity has begun to waver. Despite camping's strong and pervasive popularity today, the zenith of its national appeal occurred in the past. It is impossible to precisely quantify such trends, but camping's cultural significance appears to have peaked with the explosion of auto campers who hit the motor-camping trail during the decade following World War I. This heightened and widespread popularity should be understood as a reflection of the continuing and rapid urbanization that was sweeping through America, transforming it from a largely rural country in 1910 to a distinctly urban one by 1930.

Persuasion and Propaganda in War and Terrorism

2019 ◽  
pp. 1048-1071
Author(s):  
Thomas Steinfatt ◽  
Dana Janbek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Unrest ◽  
Actual Use ◽  
Time Part ◽  
Over Time

This chapter focuses on the use of propaganda during times of war, prejudice, and political unrest. Part one distinguishes between persuasion and one of its forms, propaganda. The meaning-in-use of the term ‘propaganda' is essential to understanding its use over time. Part two presents relevant examples of propaganda from the past several centuries in the United States and Europe. These examples include episodes from World War I and II, among others. Propaganda is not a new tool of persuasion, and learning about its use in the past provides a comparison that helps in understanding its use in the present and future. Part three looks at recent examples of how propaganda occurs in actual use in online terrorist mediums by Al-Qaeda and by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Identity ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.

Colors of the Past: Archive, Art, and Amnesia in a Digital Age

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1771-1781
Author(s):  
Santanu Das
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Gains And Losses

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.

Reclaiming the Past, Building a Future: Māori Identity in the Plays of Hone Kouka

2001 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
World War I ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Future ◽  
The 1960S

Hone Kouka's historical plays Nga Tangata Toa and Waiora, created and produced in Aotearoa/New Zealand, one set in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and the other during the great Māori urban migrations of the 1960s, provide fresh insights into the way in which individual Māori responded to the tremendous social disruptions they experienced during the twentieth century. Much like the Māori orator who prefaces his formal interactions with a statement of his whakapapa (genealogy), Kouka reassembles the bones of both his ancestors, and those of other Māori, by demonstrating how the present is constructed by the past, offering a view of contemporary Māori identity that is traditional and modern, rural and urban, respectful of the past and open to the future.

scholarly journals Anger, Irony, and the Formal Rationality of Professionalism

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-248
Author(s):  
Ajay K. Mehrotra
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
American Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formal Rationality

One of the challenges in writing about the history of American law and political economy is determining the proper amount of historical context necessary to make sense of past institutional and organizational change. Where to begin and end a historical narrative and how much to include about the broader social, cultural, political, and economic conditions of a particular place and time are, of course, questions that accompany any attempt to reconstruct the past. How one addresses these issues invariably shapes the motives and intentions that can be ascribed to historical figures. In their eloquent and thoughtful comments, Christopher Capozzola and Michael Bernstein have urged me to think more carefully about these issues, about where my story begins and ends, about the broader social, political, and material circumstances that animated World War I state-building, and about the seemingly apolitical ideas and actions of the Treasury lawyers who are the center of “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys.”

The Past in Common: Modern Ruins as a Shared Urban Experience of Revolution-Era Moscow and Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 712-735 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Stroud
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
A Site ◽  
Intellectual Movement

In this article, Gregory Stroud considers the modern ruin as a site of common urban conversation and identity for large, diverse, and otherwise fractious populations of Petersburg and Moscow residents. Stroud argues that what began at the turn of the century as a relatively narrow nostalgic intellectual movement anxious over the perceived modern loss of timeless beauty and value exploded with the frustrations of the Christmas holiday during World War I into a common boulevard conversation concerning the loss of holiday, ritual, authenticity, and habit. The failure of the old regime to satisfactorily engage this conversation and to offer meaningful solutions would render such nostalgia into a biting critique of autocracy, mass consumerism, private property, and shopkeeper capitalism.

The Prophet Muhammad as an Exemplar in War: Ottoman Views on the Eve of World War I

2000 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 145-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gottfried Hagen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Shed Light

The past to which a society refers in search of clues for self-identification and confirmation for its hopes and aspirations is not an objective reality. It is a myth that can be defined as “a (preferably narrative) reference to the past in order to shed light from there on present and future” (Assmann 1997, p. 78). However, the function of myth is not generally to legitimize the present order or to continue it into the future. It may also work as a counter-principle of the present, contrasting it with a better past and betraying the experience of a fundamental deficiency in present society. Assmann thus distinguishes several functions of the myth collectively termed mythomotoric: It can either serve the present (präsentisch, fundierend) or criticize it (kontrapräsentisch, in its extreme forms revolutionary) (Assmann 1997, pp. 80-86).

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