scholarly journals Interpretation of the history of post-war France in Pascal Quignard’s “The American Occupation”

2021 ◽  
Vol IX(253) (45) ◽  
pp. 55-58
Author(s):  
O. V. Savych

The article deals with the specifics of the interpretation of the history of post-war France, made by a contemporary French writer Pascal Quignard in the novel "The American Occupation" (1994). The writer represents in detail the chosen historical period, emphasizing its socio-political and cultural peculiarities. In addition, the author pays attention to the phenomenon of modification of the national identity of the protagonists influenced by American mass culture. The depiction of a specific historical epoch in this work becomes part of Pascal Quignard's reflection on the meaning of history in its entirety.

Author(s):  
Ziad Fahed

The post-war period in Lebanon brought to the open all sensitive subjects that have marked the history of Lebanon: how to avoid falling into such a crisis? How not repeating such war? How can the Lebanese society eradicate the reasons that may lead to any other war? The Lebanese crisis had challenged the Church inviting her to move from being a passive witness to an active participant in the peaceful struggle for the liberation of the Lebanese society and help the country to complete its incorrect reading of history. Can the Maronite Patriarchate have a positive role in this regard? Can the Maronite Patriarchate bring about the purifi cation of the memory in a multiconfessional country? In this paper, and after defi ning the meaning of the purifi cation of memory in the Lebanese context, we will consider the important challenges that must precede any serious and defi nitive solution to the crisis in Lebanon and how can the Lebanese Church contribute in the development of a national identity and in the building of a new state free from any kind of domination. The purpose of this paper is not to justify what has happened in the past 34 years, i.e. since the beginning of the Lebanese war, but to contribute in searching for a sustainable peace.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Serge Noiret

AbstractThis article traces the origins and development of public history in Italy, a field not anymore without this name today. Public history in Italy has its roots in historical institutions born in the nineteenth century and in the post WW2 first Italian Republic. The concept of “public use of history” (1993), the important role played by memory issues in post-war society, local and national identity issues, the birth of public archaeology (2015) before public history, the emergence of history festivals in the new millennium are all important moments shaping the history of the field and described in this essay. The foundation of the “Italian Association of Public History” (AIPH) in 2016/2017, and the promotion of an Italian Public History Manifesto (2018) together with the creation of Public History masters in universities, are all concrete signs of a vital development of the field in the Peninsula.


2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Taras Hrosevych

The general regularities and main tendencies of the development of a war novel have been researched in the article, an attempt of its typology and periodization is realized, the most common genre models is identified. The novel about the Second World War as a leading epic genre, which develops the theme of war in literature, creatively synthesized all the experience gained by the writers and front-line soldiers, became a noticeable artistic phenomenon and widespread genre formation in Western European, American and Slavic writing. It is concluded that the aesthetic and ideological-thematic level of artistic modeling of war reality is localized in different national literatures unevenly and stipulated first of all for the historical and geopolitical scope of the involvement of warring countries in hostilities. For example, in German military romance, is the so-called "Remarkable" novel, as well as a novel with a marked anti-militaristic nature. The main plot of the French war novel is the resistance movement, while the Italian one is fascist domination and occupation actions in the Balkans. Instead, in Britain, which has escaped occupation, military creativity takes a rather modest place. American writing focuses on war as a social phenomenon, armed conflicts in Vietnam. The polivector artistic search, the richness of types and varieties of war novel (panoramic novel, lyric war novel, anti-fascist novel, soldier novel, war novel-education, war novel with documentary basis, etc.) demonstrates military novel prose of Eastern Slavs. In particular, in the development of the Ukrainian war novel, literary critics distinguish such branches as the war novel, the post-war novel of the first decade, the war novel prose of the "second wave" (etc. pol. 50's - 60's), war novel 70’s-80’s, as well as modern war novels.


2021 ◽  
pp. 248-270
Author(s):  
Olga Yu. Antsyferova

The article examines the history of cinematic versions (film adaptations) of T. Dreiserʼs novel An American Tragedy, the key concept of the analysis being that of a mirage (phantasm). It is the unattainable and unconscious desire for the mirage of wealth and luxury that guides Clyde Griffiths in the novel (not accidentally one of its early titles was “Mirage”). The plotline of Dreiser’s attempts to film the novel during his lifetime is marked by the same illusory, fantasmatic character: the script by Sergei Eisenstein, approved by the author, was rejected by Hollywood, the movie by Joseph von Sternberg, who eliminated sociological motives, was not accepted by Dreiser who tried to sue Paramount but lost the trial. George Stevensʼ post-war film adaptation of the novel titled A Place in the Sun, where the action was transferred into the early 1950s with their less rigid class stratification, became a tragic story about love and protagonist’s desire to dissolve into cinematic fantasy. A Place in the Sun was to become a cult film both among the intellectuals (Jean- Luc Godard) and among the mass media audience, the embodiment of which can be seen in the main character of the novel by S. Erickson Zeroville and of the eponymous movie by J. Franco. The history of the relationship between Dreiserʼs text and cinema can be perceived as a hypostasis of Roland Barthesʼ “death of the author”: appropriating a well-documented text of a real-historical author, cinema gradually and increasingly turns it into a space of intertextual play, from which the real author is eliminated and becomes a “mirage”, visible only to readers familiar with Dreiserʼs novel.


2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Hillis

Early planning in Ottawa takes the form of a piece-meal architectural admixture. On paper there remains a series of largely unrealized proposals designed to promote an image symbolic of national identity. Successive federal and municipal agencies worked to various degrees of success to augment Ottawa's appearance and amenity. British planner Thomas Adams' departure from, and the subsequent demise of the Federal Commission of Conservation in the early 1920's marked a low point in efforts to evolve comprehensive planning strategies. The career of Noulan Cauchon, first head of the Ottawa Town Planning Commission, aimed to keep the notion of planning alive in the city. Certain of his little-acknowledged proposals bear remarkable similarity to the pre-W.W. II planning efforts of MacKenzie King and Jacques Greber. Cauchon's legacy endures in proposals which appear to have been incorporated into federal planning activities during the post-war era.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096996
Author(s):  
Anna Branach-Kallas

The article offers an analysis of Underground, published by Canadian writer June Hutton in 2009. The main protagonist of the novel is a young Canadian, Albert Fraser, who suffers severe shock and disillusionment in the trenches of the First World War. He faces unemployment and destitution during the Great Depression and eventually joins the 1,700 Canadian volunteers who fought in the anti-fascist cause during the Spanish Civil War. My purpose is to analyse Hutton’s representation of the Canadian veterans’ difficult reintegration in the post-war years and the protagonist’s prise de conscience which ultimately leads him to Spain, despite his hatred of war. While discussing the veterans’ discontent and the Canadian government’s attempts to control this unruly population, I refer to Judith Butler’s conceptualization of precariousness and precarity, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical reflection on biopolitics and bare life. Central in my reading is the terrain of the camp — the hobo camp, the relief camp, and the POW camp — as a site of biopolitical exclusion, yet also a space of encounter that triggers ethical reflection. Furthermore, I demonstrate how the novel stages unexpected alliances between the protagonist and Chinese characters, which cause Fraser to revise his racist opinions. I propose the concept of multidirectional vulnerabilities to explore the parallels between these apparently disjointed geographies and temporalities. The article shows how Hutton represents the vulnerability of Canadian bodies in a historical period of socio-political upheavals, yet at the same time locates in their vulnerability the possibility of resistance and an alternative ethics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Xavier Martin

The novel Les Larmes, by French writer Pascal Quignard, takes place in the ninth century, two twin brothers make totally different choices of life. Hartnid is always on the go. His twin, Nithard, is a pure scholar. His life is devoted to language. It is precisely his involment in language that allows him to write something that was never written before. He writes the Serments de Strasbourg (English: Oaths of Strasbourg, Latin: Sacramenta Argentariae) in 842, first written marks of a language that will become the French language. This novel offers a unique opportunity to sketch a thought on the ability of literature to speak about our relationship to reality.   The first part of the article questions the gesture of the novelist who acts on himself and on reality when writing, he really tries to change the world. The second part of the article studies the notion of realism and shows how Quignard finds a place in the history of literature that, today, stays away from realism, but, maybe, in order to better track down reality. Finally, in order to grasp the specificity of the Works of Quignard, my interest in the aesthetic of Les Larmes is threefold: its complex structure, the fascination for origin that it shows and, the question of identity and splitting with the twin brothers Hartnid and Nithard. The article concludes on the ability of artists to anticipate in their creations and, in advance, to tell about events that will occur in the future. 


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-67
Author(s):  
Sergey Nikolayevich Ilchenko

The article analyzes the television adaptation of the famous novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, shown on Russian television in 2012. The author juxtaposes the TV-series with the renowned Soviet film Days of the Turbins, premiered in 1976. The analysis is carried out in the context of the history of a theatre version of the novel The White guard, staged in the Moscow Academic Art Theatre in the 1920s, that is Days of the Turbins, highly appreciated by Stalin. Traditionally, both theatre and cinema directors were drawn to the play adapted by Mikhail Bulgakov after his novel. Anyhow, there is a certain subject and semantic difference between these two works. The author analyzes the structure of the TV version, its style, elaboration of on-screen characters, based on the literary source and previous interpretation of the play Days of the Turbins. However, the author argues, that ideological and figurative interference into the original, adaptation to the stereotypes of mass culture significantly distort the perception of Bulgakovs works, largely obliged to the writerss mood and emotions experienced in the years of Revolution and Civil war. Concluding, the author pinpoints both - complexity unit of Bulgakovs text adaptation towards contemporary TV, and misjudgements of the TV-series makers in the way of conception and realization.


Author(s):  
Альберт Новацький

Role of memory in forming national identity. “The land of bitter tenderness” by Volodymyr Lys The paper offers an attempt to look at the “The Land of Bitter Tenderness” by contemporary Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Lys in the context of the search for individual and national identity, national memory, as well as the history of the 20th century Ukraine. In the analyzed work, the writer uses the image of a child, which, in the researcher’s opinion, is a quite rare phenomenon in Ukrainian literature. The is technique was used by the writer in order to capture the reader’s attention and make him penetrate the text of the novel deeper. The us, the author informs the reader that the main idea of the work is extremely important because the average person is accustomed to paying more attention to children. On occasion, the writer points out that manipulating a child’s memory was the easiest way for the Bolsheviks in their criminal social experiment. The writer emphasizes that the effects of ‘brainwashing’ may be prevented, but it is impossible to cure the trauma left by this process in the soul of a person. Analyzing the mentioned novel, the author of the paper refers to the works in the fields of literary studies, pedagogy, sociology, and psychology, written by Philip Aries, Rudolf Schaffer, Ellen Kay, Pierre Nora, Katarzyna Segiet, and others.  The Ukrainian writer, describing the fate of three women (grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter), presented against the backdrop of the tumultuous Ukrainian history of the last century, is trying to restore the lost memory, both individual and collective, in order to secure the process of building Ukrainian national identity. The writer draws attention to the fact that during almost all the 20th century not only the Ukrainian nation but also Ukrainian history has been the subject of constant Bolshevik manipulation and fraud. He emphasizes that the prerequisite for building a unified Ukrainian identity is the attempt to restore individual and collective memory in Ukrainians, including the memory of history.


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