scholarly journals The Imagined Geography in the Philology of Erich Auerbach

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-54
Author(s):  
Angel Angelov
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
World War ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Symbolic Geography ◽  
Main Motive ◽  
Second World ◽  
Romance Philology ◽  
Additional Reason

The purpose of the author is to find the main motive why Auerbach chose to use the non-disciplinary term “European philologists” and what he meant by that. I argue that Auerbach’s consciousness of Europe as a historical entity was formed in the 1920s, but his exile turned this consciousness into a position. A basic question is about the symbolic geography of European culture in the works of Auerbach. The synonymous use of Europe and Abendland distinctly reveals Auerbach’s dual, unifying/divisive understanding of the identity and symbolic geography of European culture. If we accept the opinion that the European has been represented for centuries by the Romance, then the tasks of Romance philology as European philology will become clearer and the cultural geography of Europe narrower. The cultural-historical identification of Europe and Abendland after the Second World War solidified the anyway existing division of Europe in to two blocs. Literary history and philology divided Europe in the way this was done by the relevant political doctrines too. The human sciences also contributed significantly to the creation of value-attitudes, and an investigation of the former from this perspective gives us additional reason to assume that the agreement on the division of Europe after the Allied victory was not based solely on strategic interests.

Detectives, Spies, and Heroes: From the Cold War to the War on Terror

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Priestman
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
James Bond ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Single Figure ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
Second World

This chapter considers the transmutations of the crime genre’s endlessly reproducible heroes in the wake of the Second World War. More or less created by Arthur Conan Doyle (despite a few partial forerunners), series centred round the repeated exploits of a single figure — usually a detective such as Sherlock Holmes or an undercover agent such as James Bond — have dominated bestseller lists throughout the twentieth century and the beginning of this one. But such stories have only an uneasy relationship with what we might normally think of as literary history. It is a form centred not around individual books but around their heroes. However, detective or secret agent series-heroes can be very effective weathervanes of public anxieties: of what, at particular times, we fear most and most need to feel that someone, somewhere can resolve.

Writing memory: intertextuality and intra-textuality

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Hodgson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Web

This chapter explores the web of intra-textual allusion that connects the most diverse of Berggol′ts's works. The intensely self-referential nature of her writing, particularly after the Second World War, suggests that the poet's creative response to contradictions she could not resolve was to embark on a continuing and open-ended process of self-refashioning, striving towards but never achieving wholeness. Berggol′ts's writing on the Leningrad siege is situated within the context of her work as a whole, rather than being analysed in isolation. This close study of the work of a single author will, it is hoped, provoke readers whose interests include Russian poetry, the literary history of the Soviet period, other ‘official’ writers in the Stalin era, and women's writing into reassessing the cultural heritage of an era that can seem remote and impenetrable.

‘The far-off hills of the imagination’: W.R. Rodgers and the Second World War

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-323
Author(s):  
Amy Smith
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Repeated Use ◽  
Political Conviction ◽  
Second World

According to most accounts of the literary history of Northern Ireland, the flourishing of poetry during the late 1960s marked a radical departure from the creative stagnation of the preceding decades; Heaney, Mahon, Longley, and others sought to establish poetic roots in a relatively barren landscape. In this essay I challenge such preconceptions by exploring aspects of a loosely-formed coterie of poets who lived and wrote in Northern Ireland during the Second World War. Perhaps the most popular figure within this group was the Presbyterian minister W.R. Rodgers, whose neo-romantic idiom and Audenesque ideas received many favourable reviews throughout Britain and Ireland. Focusing on Rodgers, I identify the central concerns which united an otherwise diverse group of writers: left-wing political conviction and a desire to see radical social change. In Rodgers's poetry, this theme is communicated through his repeated use of the symbol of the airman.

scholarly journals Living in the Age of Axis Internationalism: Imagining Europe in Serbia Before and During the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Antić
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Second World

This article explores how ‘European civilization’ was imagined on the margins of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, and how Balkan intellectuals saw their own societies’ place in it in the context of interwar crises and World War II occupation. It traces the interwar development and wartime transformation of the intellectual debates regarding the modernization of Serbia/Yugoslavia, the role of the Balkans in the broader European culture, and the most appropriate path to becoming a member of the ‘European family of nations’. In the first half of the article, I focus on the interwar Serbian intelligentsia, and their discussions of various forms of international cultural, political and civilizational links and settings. These discussions centrally addressed the issue of Yugoslavia’s (and Serbia’s) ‘Europeanness’ and cultural identity in the context of the East–West symbolic and the state’s complex cultural-historical legacies. Such debates demonstrated how frustrating the goal of Westernization and Europeanization turned out to be for Serbian intellectuals. After exploring the conundrums and seemingly insoluble contradictions of interwar modernization/Europeanization discussions, the article then goes on to analyse the dramatic changes in such intellectual outlooks after 1941, asking how Europe and European cultural/political integration were imagined in occupied Serbia, and whether the realities of the occupation could accommodate these earlier debates. Serbia can provide an excellent case study for exploring how the brutal Nazi occupation policies affected collaborationist governments, and how the latter tried to make sense of their troubled inclusion in the racial ideology of the New European Order under the German leadership. Was Germany’s propaganda regarding European camaraderie taken seriously by any of the local actors? What did the Third Reich’s dubious internationalism mean in the east and south-east of Europe, and did it have anything to offer to the intelligentsia as well as the population at large?

The Renaissance versus the Avant-Garde

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-168
Author(s):  
Maxim Kantor
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

The essay contrasts two recurring phenomena of European culture: renaissance and avant-garde. The author discusses the paradigmatic Renaissance of 15th and 16th centuries and the paradigmatic Avant-Garde of early 20th century from the point of view of a practicing artist, interested in philosophical, social, religious, and political involvements of artists and their creation. The author shows the artistic and social history of 20th century as a struggle between the Avant-Garde and the Renaissance ideals, which, as he points out, found a fertile ground in in the 20 years that followed immediately the Second World War.

Jewish Humanism in the Late Work of Geoffrey Hill

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 99-124
Author(s):  
Jesse Russell
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
World War ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Positive Treatment ◽  
Geoffrey Hill ◽  
Second World ◽  
Apparent Influence

Abstract Throughout much of his career, Geoffrey Hill has been pilloried for his alleged conservativism as well as his positive treatment of Christianity in his poetry. A careful reading of his works, however, reveals a complex thinker who was attentive to the moral fallout of the Holocaust and the Second World War as he was a lover of England and European culture. Moreover, Hill’s writings reflect the apparent influence of a host of personalist, existentialist and what could also be called “humanist” twentieth century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. Throughout his poetry—especially his later work—Hill attempts (whether successfully or not) to fuse together this Jewish humanism with his own Christian and English voice.

La morte dell'eroe

2012 ◽  
pp. 128-141
Author(s):  
Battini Michele
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Burial Rites ◽  
Second World ◽  
Morphological Relationship ◽  
Attitudes To Death

The death of the Hero. The discussion of three recent essays, by literary critics George Steiner and Guido Paduano, and the young historian Guri Schwarz, makes it possible to attempt to decode some clues that could show the secret connections between the political religion of the Italian Resistance, the patriotic-romantic and modern Christian attitudes to death and, finally, two different classic paradigms of the Hero. These paradigms were probably still present in the burial rites after the second world war, in the worship as heroes of military, partisans or civilians, and in the veneration for the dead.The most important question involved in the new patriotic epic, so, may be the historical and morphological relationship between death and history, that is to say: a basic question in the history of cultures.

Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank-Rutger Hausmann
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
European Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Army ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
Second World ◽  
Romance Philology ◽  
Comprehensive Study

AbstractIn the years immediately following the Second World War, three books written by German professors of Romance Philology were published in Switzerland: Mimesis by Erich Auerbach in 1946, European literature and the Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius in 1948, and Montaigne by Hugo Friedrich in 1949. Even if the subjects of these studies and the approaches of their authors are different, their aim is nevertheless the same: They want to contribute to the idea of continuity in European literature. It is certainly logical to conclude that Auerbach, banished from Germany by the Nazi authorities because of his Jewish heritage, Curtius, surviving the years from 1933 to 1945 in »inner emigration«, and Friedrich, serving as interpreter in the German army, learned the lessons of the past and evoke the heritage of literature as an antidote to ideological blindness and fanaticism. Friedrich, whose study of Montaigne’s Les Essais forms the center of the following article, is internationally known first and foremost for his bestseller Structure of modern poetry (1957), translated into thirteen languages, but also his work Montaigne, which is the first comprehensive study of Montaigne’s personality and work in German and, even today, far from being outdated. Strangely enough, the book is actually only available in the English translation by Dawn Eng. It helps the modern reader to understand not only the complex composition of Montaigne’s essays, but also their epoch-making place in French moralistic literature.

scholarly journals Nogi. Męskość i niepełnosprawność w Szpitalu Czerwonego Krzyża Michała Choromańskiego

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arleta Galant
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Masculine Gender Roles ◽  
Second World ◽  
Masculine Gender

In the article, the author presents an interpretation of the novel Szpital Czerwonego Krzyża by Michał Choromański. One of the key interpretative hypothesis advanced by the author of the article based on a reading of the novel is the assumption that the work constitutes an important statement on masculinity and disability, exposing the artificiality and unoriginality of masculine gender roles and criticizing somatic culture. This criticism is, in turn, significant with regard to twentieth-century reflections on body issues in post-war modernity. The author of the article indicates that Choromański’s work, written before the Second World War but published not until 1956, is a piece of significancefor the reconstruction of issues of disability in terms of Polish literary history.

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