scholarly journals THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORICAL MEMORY IN HUMAN FATE (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE NOVELS "OLD MAN" BY YURI TRIFONOV AND "PLANET OF MR. SEMMLER" SOLA BELLOU)

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (86) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Bratus ◽  
◽  
Zoriana Sverdlyk ◽  
Anna Gunka ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Detrimental Effect ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Moral Choice ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The Right

The article analyzes the significance of historical memory in the context of personal experiences of the heroes of the literary works of Solo Bellow and Yuri Trifonov. The question of comprehension of the lived years with elements of the analysis and first of all self-analysis is considered. Particular attention is paid to times of hardship – wars, revolutions, personal tragedies. The authors dwell on the importance of "the right moral choice", on the detrimental effect of "wrong choice". It is proved that the novels "Mr. Semmler's Planet" and "The Old Man" are in approximately the same plane of cultural and historical understanding of reality, the main characters have similar qualities and their general irritation with modernity is relative regardless of different countries (USA and USSR). In modern Ukraine, the problem of overcoming the totalitarian past is quite relevant. Ukrainians have gained a traumatic experience of counteraction and adaptation, comprehension and forgetting, condemnation and justification of certain historical events of the twentieth century. Turning to the literary works of the second half of the twentieth century allows us to better understand the nature of contemporary phenomena, to learn from the useful experience of intellectual writers in trying to "reconcile with reality", to overcome the inertia of oblivion and to find basic values of human existence. human layer. Sol Bellow and Yuri Trifonov were able to describe their main characters quite accurately – they are old, "locked in their memories". Only the past remains their "true" reality, but at the same time they have to live in a "present" alien to them. Continuation of their biological life does not satisfy the main characters of the analyzed works - they try to convey their memories or thoughts to the younger generation. But here they encounter a conditional wall of misunderstanding, a wall of alienation. The considerations and feelings important to them have mostly lost their relevance and turned into rudiments. Only a small part of the information about the past can be perceived only within the framework of interest in the fate of prominent personalities with whom the main characters had to intersect.

scholarly journals Beyond the Battlefields of Memory: Historical Traumas and Hungarian Literature

Porównania ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-58
Author(s):  
Tamás Kisantal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Hungarian Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
Literary Canons

One can describe the contemporary Hungarian collective memory as an interpretational field of some traumatic historical events of the twentieth century. The essay aims to sketch some important tendencies of the literary representation of these events after the millennium. At first, it outlines the wider social and political contexts of these literary works. Secondly, it models the current Hungarian cultural field as an opposition between two strategies of memory labeling them in Michael Rothberg’s terminology as competitive and multidirectional ones. These approaches to the past are also associated with different ideological implications and literary canons. Finally, with a brief overview of some recent novels, the essay demonstrates some pathways of representing multidirectional attitudes to the past in the Hungarian literary fiction of the 2000s.

scholarly journals Historical Potential of Newsreel and Its Interpretation

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 44-53
Author(s):  
Victor K Belyakov
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Secondary Use ◽  
The Past ◽  
Comprehensive Picture ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Film Archives ◽  
The Right

What is a newsreel and how it relates to historical events? When watching the newsreel film footage, it is important to understand it and evaluate. It is necessary to have a specific pre-knowledge and pre-understanding of the subject. We have the right mind to correlate on-screen images with historical events. But newsreels never plays them fully, since they do not give a comprehensive picture of what have happened. Actually, newsreels are largely symbolic, and they also facilitate formation of historical memory. At the same time, to fully understand the historical newsreels one has to use the knowledge about the same events from other sources. When viewing pictures of the past, its vital to take into consideration the author's initial message predestinated for the according audience. This raises the question of the interpretation of the seen today, affected by certain mental filters of the actual audience. It especially tells on secondary use of historical newsreels today in a new documentary. Symbolism in newsreel arises through the symbolism of the ritual demonstrated on the screen. Does the ritualistic imagery bear any esthetical quality? There is a kind of duality: either we see a certain beauty of the ritual, or we look at what is happening only in the informational way. The novelty of the article is determined by its theoretical approach to understanding of the artistic and historical qualities of the newsreel, helpful for researchers and practitioners working in film archives.

The Specter of the Past: Reconstructing Conservative Historical Memory in South Korea

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-362
Author(s):  
Myungji Yang
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
New Right ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Right

Through the case of the New Right movement in South Korea in the early 2000s, this article explores how history has become a battleground on which the Right tried to regain its political legitimacy in the postauthoritarian context. Analyzing disputes over historiography in recent decades, this article argues that conservative intellectuals—academics, journalists, and writers—play a pivotal role in constructing conservative historical narratives and building an identity for right-wing movements. By contesting what they viewed as “distorted” leftist views and promoting national pride, New Right intellectuals positioned themselves as the guardians of “liberal democracy” in the Republic of Korea. Existing studies of the Far Right pay little attention to intellectual circles and their engagement in civil society. By examining how right-wing intellectuals appropriated the past and shaped triumphalist national imagery, this study aims to better understand the dynamics of ideational contestation and knowledge production in Far Right activism.

scholarly journals Lviv as the cradle of Polish independence organizations

2021 ◽  
Vol 201 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-545
Author(s):  
Janusz Zuziak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Social Activists ◽  
The Past ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

Lviv occupies a special place in the history of Poland. With its heroic history, it has earned the exceptionally honorable name of a city that has always been faithful to the homeland. SEMPER FIDELIS – always faithful. Marshal Józef Piłsudski sealed that title while decorating the city with the Order of Virtuti Militari in 1920. The past of Lviv, the always smoldering and uncompromising Polish revolutionist spirit, the climate, and the atmosphere that prevailed in it created the right conditions for making it the center of thought and independence movement in the early 20th century. In the early twentieth century, Polish independence organizations of various political orientations were established, from the ranks of which came legions of prominent Polish politicians and military and social activists.

Nostalgic Fragments in the Thick of Things: Yuan Kewen (1890–1931) and the Act of Remembering

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-271
Author(s):  
Shengqing Wu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Historical Dramas

Abstract This article delves into the nexus of nostalgia, memory, and visuality by examining the images, objects, and events surrounding Yuan Kewen's remembrances of his father, Yuan Shikai, and their family estate in Huanshang. It also considers Zhang Boju's remembrance of his interactions with Yuan Kewen as another layer of historical memory. Phenomenological analysis of the act of remembering, especially in the work of Edward Casey, will be shown to yield rich insights when applied to China's early twentieth-century Republican culture. Surviving fragments—poems, anecdotes, photographs, and paintings—replete with sensuous and affective images of the past become the loci of memory in which these historical figures lived. Lamentation and reminiscence are also conducted through performance of historical dramas whose gestures of mourning and remembrance allowed Yuan to cultivate feelings of perpetual nostalgia through personal artistic expressions. The act of remembering became symptomatic for Yuan, Zhang, and to a large extent the entire generation of literati who experienced drastic social-political changes in the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Heritage for All – A Contribution to the Inclusion of People with Intellectual Disabilities in Archaeology: A Polish Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-156
Author(s):  
Kornelia Kajda ◽  
Tomasz Michalik ◽  
Dawid Kobiałka
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Disabilities ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Specific Character ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
People With Intellectual Disabilities ◽  
Cognitive Problems

This paper discusses the results of project entitled Heritage for all: Perception of the past and archaeo- logical heritage by people with intellectual disabili- ties, which the authors carried out on a group of 14 young individuals who were diagnosed with intel- lectual disabilities. The project aimed to detect how the past is perceived and conceptualized by students with learning and cognitive problems and how we, archaeologists and museum workers, can transfer knowledge about the past to them in a more ap- propriate way. This paper also provides a context for a need for inclusive archaeology as a way of practising archaeology as a discipline of social and cultural value for present-day people. Despite the limited number of people approached during the research and the specific character of education for people with intellectual disabilities in Poland, some conclusions can be drawn. First of all, participants in the project understood the past not as abstract, historical events, but rather as actions related to their personal experiences. Secondly, they remem- bered more about the past when it was shown and explained to them in an active, participatory way.

New Frankensteins; or, the Body Politic

2017 ◽  
pp. 195-207
Author(s):  
Timothy C. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gothic Novels

In the introduction to his 2001 anthology of ‘New Scottish Gothic Fiction’, Alan Bissett argues that Gothic ‘has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic’ (2001: 6). While virtually every contemporary Scottish author has made use of Gothic elements or tropes in some part of their work, many of the most important recent texts to be labelled ‘Scottish Gothic’ are centrally concerned with such a re-examination of the past. For many authors, however, the past is not to be found in historical events or cultural contexts, but specifically in the interrelation between established Scottish and Gothic literary traditions. Beginning with Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978), one of numerous twentieth-century reworkings of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), many contemporary Gothic novels have explicitly relied on earlier texts; adapting the work of Hogg, Stevenson or even Shelley becomes a way of challenging preconceived notions of stable national and individual identities.

scholarly journals Ukrainian ‘Working through the Past’ in the Context of the Polish–Ukrainian Dialogue on Volhynia-43. Asymmetry of Memory

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Julia Rysicz-Szafraniec
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Nationalist Party ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Working Through ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Main Component

The modern Polish–Ukrainian dialogue is the second interstate dialogue of the twentieth century, in the development of which the historical and political discourses have played an important role. The so-called Volhynia discourse poses the most serious challenge in this dialogue, while at the same time being its main component. The article claims the Volhynia discourse plays a major role in bringing about the asymmetry of historical memory between the two states. The events of Volhynia-43 have remained in Polish historical memory as an act of genocide perpetrated in 1941–1943 by Ukrainian nationalists, mainly from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), on over 100,000 Poles and citizens of the Polish state inhabiting Galicia and Eastern Małopolska, including Volhynia. These territories, considered by the Ukrainian nationalist party OUN as indigenously Ukrainian, were to be included in the future independent Ukrainian state. The Ukrainian historiography, apart from sparse exceptions, avoids the term ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’ in reference to the events in Volhynia, defining them as a conflict or a Polish–Ukrainian war with a comparable number of casualties on both sides. The article, analysing speeches and announcements by political leaders of Poland and Ukraine, focuses on explaining the causes and effects of this shift in accentuation in the Ukrainian discourse on Volhynia, and, broadly, in Ukraine working through its past.

scholarly journals Repetition: Thinking Between G.W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History (1837) and Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (54) ◽  
pp. 81-97
Author(s):  
Antonis Balasopoulos ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
Major Complications ◽  
Gravitational Pull ◽  
Exit Strategies ◽  
Revolution Counter

Taking its cue from the untimely paradoxes manifesting themselves in some of the most visible instances of Hegel’s and Marx’s reception in the twentieth century, this essay proceeds to explore the ground between the two thinkers with particular reference to their philosophico-historical grasp of repetition. After a number of preliminary observations on the ideological subtext involved in Marx’s reference to Hegel in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and the temporality their intertextual conjuncture stages, I focus on four major complications that attend the comparison of Hegelian and Marxian notions of repetition, as well as on their correlation to the historical events of Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Restoration. I conclude with some reflections on the “exit strategies” Marx and Hegel adopt vis-à-vis the specter of iteration as a sign of submission to the gravitational pull of the past upon the present and future.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document