Conclusion

Author(s):  
Nick Hubble

The conclusion considers the various legacies of proletarian modernism and the structures of feeling it supported, including the equalities legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, and the promotion of self-reflexivity in the private sphere. It is argued that focusing on this kind of intersectional proletarian literature might provide a good direction for the future of modernist studies and a means for preserving and channelling the energy and radical analyses which have given the New Modernist Studies momentum over the last fifteen years or so into a wider-ranging, democratic and more global public engagement with everyday culture. It is argued that the possible futures imagined by the modernist-proletarian texts considered in this book far exceed the capacity of state infrastructure and mainstream political imagination. The conclusion also calls for a reinterpretation of literary history to focus on subjectivity, intersubjectivity and desire in relation to everyday life, which would have real-world consequences through its relevance to an intersectional approach to politics.

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (107) ◽  
pp. 52-73
Author(s):  
Susanne Stoltz ◽  
Anders Tønnesen

The Poetics of Terror: The Manifestoes of the RAF:This paper points to a ‘forgotten’ literary history of the Red Army Fraction (RAF) in order to contest a common misconception. The RAF is often perceived solely as a political phenomenon and its justification of terrorism as a political discourse. Thereby many scholars bluntly fail to pinpoint the attractiveness of the left-wing terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s. The paper argues that the writings of the first generation of the RAF also convey a ‘poetics’ of terrorism. It points to a somewhat overlooked strategy of justification in the writings, which can be formulated as follows: Both the act of terrorism and the utterance of its defence are justified as aesthetic experiences. Furthermore, this was constructed under heavy influence from groups of avant-garde artists in the tradition of the Situationist International (SI). The paper analyses the strategy of justification found in the first few RAF-statements. Beneath the political jargon of left-wing radicalism and the »credo of immediate action«, the paper locates another strategy of justification that carries the sign of avant-garde thought. According to the manifestoes of the RAF, the aesthetic experience of a terrorist act could liberate the spectator. The study concludes that the writings of RAF unveil a ‘poetics’ of terrorism. The act of terrorism is a radical transgression of reality. Hence, the terrorist act destroys the ‘mechanical’ system of cognitive oppression because it shows the possibility of another world. That is why the RAF views terror as a model of spiritual liberation. In addition to this the statements communicate a parallel concept to the ‘poetics’ of the terror act. The RAF constructed a concept of revolutionary language, ‘the armed propaganda’, which claimed to break down the barriers of ‘domination’ in the consciousness of the recipient. In doing so the statements perform what they preach; they are themselves acts of terror. The RAF’s concept of terrorism comprises both word and deed. The writings are acts and the acts are utterances. Accordingly, RAF’s ‘poetics’ of terrorism can be described as the transgression of reality in the word or deed of terror that leads to spiritual liberation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (5) ◽  
pp. 1108-1123
Author(s):  
Lucile Dumont

This article demonstrates how social strategies deployed at the margins of French academic space to legitimize theoretical approaches to literary texts (semiology, semantics, structural analysis of narratives) in the 1960s and 1970s strongly relied on the interventions of their promoters beyond the academy. It specifically examines two strategies privileged by promoters of literary theory which allowed some of them to bypass several requirements for academic careers in taking advantage of the transformations of higher education, of the absence of stable and strong disciplinary frames, and of their own integration into the intellectual and literary fields. First, either through the alliance with literary avant-gardes or by the temporary constitution as one, the collective strategy of the literary avant-garde became a way to engage both politically and aesthetically. Second, the investment of transnational networks and internationalization allowed the critics and theorists to get around the national path to symbolic and academic consecration, and to reframe the modalities of their public engagement. Ultimately, this article offers an understanding of how, for aspirant or marginalized academics, interventions beyond the perimeter of the academic space have, at a certain point in French history, helped their acquisition of academic legitimacy.


Author(s):  
Webb Keane

This chapter discusses the idea of ethical history, looking at situations in which hitherto taken-for-granted aspects of everyday life came to be the focus of attention, such as feminist consciousness-raising in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the American feminist movement is the invention and promulgation of the technique of consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising is interesting for several reasons: it took very seriously the effects of problematizing the habits of everyday life, it succeeded in changing the descriptions and evaluations of actions and persons that were available for many Americans, and it ultimately foundered, in part, on an unresolved tension between subjective experience and objective social analysis. The chapter then argues that processes like this play an important role in the historical transformations of ethical and moral worlds.


Author(s):  
Anneka Lenssen

Louay Kayyali was one of the leading painters of the emergent Syrian art scene during the 1960s and 1970s. His most admired works depict individual laborers as "types," illustrating the tragic humanism of everyday life. Kayyali began his career in Aleppo, exhibiting academic portraits and still life paintings locally. In 1956, he won a fellowship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he became interested in fresco and other traditional techniques. After completing his studies in 1961, Kayyali settled in Damascus and joined the faculty at the new College of Fine Arts. For a period of five years, he exhibited his portrait types, flowers, and architectural landscapes—rendered in simple lines and color stains on pressed chipboard—regularly, to acclaim from collectors. From 1965 onward, Kayyali began to struggle with mental illness. In this later period, he turned to more overtly politicized themes, including a series of dramatic charcoal drawings of citizens under siege, which was sponsored by the Syrian government as a touring exhibition in support of the Arab liberation cause. He also continued to produce paintings of fishermen, street sellers, and mothers as representations of the social themes then preoccupying him.


2021 ◽  
pp. 128-161
Author(s):  
Laura Carter

The second part of this book, of which this chapter is part, is about the ‘history of everyday life’ in practice. This chapter examines the ‘history of everyday life’ in local community settings. It argues that folk museums were the museological vehicles of popular social history in mid-twentieth-century Britain. The British folk museum movement is traced via museum case studies in Luton, Cambridge, York, and the Highlands. Collecting practices, curation, visitors, and the educational programmes within each museum are analysed. The practices of several curator-collectors of everyday life, notably Enid Porter and Isabel Grant, are explored in depth. The chapter argues that folk history, so often thought of as a talisman of the extreme right, was recast at a community level into a feminized and conservative ‘history of everyday life’ for ordinary people. The final part of the chapter connects the ‘history of everyday life’ to debates about the emergence of commercial and industrial heritage in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.


2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 539-556
Author(s):  
Key MacFarlane

Over the last 10 years there has been considerable growth in the range of geographical work on sound, particularly on how sound shapes everyday life. One area that is beginning to receive attention is how noise is formalized in law and policy. This paper contributes to that literature by developing a geographic theory of modern noise regulation. Two policies are examined: the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Noise Control Act of 1972 and Seattle’s Noise Ordinance of 1977. Combining Foucauldian and Marxian frameworks, I argue that these documents trace a biopolitics of “sensible citizenship” that emerges within, as a means of managing, a changing regime of capitalist accumulation, as global attention began to shift from production to the “noisy sphere” of exchange in the 1960s and 1970s. Noise, I claim here, has come to physically embody capitalism’s inner contradictions—between needing to promote commercial activities and needing to control the noisy externalities those activities create. Such an analysis addresses recent calls for a more historically and materially grounded approach to the study of sound in human geography, while also adding a critical legal perspective to recent debates on the relations between citizenship, the body, and governance.


Slavic Review ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-356
Author(s):  
Larry Wolff

This essay analyzes Adam Zagajewski’s recent memoir W cudzym pigknie (Another beauty), in which he reflects particularly on the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when he was a student and young poet in Kraków. The essay addresses Zagajewski’s perspective on the city of Kraków, his reflections on communism in Wladyslaw Gomulka’s Poland, his sense of the relations between older and younger Polish generations, and his efforts to negotiate a personal balance between poetry and politics. Zagajewski’s memoir is discussed in the context of his own poetry, of Polish intellectual life, and of Kraków’s cultural history from the 1890s to the 1980s. Intellectual points of reference and comparison range from Tadeusz “Boy“ Żeleński and Stanisław Wyspiański in fin-de-siècle Kraków, to Witold Gombrowicz, Czesław Miłosz, and Adam Michnik in later twentieth-century Polish letters and politics. The essay, finally, attempts to assess the significance and implications of communism for Polish poetry, literature, and intellectual life.


2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 414-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Gewirtz

Over the past 40 years a whole cluster of discourses centred on the ideas of the learning society and lifelong learning has emerged. These discourses have moved from being theoretical and aspirational to become increasingly embedded in international and national policies and professional practices. This article raises some concerns about what happens when the aspirational discourses which abounded in the 1960s and 1970s are translated into real-world practice and policies. The article begins with a brief review of the range of discourses bound up in the theory and practice of the learning society, and some of the sociological explanations for the proliferation of learning society and lifelong learning discourses. It then goes on to ask some questions about the potential risks of specific manifestations of these totalising approaches to education, focusing in particular on threats to ‘learning-rich’ and ‘learning-free’ spaces. In the spirit of lifelong learning, the author develops her arguments by drawing on some reflections on her own experiences as a worker (specifically as a supervisor of doctoral students) and as a parent of young children.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Flanagan

This article traces Ken Russell's explorations of war and wartime experience over the course of his career. In particular, it argues that Russell's scattered attempts at coming to terms with war, the rise of fascism and memorialisation are best understood in terms of a combination of Russell's own tastes and personal style, wider stylistic and thematic trends in Euro-American cinema during the 1960s and 1970s, and discourses of collective national experience. In addition to identifying Russell's recurrent techniques, this article focuses on how the residual impacts of the First and Second World Wars appear in his favoured genres: literary adaptations and composer biopics. Although the article looks for patterns and similarities in Russell's war output, it differentiates between his First and Second World War films by indicating how he engages with, and temporarily inhabits, the stylistic regime of the enemy within the latter group.


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