scholarly journals “PLACES OF REMEMBRANCE” IN “A GOD IN RUINS” NOVEL BY KATE ATKINSON

Astraea ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-25

The study analyses Kate Atkinson’s novel “A God in Ruins” (2015) in terms of the multidisciplinary field of memory studies. Among the tasks that were set by the author of the study there are: 1) tracking the correlation of individual memory and collective memory; 2) outlining the traumatic experience of the Todd family, namely the “wounds of time” caused to the family by World War II; 3) comprehending the moments of “crystallization” of collective memory, its “thickening” in “places of remembrance”; 4) outlining the boundaries of the cultural archive reproduced in the novel. The study discusses the main message of the novel, which is focused on the theme of World War II, on its understanding and reflection in the collective memory of the British people. Through the image of the main character Teddy Todd, a military pilot, specially created by the author to describe war events, the reader can feel and experience the burden of air battles. Teddy Todd is a survivor who survived to preserve the memory of his fallen comrades, to testify war crimes and to raise a new generation of British people (post-war generation of children and grandchildren). The character realises that a peaceful life is not the final happy-end, because in addition to the need to arrange his own existence, it is necessary to heal the “wounds of time”, as well as to fulfil the duty of remembrance towards the dead men. These surviving memories should be embodied in “places of remembrance” (monuments, museums, military burials, works of art, etc.). The study outlines a conditional cultural archive that correlates with the text of Kate Atkinson’s novel. This arrangement of memorable dates, memories, and events can be tentatively described in the form of a scheme (the scheme is attached hereto), where the central place is occupied by the most catastrophic experience of people during the World War II. Other “places of remembrance” in connection with the war may be related to its causes or consequences. The main points of the conditional archive: World War I, coinciding with the birth of Teddy Todd; interwar period, which includes the childhood and adolescence of the character; World War II, which involves Teddy Todd in the Battle for Britain and the bombing of Germany; postwar reconstruction of Britain; pacifist movements and youth subcultures in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s that shaped Viola Todd’s worldview; The Queen’s Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee, coinciding with the death of Teddy Todd. The conditional archive of the novel, and the “places of remembrance” recreated in it correlate with the collective memory of people in Britain, thus encouraging the understanding of the traumatic experience caused by the World War II.

2004 ◽  
Vol 132 (11-12) ◽  
pp. 469-473
Author(s):  
Zelimir Mikic ◽  
Aleksandar Lesic

The development of orthopedic surgery in Novi Sad and Voivodina is related to the name of Dr. Katherine MacPhail, a Scottish physician, who came to Serbia during the World War I, where she worked with her mission in Belgrade and Kragujevac. After the war, she remained in Serbia and, in 1921, founded the first children's, co-called English-Serbian Hospital; then, in 1934, established English-Yugoslav Children's Hospital for Treatment of Osteoarticular Tuberculosis in Sremska Kamenica, which was open until 1941. After the end of World War II, as early as in 1947, Dr. MacPhail returned to Sremska Kamenica, where she reactivated the hospital. After the nationalization of the hospital, she left for Scotland, but the hospital kept working, first under the supervision of the Belgrade Clinic for Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology, and then as a ward of the Clinic for Orthopedic Surgery and Traumatology of the Novi Sad School of Medicine, until 1992, when it was closed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 324
Author(s):  
Zheming Zhang

<p>With the continuous development and evolution of the United States, especially the economic center shift after World War II, the United States become the economic hegemon instead of the UK and thus it seized the economic initiative of the world. After the World War I, the European countries gradually withdraw from the gold standard. In order to stabilize the world economy development and the international economic order, the United States prepared to build the economic system related with its own interests so as to force the UK to return to the gold standard. The game between the United States and the UK shows the significance of economic initiative. Among them, the outcome of the two countries in the fight of the financial system also demonstrates a significant change in the world economic system.</p>


Author(s):  
Alexander Naumov

This article reviews the role of Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 in escalation of crisis trends of the Versailles system. Leaning on the British Russian archival documents, which recently became available for the researchers, the author analyzes the reasons and consequences of conclusion of this agreement between the key European democratic power and Nazi Reich. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the moods within the political elite of the United Kingdom. It is proven that the agreement became a significant milestone in escalation of crisis trends in the Versailles model of international relations. It played a substantial role in establishment of the British appeasement policy with regards to revanchist powers in the interbellum; policy that objectively led to disintegration of the created in 1919 systemic mechanism, and thus, the beginning of the World War II. The novelty of this work is substantiated by articulation of the problem. This article is first within the Russian and foreign historiography to analyze execution of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement based on the previously unavailable archival materials. The conclusion is made that this agreement played a crucial role in the process of disintegration of interbellum system of international relations. Having officially sanctioned the violation of the articles of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 by Germany, Great Britain psychologically reconciled to the potential revenge of Germany, which found reflection in the infamous appeasement policy. This launched the mechanism for disruption of status quo that was established after the World War I in Europe. This resulted in collapse of the architecture of international security in the key region of the world, rapid deterioration of relations between the countries, and a new world conflict.


Author(s):  
Roger D. Markwick

World War II has never ended for the citizens of the former Soviet Union. Nearly 27 million Soviet citizens died in the course of what Joseph Stalin declared to be the Great Patriotic War, half of the total 55 million victims of the world war. The enduring personal trauma and grief that engulfed those who survived, despite the Red Army's victory over fascism, was not matched by Stalin's state of mind, which preferred to forget the war. Not until the ousting of Nikita S. Khrushchev in October 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev was official memory of the war really resurrected. This article elaborates a thesis about the place of World War II in Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory by illuminating the sources of the myth of the Great Patriotic War and the mechanisms by which it has been sustained and even amplified. It discusses perestroika, patriotism without communism, the fate of the wartime Young Communist heroine Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the battle for Victory Day, the return of ‘trophy’ art, the Hill of Prostrations, and Sovietism without socialism.


2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dusanka Dobanovacki ◽  
Milan Breberina ◽  
Bozica Vujosevic ◽  
Marija Pecanac ◽  
Nenad Zakula ◽  
...  

Following the shift in therapy of tuberculosis in the mid-19th century, by the beginning of the 20th century numerous tuberculosis sanatoria were established in Western Europe. Being an institutional novelty in the medical practice, sanatoria spread within the first 20 years of the 20th century to Central and Eastern Europe, including the southern region of the Panonian plain, the present-day Province of Vojvodina in Serbia north of the rivers Sava and Danube. The health policy and regulations of the newly built state - the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians/Yugoslavia, provided a rather liberal framework for introducing the concept of sanatorium. Soon after the World War I there were 14 sanatoria in this region, and the period of their expansion was between 1920 and 1939 when at least 27 sanatoria were founded, more than half of the total number of 46 sanatoria in the whole state in that period. However, only two of these were for pulmonary diseases. One of them was privately owned the open public sanatorium the English-Yugoslav Hospital for Paediatric Osteo-Articular Tuberculosis in Sremska Kamenica, and the other was state-run (at Iriski venac, on the Fruska Gora mountain, as a unit of the Department for Lung Disease of the Main Regional Hospital). All the others were actually small private specialized hospitals in 6 towns (Novi Sad, Subotica, Sombor, Vrbas, Vrsac, Pancevo,) providing medical treatment of well-off, mostly gynaecological and surgical patients. The majority of sanatoria founded in the period 1920-1939 were in or close to the city of Novi Sad, the administrative headquarters of the province (the Danube Banovina at that time) with a growing population. A total of 10 sanatoria were open in the city of Novi Sad, with cumulative bed capacity varying from 60 to 130. None of these worked in newly built buildings, but in private houses adapted for medical purpose in accordance with legal requirements. The decline of sanatoria in Vojvodina began with the very outbreak of the World War II and they never regained their social role. Soon after the Hungarian fascist occupation the majority of owners/ founders were terrorized and forced to close their sanatoria, some of them to leave country and some were even killed or deported to concentration camps.


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toshio Miyake

Axis Powers Hetalia (2006–present), a Japanese gag comic and animation series, depicts relations between nations personified as cute boys against a background of World War I and World War II. The stereotypical rendering of national characteristics as well as the reduction of historically charged issues into amusing quarrels between nice-looking but incompetent boys was immensely popular, especially among female audiences in Japan and Asia, and among Euro-American manga, anime, and cosplay fans, but it also met with vehement criticism. Netizens from South Korea, for example, considered the Korean character insulting and in early 2009 mounted a protest campaign that was discussed in the Korean national assembly. Hetalia's controversial success relies to a great extent on the inventive conflation of male-oriented otaku fantasies about nations, weapons, and concepts represented as cute little girls, and of female-oriented yaoi parodies of male-male intimacy between powerful "white" characters and more passive Japanese ones. This investigation of the original Hetalia by male author Hidekaz Himaruya (b. 1985) and its many adaptations in female-oriented dōjinshi (fanzine) texts and conventions (between 2009 and 2011, Hetalia was by far the most adapted work) refers to notions of interrelationality, intersectionality, and positionality in order to address hegemonic representations of "the West," the orientalized "Rest" of the world, and "Japan" in the cross-gendered and sexually parodied mediascape of Japanese transnational subcultures.


Author(s):  
Mogami Toshiki

This chapter examines international law in Japan. It begins by looking at Japan’s embroilment with international law in the course of its efforts to revise the unequal treaties which had been concluded with about a dozen Occidental states while Japan was categorized as one of the ‘barbarian’ states in the world. After gradually overcoming this unequal status, it became a late-coming big power around the end of World War I. This big power then plunged into World War II, with the result that it was then branded an aggressor state and was penalized in an international tribunal. After that defeat, it turned into both a serious complier of new—that is, post-World War II—international law and a state deeply obedient to the United States. These factors have brought about complex international law behaviour as well as serious constraints in Japan’s choice of international law action.


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