Concrete Poetry/Konkrete Poesie/Poesia Concreta

Border Blurs ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 19-64
Author(s):  
Greg Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Concrete Poetry ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Modernist Architecture ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter provides an overview of the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s, which frames the development of concrete poetry in England and Scotland. Concrete poetry first emerged in West Germany and Brazil in the early-to-mid 1950s, largely through the endeavours of Eugen Gomringer and the Noigandres poetry group. The earliest concrete poetry, defined in this text as ‘classical concrete’, was rooted in the aesthetics of constructivism, concrete art, modernist architecture, and literary modernism, as well as an interest in simplifying and clarifying language systems which was often connected to semiotics, especially information theory. A key impulse was the desire to develop transnational systems of linguistic communication, as the basis for post-war international dialogue. By the close of the 1960s, however, a different definition of concrete poetry, more connected to Dada, Futurism, and intermedia art, had taken hold worldwide. This variant of concrete was associated with the sixties counter-culture, and with a desire to tear down existing social institutions, expressed through non-linguistic or anti-linguistic impulses. To some extent this global narrative mirrors the story of concrete poetry’s development in England and Scotland, and can be traced by assessing the work of Finlay, Morgan, Houédard and Cobbing in turn.

Border Blurs

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Reconstruction ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Concrete Poetry ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early-twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 social reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media, and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland also suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between those two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s-70s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research. It fills a gap in contemporary understandings of a significant literary and artistic genre which has been largely overlooked by literary critics. It also sheds new light on the development of British and Scottish literature during the late twentieth century, on the emergence of intermedia art, and on the development of modernism beyond its early-twentieth-century, urban Western networks.

Order and Doubt

Border Blurs ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 65-114
Author(s):  
Greg Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Concrete Poetry ◽  
International Style ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The 1960S

The Edinburgh-based poet Ian Hamilton Finlay was both the first publisher of concrete poetry and the first published concrete poet in Britain. But his interaction with the movement was relatively brief, beginning in the spring of 1962 when he discovered the international style through Edwin Morgan, and coming to an end by the late 1960s. Finlay initially seized on concrete poetry as a means of extending the dimensions of poetry beyond linear verse. He utilised concrete poetry’s capacity to combine linguistic and non-linguistic composition to establish or enrich metaphorical links between disparate objects, phenomena, and cultural contexts. This approach, indebted to classical concrete, reflected both his opposition to the restrictions of Scottish literary culture during the 1960s, and a sense of the value of aesthetic order which had ideological and biographical connotations. But his interaction with the concrete movement quickly became fraught, reflecting both the inbuilt constraints of the style and his opposition to its perceived co-option by the sixties counter-culture. Through his production of card and booklet-poems, followed by poems in glass, wood and stone, and finally, three-dimensional poems set in the landscape around his home at Little Sparta, Finlay moved gradually but decisively away from concrete practice.

German New Lefts

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-149
Author(s):  
Terence Renaud
Keyword(s):  
New Left ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
West Germany ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
German Student ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThe New Left that arose in West Germany during the 1960s mimicked the antifascist reformations of the 1930s. For grassroots campaigns, extraparliamentary opposition groups, and radical student organizations of the postwar decades, the Marxist humanist theories and revolutionary socialist splinter groups of the interwar years served as attractive models. At the same time, the Sixty-eighter generation rebelled against a political establishment now represented by that earlier generation of neoleftist pioneers, their parents. But generational conflict was just the symptom of a deeper problem in the history of the midcentury Left: a succession of radical new lefts arose out of periodic frustration at institutionalized politics. This article explores the missing link between Germany’s antifascist and antiauthoritarian new lefts: the so-called left socialists of the 1950s. In particular, Ossip K. Flechtheim’s science of futurology and Wolfgang Abendroth’s theory of antagonistic society translated antifascism’s legacies into a new paradigm of social protest. The left socialists’ support for the embattled Socialist German Student League laid the organizational and intellectual foundation for the sixties New Left. Recent studies of the “global sixties” have shown the transnational connections between new lefts across space; this article explains their continuity across time.

DEMOCRACY AS A CONTESTED CONCEPT IN POST-WAR WESTERN EUROPE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF POLITICAL DEBATES IN FRANCE, WEST GERMANY, AND ITALY

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
PEPIJN CORDUWENER
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

ABSTRACTThis article explores how political parties in France, West Germany, and Italy conceptualized democracy and challenged the conceptions of democracy of their political adversaries between the end of the 1940s and the early 1960s. It studies from a comparative perspective the different conceptions of democracy held by Christian democrat, Left-wing, and Gaullist political actors and shows how these diverged on key issues such as the economic system, foreign policy, the separation of powers, electoral systems, and the use of state institutions in the defence of democracy against anti-democratic forces. In this way, the article reveals how in the first fifteen years after the Second World War, government and opposition parties disputed each other's democratic credentials and political legitimacy, and it thereby reconsiders the claim that there existed a broad consensus on the meaning of democracy among political elites in post-war Western Europe. It is argued that these different conceptions of democracy only started to converge after they had clashed during political crises at the turn of the 1960s in all three states. This study thereby contributes to an enhanced understanding the formation of the post-war democratic order in Western Europe.

Apophasis

Border Blurs ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 159-202
Author(s):  
Greg Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Linguistic Practice ◽  
Concrete Poetry ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Tantric Ritual ◽  
Awareness Of God ◽  
The Way

For poets such as Finlay and Morgan, concrete poetry remained a fundamentally linguistic practice, with visual effects used to enhance or methodically alter a central semantic message. For the Guernsey-born, Gloucestershire-based poet Dom Sylvester Houedárd, concrete poetry came to entail a grammar of abstract visual forms, constructed from letters and diacritical marks, in which semantic meaning was largely subsumed. This quality is most virtuosically expressed in the so-called ‘typestracts’ which he created on his Olivetti typewriter. Houédard’s wordless poetics partly exemplifies the re-conceptualisation of concrete poetry as an intermedia, neo-dada artform across the 1950s-70s, which often manifested itself through a movement away from language, and in attachments to the sixties counter-culture. But the unique distinction of Houédard’s work is its attempt to express a wordless or apophatic awareness of God, in which sense his concrete poetry is connected to his vocation as a Benedictine monk, priest, and theologian. This chapter traces the development of these entwined impulses, moving from his beat-influenced verse of the 1940s-50s to his ‘kinetic’ concrete poetry of the mid-1960s, and finally to the typestracts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Influences touched on along the way include Wittgenstein, auto-destructive art, and Tantric ritual.

Making Rollerball

Rollerball ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 37-70
Author(s):  
Andrew Nette
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Modernist Architecture ◽  
Violent Action ◽  
Andre Previn ◽  
Post War

This chapter examines the making of Rollerball (1975). It starts with an overview of the cast and crew and the filming locations, principally Munich, West Germany, where Norman Jewison shot the film's game sequences and also utilised other aspects of the city's modernist architecture. For the making of Rollerball, Jewison brought together three of the leading lights of British post-war cinema — production designer John Box, Douglas Slocombe as director of photography, and Julie Harris as costume designer. Acclaimed European conductor André Previn scored the soundtrack, largely comprised of classical music. The chapter then presents a detailed scene-by-scene breakdown of the film, considering the interplay of their various contributions to Rollerball and how this influenced the final look and feel of the film, including how it blended the film's signature violent action with an examination of more sophisticated dystopian social themes.

scholarly journals The 1960s – long hair, flowers and morality mash: ethical appraisal of the clash that helped shape today’s Western society

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
H. J.G. Zandman
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Image Of God

The 1960s will be remembered as a major clash that helped shape today’s Western society. Young people were breaking out of the moulds that had been cast by their parents’ post-war era. The conflict brought about significant social change all over Western society. Western man searched frantically for a new world, willing to risk the hardship of revolution.  In a world full of confusing and conflicting approaches in terms of how to view man, the Bible has the clear answer: man is created in the image of God, and is, in this capacity, God’s vice- regent and image-bearer. However, the Christian church is by- and-large remarkably indecisive as the social conscience of Western society.   The main thrust of the sixties was anti-status quo, anti-esta- blishment, anti-materialist. In the process of man’s self-deter- mination on either side of the conflict, great erosion of man’s greatest gift occurred: ethical distinction. The spiritual vacuum created by anti-establishment forces led to confusion and self- destruction.

scholarly journals Don’t Smoke, Take Drink in Moderation, Do Walk a Lot and Do Not Gorge Yourself beyond Your Satiation: Health Education by Television in West Germany from the 1960s to the 1980s

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (18) ◽  
pp. 112
Author(s):  
Susanne Vollberg
Keyword(s):  
Health Education ◽  
Lifestyle Changes ◽  
West Germany ◽  
German Population ◽  
The West ◽  
Health Initiatives ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Public Health Initiatives

This article discusses health education through television in West Germany, with a focus on nutrition and physical activity. Public health initiatives on television contributed to the fitness boom of the late 1960s and 1970s that aimed to counterbalance post-war lifestyle changes within the West German population. The article uses individual TV programme formats and campaigns as examples to show that the 1970s marked the beginning of behaviour-oriented health education in West Germany. The ZDF health telemagazine Gesundheitsmagazin Praxis gave advice, for example on proper food and conveyed how the audience was increasingly requested to actively participate, in order to encourage health-conscious behaviour.

scholarly journals Brainwashing the cybernetic spectator: The Ipcress File, 1960s cinematic spectacle and the sciences of mind

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcia Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Multimedia Design ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
Modernist Architecture ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
The 1960S

This article argues that the mid-1960s saw a dramatic shift in how ‘brainwashing’ was popularly imagined, reflecting Anglo-American developments in the sciences of mind as well as shifts in mass media culture. The 1965 British film The Ipcress File (dir. Sidney J. Furie, starr. Michael Caine) provides a rich case for exploring these interconnections between mind control, mind science and media, as it exemplifies the era’s innovations for depicting ‘brainwashing’ on screen: the film’s protagonist is subjected to flashing lights and electronic music, pulsating to the ‘rhythm of brainwaves’. This article describes the making of The Ipcress File’s brainwashing sequence and shows how its quest for cinematic spectacle drew on developments in cybernetic science, multimedia design and modernist architecture (developments that were also influencing the 1960s psychedelic counter-culture). I argue that often interposed between the disparate endeavours of 1960s mind control, psychological science and media was a vision of the human mind as a ‘cybernetic spectator’: a subject who scrutinizes how media and other demands on her sensory perception can affect consciousness, and seeks to consciously participate in this mental conditioning and guide its effects.

scholarly journals Approaches to the study of the phenomenon of counterculture: the attempt of typology

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 52-61
Author(s):  
O. І. Шафраньош
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Balanced Approach ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The 1960S

In the article the author analyzes the directions of studying the phenomenon of counterculture in Western science. An attempt is also made to typologize these scientific approaches. The term is first encountered in the work of Talcott Parsons «Social System» in 1951. The term is used in the context of a discussion on the ideology of subculture movements and deviant groups. His term sounds like «counter-culture». In a somewhat modified writing, with an expanded description of the term, it is used by American sociologist J. Milton Jinger in 1960. His term «contraculture» in English first encountered in 1960. The term gained its scientific and public popularity in 1969 after Theodore Roszak`s publication “The Making of a Counter Culture”. He used this term to describe countercultural, subcultural movements in the United States of the 1960s, including the hippies, the «New Left». The term also was related to their critical program, as well as to characterizing an alternative society, whose creation was propagated, and partly carried out by the representatives of the movements of the sixties. This approach characterizes counterculture in a narrow sense. In the broad sense, it does not connected to a concrete time period and defines a set of ideas, values, world outlook, which oppose the official basic culture. After investigating the views of scholars on counterculture, since the 1970s the author identifies three different directions, divided by the criterion of relation to counterculture. Among them are apologetic, critical and balanced approaches. To the apologetic approach belongs the work of researchers, which is characterized by a clearly positive attitude to counterculture, social and political aspects of its activities. Often there are some critical remarks but they do not change the general picture of the author’s commitment to the phenomenon. Critical approach include researchers who consider counterculture as a negative social phenomenon and practice. The most radical representatives include Daniel Bell, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter and others. Balanced approach combines the work of many researchers, which combines efforts to investigate counterculture as an objective phenomenon, while taking into account its weaknesses and strengths. At the same time, the authors recognize the importance of existence of the phenomenon, its influence on socio-cultural and political processes. Criticism relates to radical cultural practices, political extremism and excessive interest in psychedelics among representatives of counterculture. The approaches of researchers to this direction vary, from the «pioneer» of research of the phenomenon J. Milton Jinger, and to the researchers who tried to conduct research directly inside of the countercultural movement, in particular Kenneth Keniston, and others.

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