scholarly journals American 'committed' drama in Slovene theatres

1994 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 57-65
Author(s):  
Igor Maver

The purpose of this study is essentially to demonstrate that the delayed stagings of American 'committed' plays, written in the thirties and produced in Slovene theatres immediately after World War Two in the late forties and fifties, were often miscontextualized and partly misinterpreted by the literary critics of the period. This was only in the early post-war years largely due to the need to serve the then ruling ideology and to comply with the criteria of Marxist aesthetisc, especially that of a radical social criticism. However, the later stagings particularly of Arthur Miller's and also Tennessee Williams's plays, did not see the same phenomenon, for it was they that assured the popularity of the American post-war drama on Slovene stages and, even more importantly, helped Slovene theatre to come off age in the sixties.

1994 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 57-65
Author(s):  
Igor Maver

The purpose of this study is essentially to demonstrate that the delayed stagings of American 'committed' plays, written in the thirties and produced in Slovene theatres immediately after World War Two in the late forties and fifties, were often miscontextualized and partly misinterpreted by the literary critics of the period. This was only in the early post-war years largely due to the need to serve the then ruling ideology and to comply with the criteria of Marxist aesthetisc, especially that of a radical social criticism. However, the later stagings particularly of Arthur Miller's and also Tennessee Williams's plays, did not see the same phenomenon, for it was they that assured the popularity of the American post-war drama on Slovene stages and, even more importantly, helped Slovene theatre to come off age in the sixties.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. WLS144-WLS168
Author(s):  
Sylvie Pomiès-Maréchal

Seventy-five years have elapsed since the end of World War Two. Yet, the memory of the conflict still occupies a central place in British and French collective consciousness. Fiction and film representations of the war act as powerful ‘vectors of memory’, to borrow an expression from French historian Henry Rousso, and as such, they have deeply contributed to shaping popular and cultural memories of the war. This article investigates a specific aspect of World War Two representations, namely the cinematic representations of the female agents from the SOE F section, focusing on the ‘generic’ or archetypal figure of the female SOE agent as generated by the post-war cultural industry. After a brief contextualisation focusing on Churchill’s clandestine organisation, the article will analyse the contribution of Odette (Herbert Wilcox, 1950) and Carve Her Name with Pride (Lewis Gilbert, 1958) to the construction of a World War Two ‘mythology’. It will then address more recent films, concentrating on Charlotte Gray (Gillian Armstrong, 2001) and Female Agents (Jean-Paul Salomé, 2008). How did the fictional construction of the female spy come to influence the social and cultural perception of the SOE agent? Are the tropes developed in such post-war films as Odette or Carve Her Name with Pride still current or have they evolved with time? The analysis of these fictional representations will reveal the permanence or evolution of certain representational patterns and also allow us to approach different perspectives on the cultural representation of World War Two on both sides of the Channel.


Author(s):  
Michael Guarneri

The chapter zooms in on the cultural instrumentality of the vampire metaphor in Italy by studying Italian-made vampire movies as struggles for gender definition and domination that reflect the zeitgeist of post-war Italy, when a perceived decline in masculine authority due to the vicissitudes of World War Two, the hardships of reconstruction and the post-1958 neocapitalist consumerism went hand in hand with women’s ever-increasing challenges to traditional gender roles. The chapter ventures into the so-far uncharted territory of the Italian male vampires that populate horror parodies, straightforward horrors and horror-tinged adventures. It investigates how, within a masculinity-in-crisis framework, Italian makeshift Draculas act as champions of traditional virility, irresistible Latin lovers and tyrannical patres familias seeking to reassure Italian men of their gender leadership.


Author(s):  
Gill Plain

Gill Plain interrogates the trend towards domestic heteronormativity post World War Two in the light of the complex and profound disorientation of women’s post-war lives. She identifies a pervasive sense of personal, social and cultural loss, following the ‘smothering’ of wartime expectations, that often extended beyond the heterosexual matrix. Where ‘male’ plots reprogrammed masculine identity through purposeful activity beyond the home, the absence of plot in women’s fiction signals a lack of interest in the post-war rebuilding of the normative feminine psyche. The ‘resistant plotting’ of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s post-war trilogy, and its emphasis on the urgency of maternity, exhibits a turn toward the gothic. Male damage is offset by female guilt and the onset of a second childhood in her male characters, leading to a narrative of remasculinization. The largely absent figure of the child in post war narratives suggests a generation in mourning for its abruptly foreclosed childhood.


Author(s):  
Michael Guarneri

The chapter zooms in on the cultural instrumentality of the vampire metaphor in Italy by studying Italian-made vampire movies as struggles for gender definition and domination that reflect the zeitgeist of post-war Italy, when a perceived decline in masculine authority due to the vicissitudes of World War Two, the hardships of reconstruction and the post-1958 neocapitalist consumerism went hand in hand with women’s ever-increasing challenges to traditional gender roles. The chapter argues that the female vampires of Italian horror are not simplistically villainous, power-hungry sexual predators that misogynistic-reactionary narratives put to death as a punishment for attempting to subvert the patriarchal status quo. They also are empathy-inducing characters caught between rebellion and hyper-identification with traditional values: victims returning from the grave to seek revenge against their male oppressors, and tragic lovers dreaming of a monogamous heterosexual relationship that looks strangely similar to marriage.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 379-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Brown

Abstract In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Thomas Mann and Georg Lukács both sought to come to terms with the multifaceted role of philosophy in the catastrophe of fascism. The figure of Nietzsche is (re-)examined in Mann’s Nietzsches Philosophie im Lichte unserer Erfahrung (1947) and Lukács’ Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (1954). It is generally recognised that Mann’s lecture helped to shape the post-war Nietzsche reception in the West as much as Lukács’ treatise did in the East. In contrast, I argue that Mann’s and Lukács’s contributions have more in common than is generally acknowledged and, given Mann’s esteem in the field of Nietzsche studies, that these similarities call into question the general repudiation of Lukács’ Nietzsche-Bild. After sketching the phenomenon of partisanship in the reception of Nietzsche through the lens of Kant’s notion of a ‘Kampfplatz’, some of the key topoi of Lukács’ work are identified, highlighting the aforementioned similarities in content and methodology as well as the contrasts with Western academic approaches.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rogério Arthmar ◽  
Michael McLure

This study reflects on Arthur Cecil Pigou’s role in public debate during the initial phase of the First World War over whether Britain should negotiate a peace treaty with Germany. Its main goal is to provide evidence that the Cambridge Professor framed his approach to this highly controversial issue from theoretical propositions on trade, industrial peace and welfare which he had developed in previous works. After reviewing his contributions on these subjects, Pigou’s letter to The Nation, in early 1915, suggesting an open move by the Allies towards an honourable peace with Germany, is presented along with his more elaborate thoughts on this same theme put down in a private manuscript. The negative reactions to Pigou’s letter are then scrutinized, particularly the fierce editorial published by The Morning Post. A subsequent version of Pigou’s plea for peace, delivered in his London speech late in 1915, is detailed listing the essential conditions for a successful conclusion of the conflict. To come full circle, the paper recapitulates Pigou’s post-war considerations on diplomacy, free trade and colonialism. The concluding remarks bring together the theoretical and applied branches of Pigou’s thoughts on war and peace.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Algirdas Ažubalis

Teacher Mikas Petrauskas (1908?) was the last author having published his books of problems in arithmetic for I-III forms of primary school in Independent Lithuania before the World War Two. As books of problems by other authors of the said period, the books of problems by M. Petrauskas distinguished themselves for expressed integration of arithmetic teaching with the real life of the pupils. The books of problems were used in Lithuania during the World War Two and at schools for children of war refugees in the post-war period at West Germany. M. Petrauskas was the only author that dared to publish reviewed books of problems in post-war Soviet Lithuania. However, the said review was not natural and integration with the real life was engaged considerably in the political aspect. The attempts were ineffective: within 5 years, books of problems by M. Petrauskas were displaced from Lithuanian schools by the ones approved in Moscow and translated from Russian.


2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvin Finkel

Abstract During World War Two, all federal political parties sought to accommodate the growing demand for "welfare state" programs. Mackenzie King's Liberals successfully checked the growth of the CCF by promising a comprehensive program of cradle-to-grave security. After the 1945 election the Liberal government prepared such a program and brought it to a dominion-provincial conference whose purpose was to determine the taxation and administrative arrangements necessary for its implementation. The "conference", which became a series of mini-conferences stretched over nine months, ended without agreement. The federal government blamed recalcitrant premiers in Ontario and Quebec for the conference's failure and abandoned much of the reform program. This article argues that the federal government, in fact, wanted the conference to fail because it did not want to undertake the expenses implied in the reform proposals. After proving inflexible in dealing with provincial criticisms, it cynically and successfully manipulated events to make it appear that the provinces had killed hopes for reform. Post-war prosperity and a declining interest in reform, particularly on the part of the corporate and medical elites, contributed to the federal government's unwillingness to pursue reform vigorously.


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