scholarly journals Wretched Subjectivity

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 33-53
Author(s):  
Milen Jissov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
Czeslaw Milosz

This article rethinks critically a landmark work of the twentieth century—The Captive Mind, by Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. Published in 1953, the book sought to understand human subjectivity, or, as it put it, “how the human mind functions,” in Cold-War Eastern Europe. I argue that, while probing what Western intellectuals of that time saw as the historical novelty of totalitarianism, Miłosz formulates an analysis that is rather retro. He represents Eastern Europe in terms of colonialism and imperialism—as a colonized realm and a colonized mind. What is more, he casts his representation in the terms of what Edward Said famously called “Orientalism”—producing a distorted, Orientalist work. Finally, while intimating hope for overcoming Eastern Europe’s domination, Miłosz shows that hope as illusory. 

Czeslaw Milosz: On the Imagination of Twentieth-Century Man

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39
Author(s):  
Flagg Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Czeslaw Milosz ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Surface Manifestation ◽  
Literary Circles

Czeslaw Milosz is known either as author of The Captive Mind(1953) or as the accomplished poet and Nobel laureate (1980). Little effort has been made to connect the beautiful and penetrating poet and essayist, so well known in literary circles, with the most astute analyst of the seduction of intellectuals by Communism, so essential for political scientists and historians. It is argued here that there is a remarkable unity of purpose and continuity of themes across the very distinct works in Milosz's corpus. The subject matter of intellectuals and Communism would seem, at first glance, to be an important yet nonetheless isolated matter, central only from the standpoint of understanding postwar Eastern Europe. Milosz reveals that the topic of eastern intellectuals and Communism is a surface manifestation of larger and deeper philosophical problems, including modern science and its effect on the human imagination, and the gulf between the poet and his audience.

‘Eastern Europe’ in the English-language press in the twentieth century

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-250
Author(s):  
Piotr Twardzisz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
English Language ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
General Opinion

Abstract The general opinion among scholars is that Eastern Europe is primarily a Cold-War term. Although the connection between Eastern Europe and the Cold War cannot be denied, it must be kept in mind that the term was well known and used much earlier. This article provides a synthetic review and discussion of how the phrase (name, term, concept) Eastern Europe was used in western English-language press in a better part of the twentieth century, from around 1900 to 1988. Drawing on the results of a search of a journalistic database, this study examines how the term Eastern Europe combines with other lexical units in press texts in this time period. The architecture of its use is revealed through a detailed analysis of collocations which the key term prefers in journalistic texts. In its numerous uses, the term triggers the sense of otherness in its different incarnations throughout the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Remembering Poland: The Ethics of Cultural Histories

2002 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
William Gorski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
National Identities ◽  
World War ◽  
Personal Memory ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Future ◽  
Lost In Translation

Art Spiegelman's Maus, Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation and Exit into History are recent American texts that draw upon cultural histories of Poland to launch their narratives. Each text confronts and reconstructs fragments of twentieth-century Poland at the interactive sites of collective culture and personal memory. By focusing on the contested relationship between Poles and Jews before, during, and after World War II, these texts dredge up the ghosts of centuries-long ethnic animosities. In the post-Cold War era, wherein Eastern Europe struggles to redefine itself, such texts have a formative influence in re-mapping the future of national identities.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

Making Ballet 3

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Movement Analysis ◽  
Story Line ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Ballet History ◽  
Choreographic Analysis

Making Ballet 3 provides a choreographic analysis of the ballet Western Symphony, produced by the New York City Ballet in 1954 with choreography by George Balanchine, music by Hershy Kay, scenery by John Boyt, and costumes by Karinska. It brings to light the multitude of intertextual allusions that occur throughout the ballet, playfully intermingling references of “America” with an entire lineage of nineteenth-century European classicism. Although Western Symphony has no story line, it crafts a deliberate message: a long, transatlantic genealogy of Western classicism that, in the twentieth century, has come to rest in America. Drawing on archival sources and movement analysis, this interchapter argues that Western Symphony incorporates parody to present a revisionist ballet history in which the high cultural lineages of Europe and America are intimately entwined. Ultimately, this message reinforced the Atlanticist politics of private and state anticommunist groups in the cultural Cold War, the historical setting for its production and performance.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

Voltaire, Philosopher of Human Progress

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 356-364
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Topazio
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Single Addition ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Popular Consent ◽  
Positive Knowledge ◽  
Separate Discipline

With the emergence of philosophy in the nineteenth century as a separate discipline which stressed primarily questions insoluble by empirical or formal methods, Voltaire's reputation as a philosopher has gone into gradual eclipse. It has become unfashionable and degrading for philosophers to concern themselves with the practical aspects of philosophical enquiry. In eighteenth-century France, on the other hand, the identification of philosophy with science, which by twentieth-century standards had vitiated philosophical thought, produced the “philosophes” or natural philosophers who were on the whole more interested in human progress than in the progress of the human mind. And Voltaire was by popular consent the leader of this “philosophe” group, the one who had unquestionably contributed the most in the struggle to make man a happier and freer member of society. Yet, ironically, despite a lifelong effort in behalf of humanity, Voltaire's reputation as a destructive thinker has steadily grown even as the critics have pejoratively classified him as a “practical” rather than a “real” philosopher. Typical of this criticism of Voltaire is Macaulay's statement: “Voltaire could not build: he could only pull down: he was the very Vitruvius of ruin. He has bequeathed to us not a single doctrine to be called by his name, not a single addition to the stock of our positive knowledge.”

1968. The “Prague Spring”: Fifty Years Later. Historical Essays

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
General Reader ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Prague Spring ◽  
The Military

This book is devoted to a symbolic event that defined the life and values of several generations. Half a century ago, Czech communists tried to give a new impetus to their country’s system of government by combining socialist values with a rational market economy and the mechanisms of a developed democracy. This effort failed, and the state was occupied by the military. This book is the result of joint efforts by Russian, Czech, and Romanian historians, archivists, and cultural and literary scholars, who—exploring new documents and materials—have reinterpreted these events and their lessons from a present-day perspective. Objectively, the “Prague Spring” is from a bygone era, but it is still a milestone, and many of the problems encountered during the Prague Spring are still relevant today. The authors hope that they have contributed to the historiography of the now-distant events of 1968 and that their contributions will help in analysing the experiences of the past in order to be prepared for the events of the future. This book is aimed at specialists in the history and culture of Central and Eastern Europe, students of higher educational institutions, and the general reader interested in twentieth-century history.

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