scholarly journals Post-Aural Story-Telling and the Iranian Flaneurs: A Benjaminian Reading of Sina Dadkhah’s Yousef Abad, Street 33

Author(s):  
Bakhtiar Sadjadi ◽  
Bahareh Nilfrushan

The city has fascinated the street wanderer as the contemplation of modern life. Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘flâneur,’ originally borrowed from Charles Baudelaire, could be taken as the true legacy of such fascination. There is always a sense of nostalgia being revealed through the flânerie of the city stroller passing through the metropolis, its shopping centers, and boulevards nourishing the mind of the bohemic storyteller with tales of post-aural experience and memory. Adapting Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘flânerie’ in the streets of Paris to those of Tehran, the present paper attempts to explore Sina Dadkhah’s Yousef Abad, Street 33 in order to demonstrate the post-aural stories of the flaneurs in an Iranian milieu. This article focuses on the modern aspect of the Iranian contemporary society and explores the immediate consequences of modernity on the individual subjectivity of the characters represented in the novel. Considering Dadkhah’s novel as a product of the urban literature of a generation dealing with modernity of the arcades and other lures of the megapolis on the one hand and feeling of nostalgia for their past spirit on the other, the paper simultaneously reveals the close affinity between the subjectivity of the characters and Benjaminian tenets of flânerie and modern storytellers. The flaneurs represented in the novel, by rambling through and about the city of Tehran, are turning to be the storytellers who narrate their ‘post-aural’ experiences. In Yousef Abad, Street 33 the central characters are, as fully manifested in the paper, deeply engaged in the experiences of a modern sense of living while wandering to console their wistful longings despite the everyday challenges.

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 1233
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Pavlović

In this paper, I present a part of the results of the field research I conducted from mid-2011 to early 2017 in Kosovska Mitrovica. The aim of this study was to attempt to clarify the situation of the Serbian population in this city in terms of the major socio-political changes after the war in Kosovo and Metohia in 1999, the introduction of an international protectorate in this territory and the division of Kosovska Mitrovica into two parts - the southern, inhabited mostly by Albanians, and northern, populated mostly by Serbs. The main problem which the paper discusses refers to one of the key aspects of the everyday life of Kosovska Mitrovica residents in the period after the war, and that is the concept of space, the significance of which is already supported by the fact that the division of the city causes the concentration of the Serbs and the Albanians on the opposite sides of the Ibar river, in respect of which, as the borderline, they both marked the parts of the city in which they are grouped as theirs, abstracting them as entities associated with the determination of their own ethnic identity. The greatest attention in the paper is devoted to the consideration of the individual elements of the spatial symbolism of Serbs in the ethnically divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica, from the standpoint of their role in competitive identity politics against the Albanians. The elements considered in this respect fall into, on the one hand, the domain of secular symbolism, which took into account the strategies of space ideologization by constructing street topography and a memorial fund, and, on the other hand, the domain of religious symbolism, where a reference was made to the identity shaping of space using religious architecture.


2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-14
Author(s):  
Alain Thierstein ◽  
Anne Wiese

In the context of the European city, the regeneration of former industrial sites is a unique opportunity to actively steer urban development. These plots of land gain strategic importance in actively triggering development on the city scale. Ideally, these interventions radiate beyond the individual site and contribute to the strengthening of the location as a whole. International competition between locations is rising and prosperous development a precondition for wealth and wellbeing. This approach to the regeneration of inner city plots makes high demands on all those involved. Our framework suggests a stronger focus of the conceptualization and analysis of idiosyncratic resources, to enable innovative approaches in planning. On the one hand, we are discussing spatially restrained urban plots, which have the capacity and need to be reset. On the other hand, each plot is a knot in the web of relations on a multiplicity of scales. The material city is nested into a set of interrelated scale levels – the plot, the quarter, the city, the region, potentially even the polycentric megacity region. The immaterial relations however span a multicity of scale levels. The challenge is to combine these two perspectives for their mutual benefit. The underlying processes are constitutive to urban space diversity, as urban form shapes urban life and vice versa.


Author(s):  
Irina A. Gerasimova ◽  

The article combines historical, cultural and systematic approaches to the analysis of digital transformations of society and man. Digital technologies play a crucial role in the transformation of economy, politics and society at the new stage of technologization. Developments and strategic projects for the introduction of arti­ficial intelligence, robotics, augmented and hybrid realities are implemented not only in the areas of dangerous, labor-intensive and routine work (i.e. in military affairs, industry, financial and economic operations), but also in the intellectual and creative spheres. The global time of change requires a global-system analysis. The invention of high information technologies and the interest of big business in the one-sided technologization of society disrupted the balanced co-evolution of computer technology and society. The author offers a noo-eco-geosystem ap­proach to the analysis of the crisis of technogenic civilization and the search for ways out of it. The complex grid of coordinates of the analysis includes planetary-physical, geo-ecological, geopolitical, geo-economical, geo-social, national socio-cultural, ethical and anthropological dimensions. The noo-eco-geosystem ap­proach makes it possible to reveal the catastrophic risks of digital economy and society strategies. The author considers energy and information and communica­tion technologies as catalysts for the accelerated transformation of society and the individual. These catalysts allow us to identify both the negative and positive as­pects of the global processes of evolution, as well as the “positive in the nega­tive”. The system analysis of digital transformations of society and man assumes consideration of methodological aspects of opportunities and limitations of tech­nologies. The destructive and purifying character of the transformations of nature and society is considered as a self-organizing process of the formation of the global world order, the future picture of the world and the qualitative transforma­tions of the mind on the basis of the values of noospheric ethics and geosociality


Author(s):  
Sanna Melin Schyllert

In May Sinclair’s fiction, images of sacrifice abound. From the self-abnegating Katherine Haviland in Audrey Craven (1897) to the eponymous antiheroine of The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), Sinclair’s central characters seem to be eternally struggling with the issue of renunciation. The treatment of the theme is heterogeneous in many of Sinclair’s texts, not least in the novel The Tree of Heaven, which both condemns and praises personal sacrifice for a higher or communal purpose. This displays a fundamental insecurity about the nature, function and value of sacrifice. It is this ambivalence, which underlies so much of Sinclair’s fiction, in combination with the individual mixture of philosophies in her work, that will be explored here. This chapter investigates the concept of sacrifice in the war novel The Tree of Heaven and how it is connected to community and feminism. In order to find an understanding of sacrifice as proposed by Sinclair, and its meaning in the lives of both women and men in the context of early 20th century England, the chapter discusses the crossroads in the text between sacrifice, idealism, feminism, and the nation-wide feeling of community that appears to be required in wartime.


Author(s):  
Anna S. Akimova ◽  

Moscow is the city which united the characters of A.N. Tolstoy’s novel “Peter the First”. Kitay-Gorod is the space where the action of the first book is mainly set. In the novel Tolstoy showed in great detail the everyday life of the city and its inhabi- tants. According to the I.E. Zabelin’s research (“History of the city of Moscow”) in late 17 — early 18 th centuries Moscow was like a big village that is why Tolstoy relied on his childhood memories about the life in the small village Sosnovka (Samara Region) describing the streets of Moscow. The novel begins with the description of a poor peasant household of Brovkin near Moscow, then Volkov’s noble estate is depicted and Menshikov’s house. The space of the city is expanding with each new “address”. Moscow estates, and in particular, connected with the figure of “guardian, lover of the Princess-ruler” V.V. Golitsyn, in Tolstoy’s novel are inextricably linked with the character’s living and with the life of the country. The description of the palace built by Golitsyn at the peak of his career is based on the Sergei Solovyov’s “History of Russia in ancient times”. Golitsyn left it and went to his estate outside Moscow Medvedkovo and from there in exile.


AJS Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88
Author(s):  
Dvir Tzur

The article discusses the image of Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew city, as it is described in the novelPreliminariesby S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky), one of Israel's best-known authors. In this novel, which engages with the question of home and borders, borders function as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they define home and create a circumscribed place for the protagonist and his family. On the other hand, the novel dwells on the urge to cross borders and shatter the distinction between home and the world. In this regard, Tel Aviv is sometimes described as a pleasant, “normal” city, yet at other times it is written as a perilous place—since it divides between Jews and Arabs. Tel Aviv is also the place where one can imagine a great future or see a concealed history. It is a total urban experience, encapsulating the individual.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 34-42
Author(s):  
Anastasia Ryabokon’

The essay explores the artistic and expressive features of the world's first film adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, directed in 1910 by Pyotr Chardynin. The author substantiates the degree of influence of one of the most important philosophical concepts of the novel that of a split in the human personality on Russian national consciousness at the beginning of the 20th century. The analysis of the figurative system of the film shows that its semantics and the images of its characters were ahead of its time and, therefore, deserve closer critical attention.In the The Idiot the idea of Dostoevsky about a human beings separateness in the world is revealed in the four main characters Prince Myshkin, Parfyon Rogozhin, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya who are not complete, full-fledged personalities but separate components of a harmonious human personality. These characters, like puzzle pieces, possess mutually complementary qualities. Thus, Prince Myshkin, the bearer of the highest spirituality, is contrasted with the earthly and passionate Rogozhin. And the images of Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya are connected, respectively, with the images of Heavenly Love and Earthly Love. If the characters of the novel could unite with each other in love and harmony, the world would get a complete harmonious person, like the one created by God for the Garden of Eden. However, such a merger seems impossible within the limits of earthly existence. In Dostoevsky's novel the individual parts of the soul could not unite into a harmonious whole. Egoism, passion, pride and imperfection of human nature do allow the protagonists to unite and lead them towards personal disintegration.In Russian national cinema, Dostoevskys idea of human beings separateness undergoes a number of transformations. The changes introduced by Pyotr Chardynin into the film adaptation of the novel mostly relate to the image of the films main protagonist Nastasya Filippovna, whom the filmmaker associates with a dying Russia. Chardynin also transforms other protagonists. Prince Myshkin is the only carrier of the highest spirituality, while Nastasya Filippovna, Aglaya and Rogozhin are earthly and passionate. At the end of the film, Nastasya Filippovnas murderer Rogozhin, dressed in a Russian folk costume, sobs at the bedside of the dead tsarina, while heavenly prince Myshkin who was not accepted by her in her lifetime, comforts the sinner. Chardynins film transforms the idea of a split in the human personality into the idea of the Russian separateness from God, the internal split within the Russian world and, as a consequence, that worlds inevitable death.


Author(s):  
Juan Evaristo Valls Boix

El propósito del presente estudio consiste en analizar las relaciones entre subjetividad y espacio urbano a través de la novela Jakob von Gunten de Robert Walser. La novela desarrolla una tensión entre, de un lado, un instituto de enseñanza y una forma de subjetividad entendida como interioridad privada y normativizada, y, de otro, la ciudad como espacio de lo múltiple y lo irrepresentable y una forma de subjetividad entendida como intimidad o secreto. La tensión entre ambas relaciones espacio-sujeto supone una versión peculiar de la dialéctica entre modernización y modernidad tal y como Benjamin o Kracauer la relatan, y permite pensar formas alternativas y superpuestas de concebir la subjetividad y el espacio a partir de distintas lecturas de un texto. The purpose of the present study is to analyze the relations between subjectivity and urban space through the novel Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser. The novel develops a tension between, on the one hand, an institute of teaching and a form of subjectivity understood as private and normative interiority, and, on the other, the city as a space of the multiple and the unrepresentable and a form of subjectivity understood as intimacy The secret. The tension between both space-subject relations supposes a peculiar version of the dialectic between modernization and modernity as Benjamin or Kracauer relate it, and allows to think alternative and superposed forms of conceiving the subjectivity and the space from different readings of a text.


Author(s):  
Andrés Romero Jódar

Occidental societies, according to certain visions of a postmodern future as reflected in literature and arts, are heading towards a dystopian decadent world order. It is inside this perspective that I place the following essay with the aim to analyse the representation of Postmodernism and Postmodernity in Bernard Cohen’s experimental work, Snowdome. This novel can be conceived as a complex portrayal of contemporary existence and life in the city. By means of three different narrations and two stories separated by the unstable boundary of time, Cohen depicts contemporary Sidney from a nightmarish present of noise that leads to the complete isolation of the subject in a near future. The novel emphasises the multiplicity of information in contemporary society and the way in which that information becomes a constant noise flooding the city. The individual is unable to grasp a bit of that “pure reality” outside the simulacrum offered by the media and by the terrifying museum. Sidney and Australia become, in Cohen’s work, a prolongation of contemporary North-American invasive culture, based on the power of the TV screen and the falsehood of simulacrum, whereas individuals are plunged into a new time-space dimension which is placed somewhere in a postmodern time.


Author(s):  
Yana Pogrebnaya

The possibility of identifying different artistic images that are correlated with a single version of water, and decoding the meaning of these invariant manifestations of the original version in the art world M.Yu. Lermontov is determined by two circumstances: firstly, the objectively existing universal significance of the water archetype as infinitely generating new meanings and images of the beginning, and secondly, by the individual artistic interpretation of the everyday meanings of the water archetype in the novel by M.Yu. Lermontov's "Hero of our time", significant for understanding the concept of space, approved in the literary world of the novel. The relevance of the study of the manifestations of the archetype "water" is determined by their meaning-generating function in the artistic system of the novel by M.Yu. Lermontov "Hero of our time."


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