History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe PDF

Author: Marcel Cornis-Pope

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 680

ISBN-13: 9789027234520

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Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites--multicultural cities, border areas, cross-cultural corridors, multiethnic regions--that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirm, howev.

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe PDF

Author: Marcel Cornis-Pope

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010-09-29

Total Pages: 728

ISBN-13: 9027287864

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Types and stereotypes is the fourth and last volume of a path-breaking multinational literary history that incorporates innovative features relevant to the writing of literary history in general. Instead of offering a traditional chronological narrative of the period 1800-1989, the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe approaches the region’s literatures from five complementary angles, focusing on literature’s participation in and reaction to key political events, literary periods and genres, the literatures of cities and sub-regions, literary institutions, and figures of representation. The main objective of the project is to challenge the self-enclosure of national literatures in traditional literary histories, to contextualize them in a regional perspective, and to recover individual works, writers, and minority literatures that national histories have marginalized or ignored. Types and stereotypes brings together articles that rethink the figures of National Poets, figurations of the Family, Women, Outlaws, and Others, as well as figures of Trauma and Mediation. As in the previous three volumes, the historical and imaginary figures discussed here constantly change and readjust to new political and social conditions. An Epilogue complements the basic history, focusing on the contradictory transformations of East-Central European literary cultures after 1989. This volume will be of interest to the region’s literary historians, to students and teachers of comparative literature, to cultural historians, and to the general public interested in exploring the literatures of a rich and resourceful cultural region.

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe PDF

Author: Marcel Cornis-Pope

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2006-09-13

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 9027293406

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Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites—multicultural cities, border areas, cross-cultural corridors, multiethnic regions—that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirm, however inadvertently, the very national borders they play down. This volume inverts the expansive momentum of comparative studies towards ever-broader regional, European, and world literary histories. While the theater of this volume is still the literary culture of East-Central Europe, the contributors focus on pinpointed local traditions and geographic nodal points. Their histories of Riga, Plovdiv, Timişoara or Budapest, of Transylvania or the Danube corridor – to take a few examples – reveal how each of these sites was during the last two-hundred years a home for a variety of foreign or ethnic literary traditions next to the one now dominant within the national borders. By foregrounding such non-national or hybrid traditions, this volume pleads for a diversification and pluralization of local and national histories. A genuine comparatist revival of literary history should involve the recognition that “treading on native grounds” means actually treading on grounds cultivated by diverse people.

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe PDF

Author: Marcel Cornis-Pope

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2007-07-18

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 9027292353

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The third volume in the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe focuses on the making and remaking of those institutional structures that engender and regulate the creation, distribution, and reception of literature. The focus here is not so much on shared institutions but rather on such region-wide analogous institutional processes as the national awakening, the modernist opening, and the communist regimentation, the canonization of texts, and censorship of literature. These processes, which took place in all of the region’s cultures, were often asynchronous and subjected to different local conditions. The volume’s premise is that the national awakening and institutionalization of literature were symbiotically interrelated in East-Central Europe. Each national awakening involves a language renewal, an introduction of the vernacular and its literature in schools and universities, the creation of an infrastructure for the publication of books and journals, clashes with censorship, the founding of national academies, libraries, and theaters, a (re)construction of national folklore, and the writing of histories of the vernacular literature. The four parts of this volume are titled: (1) Publishing and Censorship, (2) Theater as a Literary Institution, (3) Forging Primal Pasts: The Uses of Folk Poetry, and (4) Literary Histories: Itineraries of National Self-images.

Underground Modernity

Underground Modernity PDF

Author: Alfrun Kliems

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2021-03-23

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9633863988

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The literary scholar Alfrun Kliems explores the aesthetic strategies of Eastern European underground literature, art, film and music in the decades before and after the fall of communism, ranging from the ‘father’ of Prague Underground, Egon Bondy, to the neo-Dada Club of Polish Losers in Berlin. The works she considers are "underground" in the sense that they were produced illegally, or were received as subversive after the regimes had fallen. Her study challenges common notions of ‘underground’ as an umbrella term for nonconformism. Rather, it depicts it as a sociopoetic reflection of modernity, intimately linked to urban settings, with tropes and aesthetic procedures related to Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and, above all, pop and counterculture. The author discusses these commonalities and distinctions in Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, and German authors, musicians, and filmmakers. She identifies intertextual relations across languages and generations, and situates her findings in a transatlantic context (including the Beat Generation, Susan Sontag, Neil Young) and the historical framework of Romanticism and modernity (including Baudelaire and Brecht). Despite this wide brief, the book never loses sight of its core message: Underground is no arbitrary expression of discontent, but rather the result of a fundamental conflict at the socio-philosophical roots of modernity.

Tradition, Literature and Politics in East-Central Europe

Tradition, Literature and Politics in East-Central Europe PDF

Author: Carl Tighe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-30

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1000332039

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Milan Kundera warned that in in the states of East-Central Europe, attitudes to the west and the idea of ‘Europe’ were complex and could even be hostile. But few could have imagined how the collapse of communism and membership of the EU would confront these countries with a life that was suddenly and disconcertingly ‘modern’ and which challenged sustaining traditions in literature, culture, politics and established views on identity. Since the countries of East-Central Europe joined the European Union in 2004 the politicians and oppositionists of the centre-left, who once led the charge against communism, have often been forced to give way to right-wing, authoritarian, populist governments. These governments, while keen to accept EU finance, have been determined to present themselves as protecting their traditional ethno-national inheritance, resisting ‘foreign interference’, stemming the ‘gay invasion’, halting ‘Islamic replacement’ and reversing women’s rights. They have blamed Communists, liberals, foreigners, Jews and Gypsies, revised abortion laws, tampered with their constitutions to control the Justice system and taken over the media to an astonishing degree. By 2019, amid calls for the suspension of their voting rights, both Poland and Hungary had been taken to the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament and had begun to explore ways to put conditions on future EU funding. This book focuses on the interface between tradition, literature and politics in east-central Europe, focusing mainly on Poland but also Hungary and the Czech Republic. It explores literary tradition and the role of writers to ask why these left-liberals, who were once ubiquitous in the struggles with communism, are now marginalised, often reviled and almost entirely absent from political debate. It asks, in what ways the advent of capitalism ‘normalised’ literature and what the consequences might be? It asks whether the rise of chauvinism is ‘normal’ in this part of the world and whether the literary traditions that helped sustain independent political thought through the communist years now, instead of supporting literature, feed nationalist opinion and negative attitudes to the idea of ‘Europe’.