scholarly journals European Dictatorships: A Comparative History of the Twentieth Century. By Gerhard Besier and Katarzyna Stoklosa. (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. Pp. vii, 683. $118.99.)

Historian ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-138
Author(s):  
Porter R. Blakemore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Newcastle Upon Tyne

Sport in West and North Europe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Young
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
European Integration ◽  
English Language ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
The West ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines the development of sport in one of the most significant regions in its history. It explains the institutional reasons why a truly comparative history of the continent is still lacking and presents and critiques fruitful new avenues that might lead to a more integrated picture. Its principle plaidoyer is for greater recognition of sports of non-British origin, as well as the polygenetic spread of British sports, especially in English-language scholarship. It also urges a cautious reconsideration of political and ideological narratives (of the Fascist era in particular), which have tended to reduce complex historical reality to moral truths. While the chapter places a special emphasis on the first half of the twentieth century, it outlines the three key areas of sport’s development after 1945: affluence in the West, the Cold War, and European integration. Here, too, the chapter calls on future accounts to strive for greater complexity.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

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