Light in Captivity: Spectacular Glass and Soviet Power in the 1920s and 1930s

Slavic Review ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Bekman Chadaga
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Light Bulb ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
Mikhail Zoshchenko ◽  
Visual Power

Exploiting what Jean Starobinski has called the “solar myth” of the revolution, the Soviet regime used the visual power of light within glass to create an exalted vision of Russia's transformation. This article explores the symbolism and the spectacular use of the light bulb (as a material and a discursive entity) in the early Soviet period. Julia Bekman Chadaga traces how the light bulb became an ideological icon and then investigates its treatment in Soviet popular culture and in literary works by Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, and Iurii Olesha. The Kremlin stars are examined as a monumental manifestation of the Soviet light bulb and a case study illustrating the state's appropriation of religious imagery. While official discourse around the Kremlin stars and “Lenin's little lamps” invokes the conquest of unruly nature and the attainment of divine power via technology produced by the triumphant socialist state, the literary works examined here destabilize the fixed symbolic meaning of captive light.

Ordinary Masochisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Theoretical Examination ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Ordinary Masochisms argues for literary alternatives to pervasive dictatorial norms about masochism that first surface in Victorian literature, reach their pioneering pinnacle in the modernist moment, and are expressly mourned in post-modern texts. In particular, the literary works discussed all challenge the more popular term “sadomasochism” as a conglomerate form of perversion that was named and studied in the late nineteenth century. Underscoring close textual analyses with modern theories of masochism as empowering, this book argues that Charlotte Brontë Villette (1853), George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886), D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and Jean Rhys’s Quartet (1928) all experiment with masochistic relationships that extend far beyond reductive early readings of inherently feminine or sexually aberrant masochism. Ordinary Masochisms begins with a historical and theoretical examination of masochism’s treatment during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries before moving to an examination of the Biblical tale of Samson and Delilah in conjunction with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), from which masochism garners its name. An intermediary chapter treats Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (1903) as a case study transitioning between sexological and psychoanalytical discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the conclusion about Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981) addresses masochism’s seeming inability to recuperate itself from categories of deviance, despite the success of contemporary popular culture representations. The book closes with a brief consideration of masochistic reading, a subtle undercurrent of the project as a whole.

Are They Ready for Their Close-Up? Civil Servants and Their Portrayal in Contemporary American Cinema

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle C. Pautz ◽  
Laura Roselle
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
Case Study Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Narrative Forms

Perceptions of government and civil servants are shaped by a variety of factors including popular culture. In the public administration literature the significant role that film and other narrative forms have on citizens’ perceptions is duly noted, and there is ample research on politicians and military heroes in film, but a focus on civil servants remains largely elusive. Among the sparse literature centered on civil servants are studies that employ a case study approach or focus on a few films. In contrast, our research employs a large sample of 150 films. These films comprise the top ten box-office grossing films from 1992 through 2006; therefore we examine the films most likely to have been seen by a majority of movie-watching Americans. More than 60 percent of the films in our sample portray government as bad, inefficient, and incompetent. However, the data on more than 300 civil servants yield intriguing findings. Surprising, in light of the negative depiction of government, is the positive depiction of individual civil servants. Half of civil servants were positively portrayed, and only 40 percent were negatively depicted. Americans may view government negatively, but they see in film positive depictions of how individual civil servants can and do make a positive difference.

Russia’s ‘fortresses of solitude’: Social imaginaries of loneliness after the fall of the USSR

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-309
Author(s):  
Sergei Akopov
Keyword(s):  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Russian Government ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Specific Focus

Based on the distinction between three approaches to loneliness, and the development of the phenomenological and existential framework of loneliness studies, this article explores Russia’s discourse of national loneliness on three levels: a) the level of the official discourse of the Russian government; b) the level of political and philosophical concepts; and c) the level of popular media and cinema (with a specific focus on a case-study of the post-Soviet Russian blockbuster film Brother and its sequel, Brother 2). In this article I concentrate on the particular experiences of loneliness and their interpretations in Russia after the fall of the USSR. The case of the fall of the USSR has shown that social and political exploitations of different forms of national loneliness can become the flip side of the doctrine of autonomy, equal individual rights and freedom from authoritarian rule. This should be considered and never disregarded within our analysis of the contours and new transformations of emerging hegemonic discourses, including the different forms of nationalism in Russia, and in a wider cross-cultural perspective.

An introduction to the functioning process of embedded paratext of digital literature: Technoeikon of digital poetry

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 646-660
Author(s):  
T Shanmugapriya ◽  
Nirmala Menon ◽  
Andy Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Electronic Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Digital Literature ◽  
Digital Poetry ◽  
Cyclical Process ◽  
The Comparative Study ◽  
Digital Components

Abstract The recent digital-born electronic literature has heterogeneous components such as kinetic texts, kinetic images, graphical designs, sounds, and videos. These digital components are embedded with the main text as the paratext of print and digital works such as preface, author’s name, illustrations, and title. However, the comparative study between paratext and embedded paratext of electronic literature shows the different strategic patterns and functions of these entities. We discuss the conceptual framework of illuminant devices of paratexts and propose a new term technoeikon to recognize the functions of embedded literary artifact in digital literary works. We examine the critical construction of new term technoeikon which has a unique characteristic that makes electronic literary works different from print literature. This essay reviews the cyclical process of technoeikon from the historical perspective of pre-print culture and print culture and acknowledges technoeikon as inherited from our tradition. Due to digital contrivances, technoeikon takes a new expression as performing in digital ecology which is different from our traditional analog. This article presents a case study on Andy Campbell's (2007b) Dim O'Gauble. Also, Campbell responds to the interpretation of new term technoeikon in the fourth section of the essay.

De cultuurhistorische waarde van de literatuur

1970 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Lies Wesseling
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Post War ◽  
Literary System ◽  
Specific Expertise

This article probes the extent to which literary history and cultural history may mutuallyilluminate each other, without neglecting the poetic dimension of literary works. Thispoetic dimension is embedded within the genre repertoires that shape the production andreception of literary works. One should therefore take into close account that the literaryrepresentation of social conflict is always deflected by the prism of genre conventions.Focusing on the case study of the Dutch Gothic novel, I argue that Gothic tales provide aspecific take on the post-war modernization of the Netherlands. As such, they make avaluable contribution to historical debates about the periodization of the sixties andseventies, not in spite of, but because of their specific poetic properties. Thus, it is verywell possible to bring literary works to bear upon the discussion of historical issueswithout either infringing upon the relative autonomy of the literary system or neglectingthe specific expertise of literary studies as a discipline in its own rights.

scholarly journals TYPOLOGY AND STRATEGIES OF CREATIVE RECEPTION: A CASE STUDY OF ENGLISH POSTMODERNIST POETRY AND PROSE

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-119
Author(s):  
Maria S. Sloistova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works

The paper focuses on complex research and description of creative reception theory and typology. There are provided definitions of such terms as reception, creative reception, creative reception strategies, and others. The author builds the typology of creative reception on the basis of works by E. V. Abramovskikh, S. Ye. Trunin, M. V. Zagidullina, V. I. Tyupa, and M. Naumann. This typology includes two types (or levels) of creative reception, defined as classic and postmodernist. Each of the types is characterized by a number of strategies, i. e. ways of representing an artistically received text in one’s own work. The classic type strategies (formal, authentic, neutral and antithetical) focus primarily on plot transformation. As for the postmodernist level, the author singles out two strategies: congenial and play. The theory and typology of creative reception is substantiated with some examples of reminiscences and allusions to English and world poetry. The examples under analysis are taken from the following prose works by the outstanding English postmodernist writer John Robert Fowles (1926–2005): the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), the collection of long short stories The Ebony Tower (1974), the philosophic book The Aristos (1964), and also the lyric collection Selected Poems, published posthumously in 2012. The collection has not been translated into Russian yet. Therefore, the poem under analysis (Islanders) has been translated into Russian by the author of the present paper. The paper also deals with indirect Biblical reception which is found in the allusion to the ivory tower. The allusion gave the title The Ebony Tower both to Fowles’ long short story and collection as a whole. The author of the paper draws a conclusion about the dominant creative reception strategies in the literary works under analysis and also about the possible use of the presented creative reception typology in analyzing works by other writers.

scholarly journals Understanding Currents and Theories in Indian and African Postcolonial Literature: Themes, Tropes and Discourse in the Wider Context of Postcolonialism

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-393
Author(s):  
Shivani Ekkanath
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Diaspora And Transnationalism

The postcolonial narratives we see today are a study in contrast and tell a different tale from their colonial predecessors as minorities and individuals finally have found the voice and position to tell their stories. Histories written about our culture and societies have now found a new purpose and voice. The stories we have passed down from generation to generation through both oral and written histories, continue to morph and change with the tide of time as they re-centre our cultural narratives and shared experiences. As a result, the study of diaspora and transnationalism have altered the way in which we view identity in different forms of multimedia and literature. In this paper, the primary question which will be examined is, how and to what extent does Indian post-colonial literature figure in the formation of identity in contemporary art and literature in the context of ongoing postcolonial ideas and currents? by means of famous and notable postcolonial literary works and theories of Indian authors and theoreticians, with a special focus on the question and notion of identity. This paper works on drawing parallels between themes in Indian and African postcolonial literary works, especially themes such as power, hegemony, east meets west, among others. In this paper, European transnationalism will also be analysed as a case study to better understand postcolonialism in different contexts. The paper will seek to explore some of the gaps in the study of diasporic identity and postcolonial studies and explore some of the changes and key milestones in the evolution of the discourse over the decades.

scholarly journals Nostalgic transmediation: A not-so-final fantasy? Ichigo’s Sheet Music online platform as an object network of creative practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-193
Author(s):  
Ruth Barratt-Peacock ◽  
Sophia Staite
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Online Platform ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
Music Transcription ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Nature

Using the music of the Final Fantasy game series as our case study, we follow the music through processes of transmediation in two very different contexts: the Netflix series Dad of Light and music transcription forum Ichigo’s Sheet Music. We argue that these examples reveal transmediation acting as a process of ‘emptying’, allowing the music to carry its nostalgic cargo of affect into new relationships and contexts. This study’s theoretical combination of transmediation with Bainbridge’s object networks of social practice frame challenges normative definitions of nostalgia. The phenomenon of ‘emptying’ we identify reveals a function of popular culture nostalgia that differs from the dominant understanding as a triggering of generalized emotional longing for (or the desire to return to) the past. Instead, this article uncovers a nostalgia that is defined by personal and communal creative engagement and highlights the active and social nature of transmediated popular culture nostalgia.

scholarly journals Imperatyw konkretyzacji

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1 (51)) ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Luboń
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Original Version ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
American Writer

Imperative of Concretization: Translational Shifts and the Models of Reception of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Prose – The Case Study of "The Outsider" and its Polish Versions The Article discusses translational reception of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s prose in Poland on the example of his short story The Outsider. The gothic tale of a mysterious recluse visiting human society, in its original version, has no explicit interpretation due to the fact that the maincharacter’s identity is intentionally left by Lovecraft without precise and unambiguous explanation for its readers to determine. Polish versions, however, modified in the process of interlinguistic transfer, are aimed at concretization of the text, and thus solving this interpretational puzzle with different answers given by five translators (Grzegorz Iwanciw, Robert Lipski, Ewa Morycińska-Dzius, Mateusz Kopacz and Maciej Płaza), influenced by a variety of factors: image of the American writer, knowledge of his other literary works, implied readers of the translations and artistic trends popular in Polish literature.

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