scholarly journals Tom Stoppard: European Phantom Pain and the Theatre of Faux Biography

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Eckart Voigts
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
European History ◽  
Phantom Pain ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Tom Stoppard ◽  
Blind Spots

The paper reads Stoppard’s work in the 21st century as further testimony of the gradual politicisation of his work that began in the 1970s under the influence of Czech dissidents, and particularly as a result of his visits to Russia and Prague in 1977. It also provides evidence that Stoppard, since the 1990s, had begun to target emotional responses from his audience to redress the intellectual cool that seems to have shaped his earlier, “absurdist” phase. This turn towards emotionalism, the increasingly elegiac obsession with doubles, unrequited lives, and memory are linked to a set of biographical turning points: the death of his mother and the investigation into his Czech-Jewish family roots, which laid bare the foundations of the Stoppardian art. Examining this kind of “phantom pain” in two of his 21st-century plays, Rock’n’Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2019), the essay argues that Stoppard’s work in the 21st century was increasingly coloured by his biography and Jewishness—bringing to the fore an important engagement with European history that helped Stoppard become aware of some blind spots in his attitudes towards Englishness.

Bluvshtain (Sela), Rachel (1890–1931)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miryam Segal
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Jewish Settlement

Rachel Bluvshtain was the most salient and recognizable symbol of Labour Zionism in the 20th century and remains one of the most popular Hebrew poets in Israel into the 21st century. Bluvshtain was born to a Jewish family in Russia. As a young woman on her first visit to Palestine, she decided to join a Jewish settlement there, abandoning her plan to study art in Italy. Although her poems came to be associated with Labour Zionism and the Jewish pioneers in early 20th century Palestine, her poetic career began only once she left her work collective due to illness, and ended about a decade later with her death at the age of 40. Her short modernist lyric poetry betrays Russian acmeist and French imagist influence. Many of Bluvshtain’s poems capture and express a momentary thought, feeling, or memory. Their vocabulary and syntax are seemingly straightforward, they contain only a few images, and are concise. Bluvshtain’s style and her poems’ explicit celebration of simplicity allowed her to be read initially as a naïve contributor to ‘women’s poetry.’ A few scholarly works have since revised this critical assessment by showing the intertextual play, ambivalent language, and critique of contemporary poetic expectations embedded in her poems.

3. Big impacts

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-52
Author(s):  
Paul Slack
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
High Mortality ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
European History ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Contemporary Culture

‘Big impacts’ focuses on the Black Death, which had an impact on every sphere of human activity. Indeed, the Black Death reshaped the course of European history. The case is strongest in the area where sudden, severe, and prolonged high mortality might be expected to have an effect—that of economic and social relations. The Black Death also had an impact on how people thought about their world and their place in it, and some have argued that there were wholesale changes in mentalities, amounting to turning points in contemporary culture. It is interesting to note that the process of accommodating plague took less time than one might imagine.

scholarly journals Wprowadzenie: o kulturze pamięci w Europie Środkowej i Wschodniej

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Kasner ◽  
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
The State ◽  
European History ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Ethnic Conflicts ◽  
New States ◽  
State Of Research ◽  
The Baltic

Introduction: On culture of memory in Central and Eastern EuropeThis issue of the Acta Baltico-Slavica, entitled “Bałtyckie i słowiańskie konteksty (nie) pamięci” (The Baltic and Slavic contexts of (non-)memory, vol. 42/2018), is devoted to interdisciplinary research on culture of memory, which – after Christoph Cornelißen – we understand as a formal notion superior to all possible forms of conscious memory of past events. This volume presents the state of research on memory from the perspective of two turning points in European history: 1918 and 1989. The events immediately following the fall of empires and the communist regime (including the rise of new states, shifts and modifications of state borders, international and ethnic conflicts, transformation of political and economic systems) not only changed the geopolitical map, but also exerted enormous influence on shaping identity and memory of Europeans and their historical and biographical narrations. Wprowadzenie: o kulturze pamięci w Europie Środkowej i WschodniejTegoroczny numer rocznika „Acta Baltico-Slavica” zatytułowany Bałtyckie i słowiańskie konteksty (nie)pamięci został poświęcony interdyscyplinarnym badaniom nad kulturą pamięci, którą rozumiemy zgodnie z definicją Ch. Cornelißena jako „formalne pojęcie nadrzędne dla wszelkich możliwych form świadomej pamięci człowieka o wydarzeniach historycznych, osobistościach i procesach, niezależnie od tego, czy są one natury estetycznej, politycznej czy poznawczej”. Celem niniejszego tomu jest przedstawienie stanu badań nad pamięcią z perspektywy dwóch szczególnie ważnych dla Europy cezur dziejowych: 1918 roku i 1989 roku. Wydarzenia, które nastąpiły bezpośrednio po upadku imperiów i reżimu komunistycznego (m.in. powstanie nowych państw, przesunięcia i zmiany granic, konflikty międzypaństwowe i narodowościowe, transformacja systemu politycznego i gospodarczego) nie tylko zmieniły mapę geopolityczną, ale także wywarły ogromny wpływ na kształtowanie się tożsamości i pamięci Europejczyków, ich narracji historycznych i biograficznych.

Emotional clashes and female public nudity in Thailand

Diogenes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 039219212097041
Author(s):  
Suchada Thaweesit
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sexual Expression ◽  
Hegemonic Discourse ◽  
Sexual Culture ◽  
Bare Breast ◽  
The One

This article revisits cultural controversies over female public nudity in Thai society. It uses Songkran’s topless dancing in 2011 and a bare-breast painting performance on the ‘Thailand’s Got Talent Show’ in 2012 to explore cultural and emotional clashes in Thailand’s 21st century. It shows that these two cases of public female nudity drew deep and divergent emotional responses from different groups in Thai society. These cases clearly revealed a clash in viewpoints with regard to Thai notions of feminine respectability associated with national identity and women’s sexual expression. On the one hand, the controversies prompted moral panic and backlashes against women’s sexual rebelliousness. On the other hand, they set off counter-backlashes against hegemonic discourse that tends to normalise oppressive sexual culture, nationalism and totalitarianism.

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