Kaleidoscopic Antifascism: María Teresa León and the Refraction of Socialist Realism to Argentina

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (9) ◽  
pp. 955-969
Author(s):  
PABLO GARCÍA MARTÍNEZ

In this article I reenact the transitional nature defining the antifascist movement during the 1930s and 1940s, and I do so by using as the scenario for my reflections the novel Contra viento y marea (1941) by the Spanish writer María Teresa León. This novel was launched by the principal publishing imprint of the largest antifascist association in Argentina soon after the arrival in Buenos Aires of its author. Considering the fluid nature of a political movement whose orientations took shape according to the historical evolution and the geographical location of the struggle against fascism, Contra viento y marea illuminates new convergences and divergences in the refraction of this movement across Hispanic cartographies. The novel, written by a communist card-carrier, diverges from the author’s political position during the Spanish Civil War and from the Soviet-encouraged literary model, Socialist Realism. Despite this heterodoxy, the text received attention from Argentinian antifascism, which was dominated at that time by local communism and interested in the testimonial value of a work authored by an intellectual who played a prominent role in the fight against Spanish fascism.

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
William A. Cohen

Vanity Fair (1848) famously opens with a departure. As Becky Sharpe flounces off from Miss Pinkerton's academy, she takes leave of her patron by telling her “in a very unconcerned manner … and with a perfect accent, ‘Mademoiselle, je viens vous faire mes adieux.’” Miss Pinkerton, we learn, “did not understand French, she only directed those who did: but biting her lips and throwing up her venerable and Roman-nosed head … said, ‘Miss Sharp, I wish you a good morning’” (7). This performance of befuddlement on the part of a respectable schoolmistress bespeaks a whole collection of Victorian cultural norms about language competence in general and about the French language in particular. Even though the action is set in a period when Becky's speaking “French with purity and a Parisian accent … [was] rather a rare accomplishment” (11), the novel was written for a mid-nineteenth-century audience that could mainly count on middle-class young ladies to have acquired this degree of refinement—or at least to aspire to do so.


Author(s):  
Jan Gresil S. Kahambing ◽  

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (2018), his latest novel to-date, contains nostalgic elements of strangeness and cartography. In this paper, I short-circuit such themes with health under medical humanities, which heeds a Nietzschean counsel of close reading in literature. To do so, I explore the case of Rachel’s illness, namely her epileptic seizures, as an instance that drives her impetus for active forgetting and eventual convalescence. A close hermeneutical reading of the novel can reveal that both of Nietzsche’s ideas on active forgetting and convalescence provide traction in terms of what this paper constructs as Rachel’s pathography or narration of illness. Shifting the focus from the main narrator, Nathaniel, I argue that it is not the novel’s reliance on memory but the subplot events of Nathaniel’s sister and her epilepsy that form a substantial case of medical or health humanities.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
Martin Lukito Sinaga

Abstract: Theological attitude and political position of Christians in Indonesia is ambivalent, wich cause these people to be cornered as minority parasite. This situation needs to be adressed, and deeper understanding of Reformed heritage and Sam Ratulangis struggle in the dire era of Indonesian birth in 1945 can inspire a new mode of theology and Indonesian Christian political presence today. In this light, the strategic direction of Christian politics lies in the pluralism political movement. KEYWORS: incognito, civil obedience, minority politics, majoritarianism, politics of citizenship plurality


2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Italo Balbo

Icelandic translation of a chapter from the book describing Italo Balbo's 1933 journey to Chicago with a hundred Italians on twenty-four seaplanes. As recalled in the essays available in the first issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum, they flew from Italy to the United States, stopping in Iceland on their way. The book La centuria alata was published also in order to exploit his own growing fame as an aviator in view of a high-level political career inside the Italian fascist regime. Being a fascist since the early days of Mussolini's political movement, Balbo led the blackshirt militia in many violent actions directed against democratic politicians. After the notorious "March on Rome" (1922) and the establishment of Mussolini's regime, he played a decisive role in developing the Italian air force, testing for the first time also new weapons of mass destruction, especially during the Spanish Civil War.


Author(s):  
Ilze Ļaksa-Timinska

The article focuses on the part of Linards Laicen’s (1983–1937) biography marginalised in contemporary literary research – his life in the USSR. In literary studies, the main attention is paid to the writer’s early work; his move to the USSR is seen as a break in his writer’s creative growth, highlighting his obedience to the demands of socialist realism and schematism. The article outlines the most important aspects of Laicens’s biography, trying to construct his potential worldview and find the causal links to his arrival in the USSR. In 1932, Laicens was forced to emigrate to Moscow, where he spent the last five years of his life. Even though the Soviet government had tightened control over the artistic processes, Laicens continued to write according to his aesthetics, risking not only being censored but also politically persecuted. In 1935, Laicen’s last novel, “Limitrofija”, was published. It was written at a time when socialist realism was recognised as the only legitimate direction of art creation in the USSR. The article analyses the circumstances of the novel’s origin, poetics, features of modernism, sources of influence, publishing difficulties, and reception. After analysis of the documents available in the archives, correspondence, notes, publications, as well as the text of the novel itself, it is concluded that Laicens’s location in the USSR is not unambiguous/voluntary, and the novel “Limitrofija” is also part of his modernist and experimental literary contribution. This shows the continuity of Laicens’s creative search, although the USSR is dominated by political censorship and constant control and threats.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-198
Author(s):  
Arthur Emanuel Leal Abreu ◽  
Alexandre de Castro Coura

This paper explores the connection between law and literature, considering the concept of civil disobedience as developed in the plot of the novel “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”. To do so, this research uses the approach of law in literature, by linking the actions of Dumbledore’s Army to the theory of civil disobedience by Dworkin. Also, the narrative is compared to the conception of civil disobedience as a fundamental right, based on the conflict between facticity and validity, as described by Habermas. Thus, the analysis identifies, in the novel, two categories of civil disobedience proposed by Dworkin, and discusses, in real life, the overlapping of disobedience based on justice and on politics, in order to identify the conditions that justify actions of civil disobedience. Besides that, this paper analyzes the tension between legality and legitimacy, considering the decisions of the Ministry of Magic and its educational decrees, which sets the school community apart from the official political power. In conclusion, the research examines the use of persuasive and non-persuasive strategies and the reach of civil disobedience’s purposes based on the actions of Harry Potter and of Dumbledore’s Army.


Author(s):  
Yujin Nagasawa

‘Why do so many people believe in miracles?’ considers why it is that the belief in miracles is so widespread. It addresses a number of remarkable recent findings in psychology that seem to support the miracle bias hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, belief in miracles is widespread because humans are cognitively and developmentally biased towards forming and transmitting such a belief. The minimal counterintuitiveness theory suggests concepts that deviate slightly from intuitive expectations can be transmitted more successfully than common concepts that are compatible with expectations. This theory applies across cultures, which may be why miracle episodes are common irrespective of geographical location or religious tradition.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Andre Dias

This paper presents a Foucauldian discourse analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The analysis examines linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of both the film and the novel. It is composed of three parts: the first is an analysis of the Manichaeism during the Cold War period and how it turned the Soviets into mortal enemies of the United States; the second is how the nuclear threat and the Cold War paranoia could destroy the democratic system in the United States; and the third analysis explain how Fascistic relations could be cultivated through the discipline of bodies. It has been concluded that the movie is presenting a concept, here referred to as Strangelove’s Hypothesis, that a Strangelovian scenario (i.e., a nuclear holocaust, usually caused by incompetence or without the will to do so) could lead to the emergence of a Fascistic-like form of government in order to restore security. The solution presented to avoid such scenario is a sociopsychological change in order to pursue more peaceful relations.


Author(s):  
G. Ian Taylor ◽  
Geoffrey G. Hallock

AbstractAnother congress of the World Society for Reconstructive Microsurgery (WSRM) this past year in Bologna was magnificent not just for the presentation of so many keynote lectures by the giants of our field nor the novel and innovative ideas shown by those who will someday follow in those footsteps, but by making all of us realize how many capable microsurgeons there are now practically everywhere in this world, doing incredibly important surgical management of challenges that previously were unmet and resulted in sheer devastation for so many of our patients. How much we are the same in our goals, aspirations, and abilities could not be overlooked, but it is amazing how much we also want to learn more together—each relying on the other. To do so, we must not forget our origins as we appropriately plan for the future. All this we philosophized in our WSRM panel on lower extremity reconstruction, while emphasizing on the surface the perforator flap that at the least today has caught everyone's attention. In this overview to follow, we once again tell two stories, starting with the beginnings of the concept of flaps in showing how the nomenclature has evolved over time according to our various surgical manipulations. Often overlooked, though, is a parallel timeline by the anatomists who have better elucidated the circulation to these flaps, where it will become obvious that often long ago the existence of perforators was recognized by them long before known by the surgeons. At least today, these two paths have at least temporarily intersected. Our pursuit of the “perforator” in the perforator skin flap has come full circle, following the course of the history of the flap itself—a pursuit of excellence.


Societies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
José Yebra

In the last years, more and more literary accounts of recent and current wars in the Middle East have been published. In most cases, they are authored from a Western viewpoint and provide a narrow account of the Muslim world. This article focuses on Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer because it opens the scope. That is, it constitutes an alternative to the imagery of the American film industry. Moreover, as Antoon is a Christian, his account of contemporary Iraq is particularly peripheral and hybrid. To analyse the novel, this article makes use of Transmodernity, a concept coined by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda in 1989. Yet, instead of Magda’s Transmodernity as a neatly Euro-centric phenomenon of worldwide connectivity, Ziauddin Sardar’s version of the concept is preferred. Sardar’s Transmodernity adds to connectivity a message of reconciliation between progress and tradition, particularly in the context of non-Western cultures. This paper defends that Antoon’s novel opens the debate on Islam to challenge the prejudiced Western discourses that have ‘legitimized’ war. To do so, Sardar’s ‘borders’ and Judith Butler’s grievability are particularly useful. In a Transmodern context, novels like Antoon’s show that humans should never be bare lives.


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