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"The pictures in this book bring the argument about reuse and preservation into focus. What is worthy of retaining and what is dispensable? What are the criteria for considering whether a structure should be retained or demolished? How do you define the parameters of taste and utility in making decisions to preserve or destroy? How will future generations regard the destruction of certain structures, will we be considered cultural vandals for not having retained more of the structures that seemed irrelevant at the time? The preservation argument is heightened in the case of the exhibitions sites, as by definition an exhibition is considered a temporary event."--Page 9.
The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins by Maria Todorova Pdf
Maria Todorova's book is devoted to the 'golden age' of the socialist idea, broadly surveying the period in and around the time of the Second International. It critically examines the promise for an alternative socialist utopia from 1870 to the 1920s. Todorova brings in the experience of the periphery in a comparative context in the belief that the margins can often elucidate better the character of a phenomenon, and de-provincialize it from essentialist notions. In doing so, The Lost World of Socialists at Europe's Margins moves beyond the traditional historiographical emphasis on ideology by looking at different intersections or entanglements of spaces, generations, genders, ideas and feelings, and different flows of historical time. The study provides a social and cultural history of early socialism in Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Bulgaria, arguably the country with the earliest and strongest socialist movement in Southeast Europe, and one that had a unique relationship to both German and Russian social democracy. Based on a rich prosopographical database of around 3500 biographies of people born in the 19th century, the book addresses the interplay of several generations of leftists, looking at the specifics of how ideas were generated, received, transferred and transformed. Finally, the work investigates the intersection between subjectivity and memory as reflected in a unique cache of archival materials containing over 4000 documentary sources including diaries, oral interviews, and unpublished memoirs. A microhistorical approach to this material allows the reconstruction of 'structures of feeling' that inspired an exceptional group of individuals.
AntiFascism and Memory in East Germany by Josie McLellan Pdf
AntiFascism and Memory in East Germany is a book about remembering and about forgetting, about war, and about the peace which eventually followed. In the unlikely setting of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Spanish Civil War became the subject of a debate which both predated and outlasted the Cold War, involving historians, veterans, politicains, censors, artists, writers, and Church activists. Examining these multiple memories and interpretations of Spain casts new and unexpected light on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and the relationship between history and memory under state socialism. The ruling Socialist Unity Party made full use of the antifascist legacy as legitimation for a non-democratic state. But despite dogged attempts at control and censorship, the state was unable to silence competing voices. All over East Germany, International Brigade veterans preserved their version of events - in letters to each other, in communications with the party, in discussions with friends and family around the kitchen table, and in memoirs written for the 'desk drawer'. For younger East Germans, the war retained an undeniably romantic aura. From their perspective, Spain was a far-away land to which they were forbidden to travel, the stuff of camp-fire singalongs and fantasies of adventure. This book dissects the relationship between state-sponsored history, the lobbying of veterans, cultural interpretations of war, and the memory traces left behind by marginalised or politically oppositional groups and individuals. It is a cultural history of memory under state socialism, a social history of veteran groups and their relationship with the state, and a political history of communist culture. Above all, it is the story of how post-war Europeans came to terms with the heavy burden of their pre-war past.
Environmentalism has relentlessly warned about the dire consequences of abusing and exploiting the planet's natural resources, imagining future wastelands of ecological depletion and social chaos. But it has also generated rich new ideas about how humans might live better with nature. Green Utopias explores these ideas of environmental hope in the post-war period, from the environmental crisis to the end of nature. Using a broad definition of Utopia as it exists in Western policy, theory and literature, Lisa Garforth explains how its developing entanglement with popular culture and mainstream politics has shaped successive green future visions and initiatives. In the face of apocalyptic, despairing or indifferent responses to contemporary ecological dilemmas, utopias and the utopian method seem more necessary than ever. This distinctive reading of green political thought and culture will appeal across the social sciences and humanities to all interested in why green utopias continue to matter in the cultivation of ecological values and the emergence of new forms of human and non-human well-being.
Television has long been a symbol of social and cultural decay, yet many in postwar Europe saw it as the medium with the greatest potential to help build a new society and create a new form of audiovisual art. Utopian Television examines works of the great filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Peter Watkins, and Jean-Luc Godard, all of whom looked to television as a promising new medium even while remaining critical of its existing practices. Utopian Television illustrates how each director imagined television’s improved or “utopian” version by drawing on elements that had come to characterize it by the early 1960s. Taking advantage of the public service model of Western European broadcasting, each used television to realize works that would never have been viable in the commercial cinema. All three directors likewise seized on television’s supposed affinity for information and its status as a “useful” medium, but attempted to join this utility with aesthetic experimentation, suggesting new ways to conceive of the relationship between aesthetics and information. As beautifully written as it is theoretically rigorous, Utopian Television turns to the writing of Fredric Jameson and Ernst Bloch in treating the three directors’ television experiments as enactments of “utopia as method.” In doing so it reveals the extent to which the medium inspired and shaped hopes not only of a better future but of better moving image art as well.
J.R.R. Tolkien's Utopianism and the Classics by Hamish Williams Pdf
This book opens up new perspectives on the English fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien, arguing that he was an influential thinker of utopianism in 20th-century fiction and that his scrutiny of utopias can be assessed through his dialogue with antiquity. Tolkien's engagement with the ancient world often reflects an interest in retrotopianism: his fictional places – cities, forests, homes – draw on a rich (post-)classical narrative imagination of similar spaces. Importantly for Tolkien, such narratives entail 'eutopian' thought experiments: the decline and fall of distinctly 'classical' communities provide an utopian blueprint for future political restorations; the home as oikos becomes a space where an ideal ethical reciprocity between host and guest can be sought; the 'ancient forest' is an ambiguous, unsettling site where characters can experience necessary forms of awakening. From these perspectives, tokens of Platonic moderation, Augustan restoration, Homeric xenophilia, and the Ovidian material sublime are evident in Tolkien's writing. Likewise, his retrotopianism also always entails a rewriting of ancient narratives in post-classical and modern terms. This study then explores how Tolkien's use of the classical past can help us to align classical and utopian studies, and thus to reflect on the ranges and limits of utopianism in classical literature and thought.
Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular—and thus exclusive and inimitable. Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity’s two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.
Utopian thought, though commonly characterized as projecting a future without a past, depends on golden models for re-invention of what is. Through a detailed and innovative re-assessment of the work of three architects who sought to represent a utopian content in their work, and a consideration of the thoughts of a range of leading writers, Coleman offers the reader a unique perspective of idealism in architectural design. With unparalleled depth and focus of vision on the work of Le Corbusier, Louis I Kahn and Aldo van Eyck, this book persuasively challenges predominant assumptions in current architectural discourse, forging a new approach to the invention of welcoming built environments and transcending the limitations of both the postmodern and hyper-modern stance and orthodox modernist architecture.
When Dmitri Tiomkin thanked Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner upon accepting the Academy Award for his score of The High and the Mighty in 1954, he was honoring a romantic style that had characterized Hollywood's golden age of film composition from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Exploring elements of romanticism in film scores of composers ranging from Erich Korngold to Bernard Herrmann, Caryl Flinn argues that films tended to link music to the sense of an idealized, lost past. Just as the score of Gone with the Wind captured the grandeur of the antebellum South, others prompted flashbacks or suggested moments of emotional intensity and sensuality. Maintaining that many films treated this utopian impulse as a female trait, Flinn investigates the ways Hollywood genre films--particularly film noir and melodrama--sustained the connection between music and nostalgia, utopia, and femininity. The author situates Hollywood film scores within a romantic aesthetic ideology, noting compositional and theoretical affinities between the film composers and Wagner, with emphasis on authorship, creativity, and femininity. Pointing to the lasting impact of romanticism on film music, Flinn draws from poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic criticism to offer fresh insights into the broad theme of music as an excessive utopian condition.
Nordic Utopias and Dystopias by Pia Maria Ahlbäck,Jouni Teittinen,Maria Lassén-Seger Pdf
The Nordic countries have long been subject to certain idealised, even utopian imaginaries, particularly with regard to images of pristine nature and the societal ideals of democracy, equality and education. On the other hand, such projections inevitably invite dissent, irony and intimations of the utopia’s dark underside. Things may yet take, or may have already taken, a dystopic course. The present volume offers twelve contributions on utopias and dystopias in Nordic literature and culture. Geographically, the articles cover the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the autonomous area of Greenland. Through the articles’ varied subjects — ranging from avant-garde literature and long poems to noir TV-series, young adult fiction, popular historiography, and political discourse in literature outside of Norden — the volume brings forth a historically rich, multi-layered picture of social, cultural and environmental imagination in the Nordic countries. Nordic Utopias and Dystopias is thus of interest not only to specialists in dystopian and utopian research but more broadly to scholars of literature and culture, and the political and social sciences, especially but not exclusively in the Nordic context.
'Comprehensive and thorough, Utopias in Nonfiction Film takes a new direction in its surprise application to documentary that has the potential to shake up the field.'- Jane Gaines, Columbia University, USA 'Spiegel has introduced a new sub-genre to utopian studies, the documentary film. The book covers an impressive range of films, making the book one of the few truly international and comparative works in utopian studies.'- Lyman Tower Sargent, University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA "Simon Spiegel’s magisterial overview of utopian documentaries and nonfiction films is a treasure trove of information and unearths many forgotten and half-forgotten films, providing perceptive discussions of sidelined movies that deserve his (and our) critical scrutiny.“ - Eckart Voigts, University of Braunschweig – Institute of Technology, Germany This book is the first major study on utopias in nonfiction film. Since the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia more than 500 years ago, countless books have been written which describe a better world. But in film, positive utopias seem to be nonexistent. So far, research has focused almost exclusively on dystopias, since positive outlooks seem to run contrary to the media’s requirement. Utopias in Nonfiction Film takes a new approach; starting from the insight that literary utopias are first and foremost meant as a reaction to the ills of the present and not as entertaining stories, it looks at documentary and propaganda films, an area which so far has been completely ignored by research. Combining insights from documentary research and utopian studies, a vast and very diverse corpus of films is analysed. Among them are Zionist propaganda films, cinematic city utopias, socialist films of the future as well as web videos produced by the Islamist terrorist group ISIS.
Author : Jay Y. Gonen Publisher : University Press of Kentucky Page : 240 pages File Size : 45,6 Mb Release : 2013-07-24 Category : History ISBN : 9780813143682
" Was Hitler a moral aberration or a man of his people? This topic has been hotly argued in recent years, and now Jay Gonen brings new answers to the debate using a psychohistorical perspective, contending that Hitler reflected the psyche of many Germans of his time. Like any charismatic leader, Hitler was an expert scanner of the Zeitgeist. He possessed an uncanny ability to read the masses correctly and guide them with ""new"" ideas that were merely reflections of what the people already believed. Gonen argues that Hitler's notions grew from the general fabric of German culture in the years following World War I. Basing his work in the role of ideologies in group psychology, Gonen exposes the psychological underpinnings of Nazi Germany's desire to expand its living space and exterminate Jews. Hitler responded to the nation's group fantasy of renewing a Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. He presented the utopian ideal of one large state, where the nation represented one extended family. In reality, however, he desired the triumph of automatism and totalitarian practices that would preempt family autonomy and private action. Such a regimented state would become a war machine, designed to breed infantile soldiers brainwashed for sacrifice. To achieve that aim, he unleashed barbaric forces whose utopian features were the very aspects of the state that made it most cruel.
This set of 9 volumes, originally published between 1965 and 1991, amalgamates a wide breadth of research on John Milton, with a particular focus on his epic poem Paradise Lost. This collection of books from some of the leading scholars in the field provides a comprehensive overview of how Milton criticism has evolved over time, and will be of particular interest to students of English Literature.
