Sincerity after Communism
Sincerity after Communism

Author: Ellen Rutten

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-01-10

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0300224834

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A compelling study of new sincerity as a powerful cultural practice, born in perestroika-era Russia, and how it interconnects with global social and media flows The global cultural practice of a new sincerity in literature, media, art, design, fashion, film, and architecture grew steadily in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Cultural historian Ellen Rutten traces the rise and proliferation of a new rhetoric of sincere social expression characterized by complex blends of unabashed honesty, playfulness, and irony. Insightful and thought provoking, Rutten s masterful study of a sweeping cultural trend with roots in late Soviet Russia addresses postsocialist, postmodern, and postdigital questions of selfhood. The author explores how and why a uniquely Russian artistic and social philosophy was shaped by cultural memory, commodification, and mediatization, and how, under Putin, new sincerity talk merges with transnational pleas to revive sincerity. This essential study stands squarely at the intersection of the history of emotions, media studies, and post-Soviet studies to shed light on a new cultural reality one that is profoundly affecting creative thought, artistic expression, and lifestyle virtually everywhere.

To See Paris and Die
To See Paris and Die

Author: Eleonory Gilburd

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 2018-12-28

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0674980719

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A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year Winner of the AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Cultural Studies Winner of the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies Winner of the Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize Winner of the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize The Soviet Union was a notoriously closed society until Stalin’s death in 1953. Then, in the mid-1950s, a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes, acquiring heightened emotional significance. To See Paris and Die is a history of this momentous opening to the West. At the heart of this history is a process of translation, in which Western figures took on Soviet roles: Pablo Picasso as a political rabble-rouser; Rockwell Kent as a quintessential American painter; Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway as teachers of love and courage under fire; J. D. Salinger and Giuseppe De Santis as saviors from Soviet clichés. Imported novels challenged fundamental tenets of Soviet ethics, while modernist paintings tested deep-seated notions of culture. Western films were eroticized even before viewers took their seats. The drama of cultural exchange and translation encompassed discovery as well as loss. Eleonory Gilburd explores the pleasure, longing, humiliation, and anger that Soviet citizens felt as they found themselves in the midst of this cross-cultural encounter. The main protagonists of To See Paris and Die are small-town teachers daydreaming of faraway places, college students vicariously discovering a wider world, and factory engineers striving for self-improvement. They invested Western imports with political and personal significance, transforming foreign texts into intimate belongings. With the end of the Soviet Union, the Soviet West disappeared from the cultural map. Gilburd’s history reveals how domesticated Western imports defined the last three decades of the Soviet Union, as well as its death and afterlife.

Transcending Postmodernism
Transcending Postmodernism

Author: Raoul Eshelman

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-12-02

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1040253849

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Transcending Postmodernism: Performatism 2.0 is an ambitious attempt to expand and deepen the theory of performatism. Its main thesis is that, beginning in the mid-1990s, the strategies and norms of postmodernism have been displaced by ones that force readers or viewers to experience effects of aesthetically mediated transcendence. These effects include specific temporal strategies (“chunking”), stylizing separated subjectivity (the genius and the fool being its two main poles) and orienting ethics toward actions taken by centered agents bearing a sacral charge. The book provides a critical overview of other theories of post-postmodernism, and suggests that among five text-oriented theories there is basic agreement on its techniques and strategies.

An Indwelling Voice
An Indwelling Voice

Author: Stuart Goldberg

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2023-10-02

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1487544561

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How have poets in recent centuries been able to inscribe recognizable and relatively sincere voices despite the wearing of poetic language and reader awareness of sincerity’s pitfalls? How are readers able to recognize sincerity at all given the mutability of sincere voices and the unavailability of inner worlds? What do disagreements about the sincerity of texts and authors tell us about competing conceptualizations of sincerity? And how has sincere expression in one particular, illustrative context – Russian poetry – both changed and remained constant? An Indwelling Voice grapples, uniquely, with such questions. In case studies ranging from the late neoclassical period to post-postmodernism, it explores how Russian poets have generated the pragmatic framings and poetic devices that allow them to inscribe sincere voices in their poetry. Engaging Anglo-American and European literature, as well as providing close readings of Russian poetry, An Indwelling Voice helps us understand how poets have at times generated a powerful sense of presence, intimating that they speak through the poem.

Revolution Rekindled
Revolution Rekindled

Author: Polly Jones

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0198804342

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Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, a major Soviet initiative was launched to rekindle enthusiasm for the revolution, giving rise to over 150 biographies and historical novels, authored by prominent dissidents, leading historians, and popular historical novelists. What new meanings did revolution take on as it was reimagined by these writers?

Literature, Autonomy and Commitment
Literature, Autonomy and Commitment

Author: Aukje van Rooden

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1501344757

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It is often argued that a new form of committed literature is needed. Embracing the 18th-century Romantic idea of aesthetic autonomy, literature is believed to have turned its back to everyday social and political reality. One of the central questions occupying contemporary literary debates is therefore whether literary autonomy is essential to modern literature ('autonomism') or should be abandoned ('anti-autonomism'). Aukje van Rooden argues that the debate between autonomists and anti-autonomists cannot be anything but a fruitless tug-of-war, because it is based on a distorted historical picture. In order to make sense of the social relevance of contemporary literature, a new theoretical paradigm has to be formulated. Literature, Autonomy and Commitment not only offers an historical-conceptual reconstruction of the Romantic paradigm and the theoretical impasse it has created, but also sketches the outline of a new paradigm, called 'the relational paradigm', based on the relational ontologies developed in 20th- and 21st-century philosophy.

Avant-Garde Post-
Avant-Garde Post-

Author: Marijeta Bozovic

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0674290623

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Avant-Garde Post- follows seven Russophone poets as they reinvigorate leftist art in the wake of state socialism. Rejecting both the Putin regime--with its selective mobilizations of Soviet nostalgia--and Western discourses of liberal superiority, this circle is reviving class-based critique through experimental forms and global collaborations.

Miscommunications
Miscommunications

Author: Timothy Barker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1501363840

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What happens when communication breaks down? Is it the condition for mistakes and errors that is characteristic of digital culture? And if mistakes and errors have a certain power, what stands behind it? To address these questions, this collection assembles a range of cutting-edge philosophical, socio-political, art historical and media theoretical inquiries that address contemporary culture as a terrain of miscommunication. If the period since the industrial revolution can be thought of as marked by the realisation of the possibilities for global communication, in terms of the telephone, telegraph, television, and finally the internet, Miscommunications shows that to think about the contemporary historical moment, a new history and theory of these devices needs to be written, one which illustrates the emergence of the current cultures of miscommunication and the powers of the false. The essays in the book chart the new conditions for discourse in the 21st century and collectively show how studies of communication can be refigured when we focus on the capacity for errors, accidents, mistakes, malfunctions and both intentional and non-intentional miscommunications.

After Marx
After Marx

Author: Colleen Lye

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-03-17

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1108808395

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After Marx:Literature, Theory and Value demonstrates the importance of Marxist literary and cultural criticism for an era of intersectional politics and economic decline. The volume includes fresh approaches to reading poetry, fiction, film and drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary literature, and shows how Marxist literary criticism improves our understanding of racial capitalism, feminist politics, colonialism, deindustrialization, high-tech labor, ecological crisis, and other issues. A key innovation of the volume's essays is how they attend to Marx's theory of value. For Marx, capitalist value demands a range of different kinds of labor as well as unemployment. This book shows the importance of Marxist approaches to literature that reach beyond simply demonstrating the revolutionary potential or the political consciousness of a 19th-century-style industrial working class. After Marx makes an argument for the twenty-first century interconnectedness of widely different literary genres, and far-flung political struggles.

Ludmila Ulitskaya and the Art of Tolerance
Ludmila Ulitskaya and the Art of Tolerance

Author: Elizabeth Skomp

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2015-06-11

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0299304140

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Novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya is a best-selling and critically lauded Russian writer who champions the values of liberalism and tolerance and critiques Putin's policies. This is the first English-language book about this important writer, placing her in the shifting landscape of post-Soviet society and culture.