A timely exploration of intellectual dogmatism in politics, economics, religion, and literature—and what can be done to fight it Polarization may be pushing democracy to the breaking point. But few ...have explored the larger, interconnected forces that have set the stage for this crisis: namely, a rise in styles of thought, across a range of fields, that literary scholar Gary Saul Morson and economist Morton Schapiro call "fundamentalist." In Minds Wide Shut, Morson and Schapiro examine how rigid adherence to ideological thinking has altered politics, economics, religion, and literature in ways that are mutually reinforcing and antithetical to the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that animate democracy. In response, they propose alternatives that would again make serious dialogue possible.Fundamentalist thinking, Morson and Schapiro argue, is not limited to any one camp. It flourishes across the political spectrum, giving rise to dueling monologues of shouting and abuse between those who are certain that they can't be wrong, that truth and justice are all on their side, and that there is nothing to learn from their opponents, who must be evil or deluded. But things don't have to be this way. Drawing on thinkers and writers from across the humanities and social sciences, Morson and Schapiro show how we might begin to return to meaningful dialogue through case-based reasoning, objective analyses, lessons drawn from literature, and more.The result is a powerful invitation to leave behind simplification, rigidity, and extremism—and to move toward a future of greater open-mindedness, moderation, and, perhaps, even wisdom.
This article examines the range of the anticommunist Cold War mindset in Romanian postmodernism and its evolution from the pre-1989 “anti-political” ethos of writers to a public master narrative that ...led the competition for political, cultural and literary power after 1989. My main argument challenges the readings of East-Central European postmodernism that overstate its oppositional stance against state structures and its post-Cold War drive towards heteroglossia. Instead, I argue that Romanian postmodernism radicalized a Cold War Manichean worldview with a distinctly North American shape and prolonged its life into a public mythology of anticommunism that worked in service of the power structures of post-communism. With this view, I analyze the two historical stages of these literary and political entanglements. On the one hand, Romanian postmodernism emerged in the 1980s as a partially autocolonial iteration of the American postmodern theory and literature, whose anti-totalizing epistemology befitted the antitotalitarian drive of the pre-1989 literary intelligentsia. As such, Romanian postmodernists could channel their frustration with the regime through the metafictional deconstruction of historical truth and representation and through fictional allegories of the private individual. On the other hand, the principles of liberalism weaved into the literary program developed during the 1980s were recast after 1989 in support of the post-communist market capitalism. Consequently, Romanian postmodernists acted upon their aesthetic choices with a sense of political agency, by advocating a fast-track adjustment to Western type neoliberalism, which disabled the leftist arguments that had nurtured Western variants of postmodernism.
The contributions of the theory of the radical historicity of literature, which conceives it as an ideological discourse in line with a certain Marxist tradition, particularly the Althusser, have not ...yet been systematized and analyzed within the existing bibliography on the poets of the Generation of 1927. In this article Juan Carlos Rodríguez's history and criticism on this poetic group and on some of its eminent representatives will be presented. This theorist develops an intriguing ideological reading that contrasts with the established approaches and, in a new way, places these poets in the social, cultural, and political history of contemporary Spain.
The relationship between language and ideology has long been central to research in discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and has also informed other fields ...such as sociology and literary criticism. This book, by one of the world's leading pragmatists, introduces a new framework for the study of ideology in written language, using the tools, methods and theories of pragmatics and discourse analysis. Illustrations are drawn systematically from a coherent corpus of excerpts from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history textbooks dealing with episodes of colonial history and in particular the 1857 'Indian Mutiny'. It includes the complete corpus of excerpts, allowing researchers and students to evaluate all illustrations; at the same time, it provides useful practice and training materials. The book is intended as a teaching tool in language-, discourse- and communication-oriented programs, but also for historians and social and political scientists.
This paper examines the changing presentation of teachers in the post-Mao era. The image of teachers was almost sacred in traditional Confucian society until Mao Zedong launched China’s Cultural ...Revolution in 1966, when children were encouraged to use the pretext of class struggle to critique and even to attack their teachers. As such, restoring the high status of teachers in children’s literature became the first step in fighting against Maoist radicalism after his death in 1976. Since then, the internal logic of the development of literature has been shaped by the social movement of Openness and Reform and nurtured by a return of realist aesthetics. Meanwhile, Chinese society has also been changing rapidly, and so has the portrayal of teachers in stories for the young, which has become more diversified. Analysis of these changing images offers us an insight into China’s education system, as well as the use of Chinese children’s literature as a didactic tool for moral education.
La Revolución cubana fue saludada en la República Popular de Rumania con entusiasmo y las políticas similares favorecieron el rápido establecimiento de unos acuerdos bilaterales, entre estos uno que ...concernía a los intercambios culturales. Pronto, gracias a ellos, los escritores rumanos empezaron a viajar a Cuba y sus colegas cubanos a Rumania, por lo cual entre 1960 y 1980 varios escritores rumanos pudieron visitar y escribir sobre el país socialista antillano. Nuestro artículo pretende presentar los viajes de los escritores rumanos a Cuba y analizar los textos que escribieron sobre su experiencia cubana, observando que estos textos producen un corpus muy heterogéneo tanto desde el punto de vista genérico como desde el punto de vista del grado de adhesión a la ideología promovida por los dirigentes socialistas. Es interesante también el hecho de que las notas de viaje a Cuba no reflejan siempre las transformaciones del discurso ideológico oficial y de las políticas culturales que afectaron a la Rumania socialista. Sin agotar el tema, esta incursión en el campo de las relaciones entre las instituciones culturales rumano-cubanas es capaz de poner en evidencia las similitudes de las políticas culturales del antiguo bloque socialista y de la Cuba de los años 1960-1980.
The Cuban Revolution was enthusiastically received in The Romanian People's Republic and the two nations' similar policies contributed to several bilateral agreements, one of which focused on cultural exchanges. As a result of these agreements, Romanian writers started travelling to Cuba and their Cuban counterparts travelled to Romania, allowing several Romanian writers to visit and write about the Caribbean country. This article presents the Romanian writers' travels to Cuba and analyses the texts they wrote about their Cuban experience, concluding that these texts compose a very heterogeneous corpus, both from a generic and from an ideologic point of view, in what regards their degree of support of the socialist leaders' ideology. Another outstanding feature of these texts is that the writers' travel diaries about Cuba do not always show the changes in the official ideological discourse, or the changes in cultural policy that affected socialist Romania. Without exhausting all the questions raised by the theme, this insight into the relations between the Romanian and Cuban cultural institutions highlights the similarities between cultural policies in the old Socialist Block and in 1960-1980's Cuba.
Academic Studies Press is proud to present this translation of Professor Andrei Zorin’s seminal Kormya Dvuglavogo Orla. This collection of essays includes several that have never before appeared in ...English, including “The People’s War: The Time of Troubles in Russian Literature, 1806-1807” and “Holy Alliances: V. A. Zhukovskii’s Epistle ‘To Emperor Alexander’ and Christian Universalism.”
An exploration of the constructions of authority in Eurasian empires in fictional texts of various genres, showing remarkable parallels, and the fluidity of literary material as a repository of ...cultural/political values.
Epic Revisionism Platt, Kevin M. F; Brandenberger, David
2006, 20060101
eBook
Focusing on a number of historical and literary personalities who were regarded with disdain in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution—figures such as Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, ...Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov— Epic Revisionism tells the fascinating story of these individuals’ return to canonical status during the darkest days of the Stalin era.      An inherently interdisciplinary project, Epic Revisionism features pieces on literary and cultural history, film, opera, and theater. This volume pairs scholarly essays with selections drawn from Stalin-era primary sources—newspaper articles, unpublished archival documents, short stories—to provide students and specialists with the richest possible understanding of this understudied phenomenon in modern Russian history. “These scholars shed a great deal of light not only on Stalinist culture but on the politics of cultural production under the Soviet system.”—David L. Hoffmann, Slavic Review
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