History and Utopian Disillusion

History and Utopian Disillusion
Author: Jun Young Lee
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2008
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780820486420

Canonical but controversial works of radical modernism, John Dos Passos' novels continue to intrigue readers and challenge literary critics with their unique styles and provocative messages. This book offers an insightful and refreshing perspective on his fictional world, exploring the historical vision and utopian aspirations of his early novels in light of their dialectical politics in narrating modern American society. History and Utopian Disillusion convincingly shows that Dos Passos' epic-scale project is a radical hymn of faith dialectically inspiring the utopian resolution of American history by presenting entropic despair and disillusionment.

Between Utopia and Disillusionment

Between Utopia and Disillusionment
Author: Henri Vogt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2005
Genre: Czech Republic
ISBN: 9781571818959

Scholarly interpretations of the collapse of communism and developments thereafter have tended to be primarily concerned with people's need to rid themselves of the communist system, of their past. The expectations, dreams, and hopes that ordinary Eastern Europeans had when they took to the streets in 1989, and have had ever since, have therefore been overlooked - and our understanding of the changes in post-communist Europe has remained incomplete. Focusing primarily on five key areas, such as the heritage of 1989 revolutions, ambivalence, disillusionment, individualism, and collective identities, this book explores the expectations and goals that ordinary Eastern Europeans had during the 1989 revolutions and the decade thereafter, and also the problems and disappointments they encountered in the course of the transformation. The analysis is based on extensive interviews with university students and young intellectuals in the Czech Republic, Eastern Germany and Estonia in the 1990s, which in themselves have considerable value as historical documents.

Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage

Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage
Author: Magda Dragu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2020-02-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000026221

This book uses intermedial theories to study collage and montage, tracing the transformation of visual collage into photomontage in the early avant-garde period. Magda Dragu distinguishes between the concepts of collage and montage, as defined across several media (fine arts, literature, music, film, photography), based on the type of artistic meaning they generate, rather than the mechanical procedures involved. The book applies theories of intermediality to collage and montage, which is crucial for understanding collage as a form of cultural production. Throughout, the author considers the political implications, as collages and montages were often used for propagandistic purposes. This book combines research methods used in several areas of inquiry: art history, literary criticism, analytical philosophy, musicology, and aesthetics.

Catalan Culture

Catalan Culture
Author:
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2018-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786832038

1) The subject matter is topical: Catalonia’s relationship with Spain is arguably the most important political issue within the peninsula today. 2) The coverage is diverse, adopting a multi-generic approach focusing on new and innovative cultural outputs, some of which have received limited critical attention to date. 3) The volume brings together the scholarship of leading UK and US Catalan specialists which is nicely contextualized by the thoroughgoing introduction.

The Last Utopia

The Last Utopia
Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2012-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674256522

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction

Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Lyman Tower Sargent
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2010-09-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0191614424

There are many debates about utopia - What constitutes a utopia? Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical? What is the relationship between utopia and ideology? This Very Short Introduction explores these issues and examines utopianism and its history. Lyman Sargent discusses the role of utopianism in literature, and in the development of colonies and in immigration. The idea of utopia has become commonplace in social and political thought, both negatively and positively. Some thinkers see a trajectory from utopia to totalitarianism with violence an inevitable part of the mix. Others see utopia directly connected to freedom and as a necessary element in the fight against totalitarianism. In Christianity utopia is labelled as both heretical and as a fundamental part of Christian belief, and such debates are also central to such fields as architecture, town and city planning, and sociology among many others Sargent introduces and summarizes the debates over the utopia in literature, communal studies, social and political theory, and theology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Routine Crisis

Routine Crisis
Author: Sarah Muir
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 022675278X

Speaking of crisis -- A suspicious history -- Economies of loss -- Exhausted futures -- Solidary selves -- Argentine afterword.

Ingeborg Bachmann's Utopia and Disillusionment

Ingeborg Bachmann's Utopia and Disillusionment
Author: Leena Eilittä
Publisher:
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2008
Genre: Utopias in literature
ISBN:

In this study Leena Eilittä analyses Bachmann's work via two key concepts - 'utopia' and 'disillusionment' - which allow her to locate Bachmann's thinking in the post war critical discourse in Germany. Already in her early works Bachmann turns to the idea of utopianism as a possibility to cope with the problems of past heritage and with those of contemporary society. It is this utopian perscpective that allows her to address the position of a woman in critical terms and to make reflections about a more equal society in the major body of her writings. -- Publisher.