Suchergebnisse

This book explores the creative work and dissent activities of Czech surrealist Eva Svankmajerová and writer Eda Kriseová, examining the ways in which the women wrote, painted, sculpted, and supported each other while struggling to survive the totalitarian communist regime from the late 1960s to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.

This collection includes eighteen essays that introduce the concept of unpopular culture and explore its critical possibilities and ramifications from a large variety of perspectives. Proposing a third term that operates beyond the dichotomy of high culture and mass culture and yet offers a fresh approach to both, these essays address a multitude of different topics that can all be classified as unpopular culture. From David Foster Wallace and Ernest Hemingway to Zane Grey and fan fiction, from Christian Rock and Country to Black Metal, from Steven Seagal to Genesis (Breyer) P-Orridge, from The Simpsons to The Real Housewives, from natural disasters to 9/11, from thesis hatements to professional sports, these essays find the unpopular across media and genres, and they analyze the politics and the aesthetics of an unpopular culture (and the unpopular in culture) that has not been duly recognized as such by the theories and methods of cultural studies

Writings on human life and the refugee crisis by the most important political artist of our timeAi Weiwei (b. 1957) is widely known as an artist across media: sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and architecture. He is also one of the world's most important artist-activists and a powerful documentary filmmaker. His work and art call attention to attacks on democracy and free speech, abuses of human rights, and human displacement--often on an epic, international scale.This collection of quotations demonstrates the range of Ai Weiwei's thinking on humanity and mass migration, issues that have occupied him for decades. Selected from articles, interviews, and conversations, Ai Weiwei's words speak to the profound urgency of the global refugee crisis, the resilience and vulnerability of the human condition, and the role of art in providing a voice for the voiceless.Select quotations from the book:"This problem has such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow, somewhere, and at some moment." "Allowing borders to determine your thinking is incompatible with the modern era." "Art is about aesthetics, about morals, about our beliefs in humanity. Without that there is simply no art." "I don't care what all people think. My work belongs to the people who have no voice.

"Just as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was seeking re-election on a campaign of 'no experiments,' art avant-garde groups in West Germany were reviving the utopian impulse to unite art and society. Utopia and Dissent in West Germany examines these groups and their legacy. Postwar artists built international as well as intergenerational networks such as Fluxus, which was active in Düsseldorf, Wiesbaden, and Cologne, and the Situationist International based in Paris. These groups were committed to undoing the compartmentalization of everyday life and the isolation of the artist in society. And as artists recast politics to address culture and everyday life, they helped forge a path for the West German extraparliamentary left. Utopia and Dissent in West Germany traces these connections and presents a chronological map of the networks that fed into the extraparliamentary left as well as a geographical map of increasing radicalism as the locus of action shifted to West Berlin. These two maps show that in West Germany artists and their interventions in the structures of everyday life were a key starting point for challenging the postwar order"--

Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- "Culture is humanity's highest need" / As if . . . / Slogans, slogans everywhere -- Freedom and democracy -- Our literature does not leave the country / Nadia al-Ghazzi / Colette al-Khuri -- No such thing as women's literature / Ulfat Idilbi / Salons and Mallahat al-Khani / Nadia Khust and the Nadwa -- Commissioned criticism / Culture after the Fall of the Wall / Commissioned criticism / The fantasy of choice -- Dissident performances / Performing dissidence / The ghoul / -- Historical miniatures -- Filming dreams / The extras / Dreaming features / Documenting dreams -- Lighten your step / Ibrahim Samuil / Waiting / Ghassan al-Jaba'i / Lessons from a rogue state -- Leaving Damascus -- Postscript -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

"This book examines the figure of the public intellectual through the work of Emile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair. It analyses Zola's famous letter "J'Accuse" supporting Alfred Dreyfus and its philosophical and political consequences for the intellectual world, including Indian public intellectuals. The volume is an examination of the critical role which can be played by public intellectuals today by referring to the "J'Accuse" model and an homage to the ideal of living decently and truthfully through the exercise of critical reason and moral excellence. Accessible and comprehensive, the book will be essential reading for students of philosophy and critical reasoning. It will be of interest to general readers as well"--

"The Czech philosopher Jan Patocka not only witnessed some of the most turbulent politics of twentieth-century Central Europe, but shaped his philosophy in response to that tumult. One of the last students of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, he inspired Václav Havel and other dissidents who confronted the Communist regime before 1989, as well as being actively involved in authoring and enacting Charter 77. He died in 1977 from medical complications resulting from interrogations of the secret police. Confronting Totalitarian Minds examines his legacy along with several contemporary applications of his ideas about dissidence, solidarity, and the human being's existential confrontation with unjust politics. Expanding the current possibilities of comparative political theory, the author puts Patocka's ideas about dissidence, citizen mobilization, and civic responsibility into conversation with notable world historical figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Vaclav Havel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and other contemporary activists. In adding a fresh voice to contemporary conversations on transcending injustice, Confronting Totalitarian Minds seeks to educate a wider audience about this philosopher's continued relevance to political dissidents across the world."--

Introduction: the Restoration, the Reformation, and the royal supremacy -- 1. Foundations and legacies: the Reformation and the royal supremacies, 1530-1660 -- 2. The crown and the cavalier Anglicans: prerogative, parliament, and ecclesiastical law -- 3. Spiritual authority and royal jurisdiction: the question of bishops -- 4. Dissenters and the supremacy: the question of toleration -- 5. Anticlericals and 'Erastians': the spectre of Hobbes -- 6. Catholics and Anglicans: James II and Catholic supremacy -- Conclusion

"The Czech philosopher Jan Patocka not only witnessed some of the most turbulent politics of twentieth-century Central Europe, but shaped his philosophy in response to that tumult. One of the last students of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, he inspired Václav Havel and other dissidents who confronted the Communist regime before 1989, as well as being actively involved in authoring and enacting Charter 77. He died in 1977 from medical complications resulting from interrogations of the secret police. Confronting Totalitarian Minds examines his legacy along with several contemporary applications of his ideas about dissidence, solidarity, and the human being's existential confrontation with unjust politics. Expanding the current possibilities of comparative political theory, the author puts Patocka's ideas about dissidence, citizen mobilization, and civic responsibility into conversation with notable world historical figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Vaclav Havel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and other contemporary activists. In adding a fresh voice to contemporary conversations on transcending injustice, Confronting Totalitarian Minds seeks to educate a wider audience about this philosopher's continued relevance to political dissidents across the world."--

"Situated in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural studies, "Generations of Dissent" brings together ten essays offering new and innovative analysis on state hegemony and artistic creativity, cultural production, intellectual movements, and modes of political dissidence across the Middle East and North Africa over the past six decades"--

The purpose of the study is to reconsider the "strict style" beyond the narrative of the "Soviet art" and to identify those characteristics that allowed individual artists from Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Armenia to return to the national artistic tradition and find their own creative language that did not coincide with the values of the totalitarian system. The research methods are based on the fundamental principles of art historical analysis with the involvement of interdisciplinary connections (philosophy, history) to identify the innovative features of the "strict style" as the first important step for the emergence of the art of the "dissenters". The comparative method is used to identify the differences in regional manifestations of the "strict style" based on the national artistic traditions of Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Armenia. The systematic-analytical method is used to highlight the influence of the Khrushchev Thaw on the formation of new worldview values among the creative youth of the post-war period of the 1946s-1955s. The scientific novelty of the study is to identify the plot, plastic, and compositional characteristics of the "strict style" that became the reason for some national artists to search for national artistic traditions and interpret them using their own experience and artistic and figurative language. Conclusions. When comprehending the significance of the "strict style", one should note its importance for the beginnings of the revival of Ukraine's artistic traditions, which soon led to the emergence of "unofficial" art. While its founders, Russian artists, sought to convey the feat of labour of the Soviet man, our individual artists were able to demonstrate the difficult fates and tragedies of their own people (I.-V. Zadorozhnyi), moreover, using the techniques and imagery of avant-garde artists in their artistic language. The national artistic experience of the 1920s and early 1930s prompted them to revive and rethink their own heritage. The subjects, techniques of transmission, and compositional features were similar among the representatives of the "strict style", but the peculiar artistic thinking based on the worldview of their people made some national artists, as well as their colleagues from Estonia, Latvia, and Armenia, interpret the reality of their countrymen differently.