Suchergebnisse

Taking methodological cues primarily from James Buzard's bookThe Beaten Track(1993), Susan Layton examines the socially divisive construction of the Russian tourist abroad in mainstream writings published in Russia between 1856 and 1863. It was during this early reform era that Russians first began publicly worrying aboutturistyandturizmas components of their national culture. The prism of divisiveness complicates a scholarly tendency to interpret the production of imperial Russian travel narratives as a nation-building enterprise from the eighteenth century onward. Although nationalist sentiments persisted in early reform public discourse concerning leisure travel, writers also fissured the nation along lines of social estate, gender, education, cultural competence, and moral values. Layton's comparative approach establishes parallels between snobbish nineteenth-century English and Russian views of ill-prepared "crowds" of tourists abroad but underlines Russian convictions that all Russian travel to western Europe should pursue educational and moral benefits.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.—Shakespeare,Twelfth NightPaul Fussell'sThe Great War and Modern Memorywas a landmark in the study of literature's role in shaping a society's remembrance of war. Although Fussell's book is primarily devoted to famous British poets of World War I, he stimulates thinking about the general question of how any military conflict comes to exist in the minds of civilian readers. A fascinating aspect of this immense topic concerns the power of words in the absence of images. Before newsreels and television regularly exposed civilians to scenes of carnage, writers had to rely on language to "depict" things a reader had never witnessed and probably never would. A picture can serve as a powerful substitute for seeing a massacre, and just one may leave an indelible mark. But words alone lack the stunning immediacy of visual images, an argument we can trace back to Aristotle. Verbal "depiction" is only a metaphor, as Viktor Shklovskii stressed when he asserted (with reference to suicide) that "'Blood' in poetry is not bloody." Unlike some deconstructionists, Shklovskii was not fretting about how much reality bloodshed has "prior to verbal configurations." He pinpointed instead the emotional and aesthetic detachment of readers never threatened by violence.