Olympic Films and Public Memory

How is our memory of mega‐events structured? This article investigates the relationship between cinema and the Olympic Games. To this end, it first unravels the historical origins of the strong link between the two, as both are symbolic products of the 20th century. The Olympics reaffirm the image of the modern nation‐state; the cinematic medium visually represents the Games as spectacle. Leni Riefenstahl's film, Olympia (1938), recorded at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, supplies the most enduring imagery of this type. In addition to Riefenstahl's thoughts and methods, this study delves into Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which was influenced by Olympia. Ichikawa's film, which reflects his artistry and showcases his various skills, won critical acclaim and, intriguingly, precipitated the “document or art” controversy that involved the Japanese state and the mass media. Whether document or work of art, this film has supplied the public with imagery for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games—various images that most of us recognize—and thereby played a key role in constituting our memory of them. Therefore, our experience of the Games is a mediated experience through the construction of our public memory. Our memory culture is composed of “prosthetic memories” that are technologically assembled through cinema and act as Freudian “screen memories.”     

Zinovy Zinik's Narratives of Cultural Dislocation

Abstract

The study examines Zinik's use of translation, theatre and misreading as metaphors for the act of border crossing in his novels and short stories. Through close readings of Zinik's novels The Lord and the Gamekeeper, The Mushroom Picker and The Russian Service, it is demonstrated that Zinik integrates these themes into his work with intent to expose novelistic conventions, confuse the boundary between art and life, and blur the roles of the author, reader and literary protagonist. Zinik's invitations to the reader to enter the worlds of his texts and experience cultural dislocation firsthand are continued in his recent short stories, which reflect the social changes and fluid cultural boundaries associated with globalisation. It is argued that, at the same time, Zinik's work reveals the limitations of conventional binary oppositions such as actor/audience and the utopian claims behind translation, interpretation and globalisation. Thus, it asserts the need to affirm new cultural symbols and practices through which individuals will shape transcultural identities as visions of a homogeneous global culture become more prevalent.     

Peter Kireevskii and the Development of Moscow Slavophilism

Abstract

Although the name of the folklorist Peter Kireevskii is well known to historians of nineteenth-century Russia, comparatively little has been written about his place within the Slavophile circle. Some scholars have treated him as the 'first' Slavophile. Others have questioned whether his views were in any sense really Slavophile at all. This article argues that Peter Kireevskii's life-long interest in Russian folklore was rooted both in his understanding of the Russian countryside and his exposure to the influence of a Russian Romantic tradition that viewed the narod as the authentic representative of national identity. It suggests that Kireevskii was from his youth convinced that Russia possessed a culture and history that was equal in value to any country in the West, but that it was only in the late 1830s that he stressed the role played by Orthodoxy in shaping Russia's development. Although his mature views brought him closer to the Slavophile 'mainstream', there were always some elements that set him apart, perhaps reflecting the fact that Slavophilism was a more eclectic and diverse phenomenon than sometimes realized.     

Revivifying Russia: Literature,Theory, and Empire in Viktor Shklovskii's Civil War Writings

Abstract

When in 1924 Iurii Tynianov identified Viktor Shklovskii's memoir A Sentimental Journey as a work 'on the margin of literature', he was commenting on the text's generic experimentation. But he also provided an apt label for its geopolitical setting, as war drives Shklovskii back and forth from Russia's dying imperial centre Petrograd to the country's peripheries. The sometimes uneasy relationship between Shklovskii's literary theory and his movement through the disintegrating Empire is this essay's main focus. Drawing on recent scholarship that identifies a fundamental paradox of modern literary theory as both the cosmopolitan study of literature per se and a discipline validated by national literary canons, the essay proposes that Shklovskii negotiates cosmopolitan and national impulses by exploring Russian literature as the expression of a multi-ethnic and multilingual empire. In analogy with Shklovskii's famous dictum that art exists to 'make the stone stony', the argument is made that in his Civil War writings Shklovskii strove to revivify the Russian Empire, that is, to 'make Russia Russian', by presenting his readers with a new and strange view of Russia from its imperial borders.     

Vygotsky's Stage Theory: The Psychology of Art and the Actor under the Direction of Perezhivanie

This article reviews Vygotsky's writings on arts (particularly logocentric art including the theater) and emotions, drawing on his initial exploration in The Psychology of Art and his final considerations set forth in a set of essays, treatises, and lectures produced in the last years of his life. The review of The Psychology of Art includes attention to the limits of his analysis, the mixed Marxist legacy that is evident in the book, the cultural blinders that affect his vision of the relative value of different artistic productions, the content of what he elsewhere refers to his “tedious investigations” into extant views, and the gist of what he considers to be the essence of art. Attention to his late work falls into two areas: Emotion in formal drama and emotion in everyday drama, each of which involves perezhivanie, roughly but incompletely characterized as emotional experience. The article concludes with an effort to situate Vygotsky's writing on art and emotion both within his broader effort to articulate a comprehensive developmental psychology of socially, culturally, and historically grounded individuals and social groups, and within scholarship that has extended and questioned his work as his influence has expanded beyond the clinics of Soviet Moscow.     

Imperial Misnomers: Herman Melville's Subversion of Narratives of Exploration

Abstract

In his oeuvre the nineteenth-century American author Herman Melville engages critically with the role of narrative taxonomies in imperial praxis, particularly as they relate to his own country's emergence as imperial nation. The relativising influence of Melville's years at sea is an important factor in shaping the ontologically indeterminate and anti-teleological character of his narratives, which both critically and parodically recall the ways in which narrative representations serve imperial ends by bridging or overwriting epistemological lacunae. Melville's lectures ‘On Traveling’ and ‘The South Seas’ provide a useful introduction to his countervailing perspective: the former, by delineating a mode of travelling that remains open to that which is other; the latter by considering critically the introduction of the Pacific into Western historiography by means of several acts of misnaming and symbolic appropriation. Melville highlights the self-deconstructive nature of such acts, yet also shows a keen understanding of how nominal appropriation and exotic refiguration foreground and enable colonisation. This recognition informs Melville's first prose fiction, Typee, in which he launches a two-pronged critique of imperialism: by his first person narrator's polemic against missionary and naval activity in the Marquesas, but also, more tellingly, by exposing this narrator's own acts of misrepresentation, which suggest a deeper complicity in the discourse of empire.     

The reproduction of culture and personality: Critique of Christopher Lasch

Following in the theoretical tradition of the Frankfurt School, Christopher Lasch contends that the narcissistic personality has become the modal personality type in the United States. According to Lasch, the narcissistic personality is nurtured in the contemporary nuclear family and sustained by a culture that promotes immediate gratification and a preoccupation with the self.

The central aim of this paper is to critically analyze Lasch's argument. The paper will show that Lasch's perspective rests on the unfounded psychoanalytic assumption that the adult personality is crystallized during childhood socialization and remains largely resistant to change. It will further be shown that Lasch's Freudianism is at odds with his Marxist politics, and that his conceptualization of culture and personality rests upon a functionalist bias in his theoretical perspective. The conclusion of this paper is that Lasch does not provide any reliable evidence for the existence of a narcissistic personality type in contemporary America.     

Parting words: Trauma,silence and survival

Abstract

This article examines an enigma at the heart of Freud's work on trauma: the surprising emergence, from within the theory of the death drive, of the drive to life, a form of survival that both witnesses and turns away from the trauma in which it originates. I analyse in particular the striking juxtaposition, in Freud's founding work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of his two primary examples of trauma: the repetitive nightmares of battle suffered by the soldiers of World War I, and the game of the child, faced with the loss of its mother, who plays fort and da (there and here) with his spool. My own understanding of Freud's insight did not emerge, however, simply through a reading of his text but began, in fact, in my encounter with a real child in Atlanta, a child whose best friend was murdered in the street and who is interviewed by the friend's mother. I thus read together the language of the nightmare and the language of the child in Freud's text, and then attempt to understand how Freud's text and the language of the real child shed light upon each other.     

Home of the Brave,Frantz Fanon and cultural pluralism

Abstract

This article examines Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (1949, USA), a Hollywood social problem drama about anti-black racism, and the brief but vivid response to the film presented in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Fanon enables a rethinking of some of the film's most central assumptions and the discourses upon which the story relies. At the same time, Fanon's response conveys information about his own biography and his perspectives on cultural representation generally. The article examines the film as a document that reveals competing claims about anti-black racism and, through Fanon's commentary, revisits the relationship between cultural pluralism and racial ideologies in the mid-20th century USA. The article explores the nature of Fanon's anti-racist commentary on the film as a form of 'cultural studies' that offers transnational historical insight and simultaneously provides ways of re-examining the national specificity of race thinking.     

Understanding Georg Simmel

Abstract

This paper makes two basic claims. First, Simmel was aware of the Als-Ob (“As-If”) before Vaihinger published his Die Philosophie des Als-Ob (The Philosophy of As-If) (Vaihinger, 1911 [1935]), and he used the As-If in his epistemology of the social sciences. It is difficult to understand Simmel's sociology without recognizing the role of the As-If. However, this essential part of Simmel's epistemology of the social sciences almost has gone unreported in the standard literature. Second, Simmel formulated a concept of relativity. This concept, too, is an important part of his epistemology, yet it is not understood well. Only through an appreciation of his view of relativity can Simmel's concept Wechselwirkung (usually translated as “reciprocal interaction” but more exactly translated as “reciprocal effect”) be interpreted properly. Without an understanding of his concept of relativity Simmel's form-content relation does not convey the sense intended. This paper demonstrates that the form-content relation as used by Simmel is, in current terminology, the theory-model relation. Finally, use is made of my explication of Simmel's epistemology to clarify some relations between Simmel's ideas and Durkheim's position.     

The Utility of Weber's Ideal Type: Verstehen and the Theory of Critical Mass

Weber's concepts of the ideal type and Verstehen are perhaps the most often discussed and debated but least understood of all his methodological formulations. This is in part a consequence of the complexity regarding the historical and intellectual matrix in which he developed his conceptual thought, and in part the relationship of the ideal type and Verstehen to other central aspects both of his methodology and theoretical works. The full scope of Weber's effort, and the relevance of this to contemporary sociological and historical investigations, can be found in his orientation to positivism and its role vis-a-vis the social sciences. A return by social scientists to mathematical modeling (which is not necessarily the province of the natural sciences) may, ironically, provide the foundation for returning back to a reconsideration of Weber's methodological thought, while repositioning the role of the ideal type and positivism in sociological investigations.     

Truth,lies, and racial consequences in Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by relating the author's vision of the role of Africa in the literary imagination to issues the novel raises for postcolonial cultural and historical criticism. Analyzing the novel's narrative, which draws upon Hemingway's second safari to Kenya in 1953–4, offers insight into Hemingway's 'African American' consciousness, and the new awareness that he was able substantively to arrive at for the first time in this novel, less than 10 years before his death. This awareness inaugurated what might be called a fictional reverse migration, whereby Hemingway reconnects with the black native perspective on Africa that he encountered on his first safari in 1933–4, in order to acquire material insight into what blacks were experiencing in America at the time of his second safari. Identifying this awareness also leads to the possibility of (re)reading Hemingway's racial perspective in his earlier works with African settings.     

Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale: a unique social engagement

Abstract

Art as a social engagement in the West can be dated back to the history of avant-garde art starting from the end of nineteenth century. Rooted in his own cultural background, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s socially engaged art project “Fairytale is more complex than the avant-garde strategy. The work Fairytale established a structure – “1=1,001”. That means on the one hand, the participants can be easily regarded everywhere in Kassel as 1,001 mobile works of art. All of them contribute to an entire work. In other words, the 1,001 people consist of one work. On the other hand, everyone is dealing with their personal issues independent of art. In this sense, the entire work can be divided into 1,001 personal experiences. This structure is based on three principles of Chinese philosophy Taoism – the duality between Yin and Yang, the dynamism between Yin and Yang, and the concept of “uselessness”. Positioning Fairytale within both Western theoretical as well as Chinese philosophical contexts, this essay is to analyze how Chinese philosophy shaped Ai’s strategy of social engagement and his cultural identity – Chineseness.     

The ‘Glasgow King of Billingsgate’: James MacQueen and an Atlantic Proslavery Network1

This article examines the ‘imperial career’ of James MacQueen, one of the most outspoken critics of the British antislavery campaign in the 1820s and 1830s. Rather than considering the particular proslavery discourses that he articulated in his writing, however, the article focuses on his central place within an Atlantic network of proslavery advocacy. Using published and unpublished sources to explore this network, the article begins with MacQueen's time as a plantation overseer in Grenada. Next, it considers his involvement in the slavery controversy after he returned to Glasgow, including his attack on the History of Mary Prince (1831) and its aftermath. Finally, the article considers MacQueen's unexpected role in the Niger Expedition following the abolition of British slavery. In this way, the article demonstrates MacQueen's central place in nineteenth-century anti-abolitionism.     

'The world will be saved by beauty': The Revival of Romantic Theories of the Symbol in Pavel Florenskii's Works

Abstract

From a study of Pavel Florenskii's (1882–1937) works on the symbol from the 1920s, it is suggested that Florenskii's understanding of symbolism bears witness to the revival of romantic theories at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The continuity between romantic theories of the symbol and Florenskii's understanding of the symbolic image has not previously been noted. However, the closeness of Florenskii's writings and Viacheslav Ivanov's on the symbol has been noticed, while Ivanov's indebtedness to the German romantics has long been known. Thus, another relatively little studied dimension of Florenskii's work is uncovered and, in particular, his involvement with Russian Symbolism and with its main theoretical spokesman. Florenskii's understanding of the symbol is seen in the context of developments growing out of the October Revolution, but also, more broadly, as a response to the crisis of modernity. The romantic definition of the symbol, as accepted by Florenskii, is an attempt to restore the lost sense of belonging to 'higher' reality through the ontological identity between 'being' and 'thing'. The mission of art in this project is of fundamental importance and it can be summed up in the famous words of Dostoevskii's character, Prince Myshkin, in The Idiot: 'beauty will save the world'.     

William Blake and America: Freedom and Violence in the Atlantic World

Abstract

In this article, I consider the absence of a general readership of William Blake's poetry in nineteenth-century Britain and compare that neglect to the American Transcendentalists' reading of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) in the 1840s. The American interest in Blake's poetry is complemented by his fascination with the events in the Atlantic World in the years culminating in the American War of Independence. I will offer a reading of Blake's America: a Prophecy (1793) showing that the Civil War fulfilled his prophecy of inevitable future conflict. This is developed first by considering Ralph Waldo Emerson's changing responses to slavery and race during the turbulent middle decades of the century, and then by addressing Walt Whitman's attempt to negotiate postbellum America. This negotiation, I argue, results in the emergence of those two powerfully conflicting strains in his mature poetry: emancipatory fervour and simultaneous despair at the violence intrinsic in liberty.     

Enabling Fictions: Philip Roth's Prosthetic Anne Franks

Abstract

In this article, it is argued that insufficient attention has been paid to Philip Roth's uses of Anne Frank in his work. Concentrating on the 'Zuckerman' and 'Philip Roth' novels in which Anne Frank is discussed, it is illustrated that Anne Frank functions as a 'narrative prosthesis' not only in Roth's work and within American postwar culture, but that all representations of Anne Frank function as narrative prosthesis. The concept of Anne Frank as narrative prosthesis allows for recognition of the fact that Roth characterises writing and identity as prosthesis. Exploration of Roth's uses of Anne Frank also exposes problematics in his own work, particularly in his representations of women.     

“Our Artistic Home”: Adolescent Girls and Domestic Interiors in the Girl’s Own Paper

Abstract

By zooming in on the Girl’s Own Paper (GOP), this essay demonstrates how the production and dissemination of shared domestic cultures are directed at adolescent girls through esthetic practices of furnishing and decorating the home. The essay aims to contextualize the role of household art in the relationship between female adolescence and bourgeois domestic interiors in fin de siècle Britain. The relationship reveals three important aspects of domestic cultures: household art, do-it-yourself crafts, and material collecting. First, the GOP advises adolescent girls to read and interpret the language of household art through selection and placing, which, in turn, facilitates the construction of the textuality of interior furnishings. The GOP’s esthetic theory, an integral part of educating and improving girls’ taste, functions to enhance their room-layout skills and also construct their architectural identities. Second, adolescent girls are credited with the active role of young home-makers in the GOP. The practice of amateur upholstery shapes female youth’s artistic self-expression and manifests their autonomous control over the making of home-crafted objects. And thirdly, the act of collecting furniture pieces and decorative items functions to address the various components of a room alongside contemporary social concerns about good taste. The accumulation of artifacts allows girls to achieve a sense of materiality and ownership contained within the domestic sphere. Home decoration in general provides a focal point for understanding how the familial space becomes the site of adolescent girls’ artistic labor and household elegancies.     

Frank O'Hara in New York Race relations,poetic situations,postcolonial space

Abstract

Frank O'Hara's 1958 poem 'Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets' cites 'race' as 'the poetic ground on which we rear our smiles', a phrase that points to both domestic and international contexts for reading this New York poet. At the same time, 'race' has a history of specific valences in O'Hara's work – as a focus of exoticized images of desire, aesthetic fulfillment, and social energy. Further, race, inflected through various colonial screens, becomes the central avenue leading toward O'Hara's project of rewriting the parameters of social space in poetry, a radical aestheticization not just of landscape but of social relations, with a consequent socialization of the act of writing. This article explores O'Hara's spatial poetics through the terms of Situationist theory, in which the techniques of dérive and détournement are applied to a reading of the poet's active suspension of the 'rules' of a gridded and hierarchical social order.     

The Judgments of David Bergelson

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I read the Yiddish author David Bergelson’s statements at his secret trial through the lens of his own earlier fiction about Soviet justice, especially his novel Judgment. I examine Bergelson’s self-fashioning as a Jewish writer and how he uses his own Jewish background as a justification for his failures as a Soviet person. I offer some contextualization of Bergelson’s statements in light of other trials of other writers both before and after 1952, and compare his declaration of love for Yiddish with other, similar expressions. Bergelson does not merely defend himself, he creates a memory about his legacy for the future.