Situating itself in the field of cultural memory studies, this article traces the slow emergence in German historical discourse of the narrative of an anonymous German woman who survived the Soviet occupation of Berlin in 1945. I will, firstly, conceptualize the historical condition of the Anonyma as a precarious liminal sphere of transition between competing sovereignties that dislodged her political status as citizen and reconstituted her as bare life in the sense of Agamben. Secondly, I direct focus to the relationship between the personal story of the Anonyma and a historical Master narrative pertaining to the period. The article argues for a close connection between the woman’s form of resistance that aimed at replacing unchecked rape with a form of coerced prostitution to reassert limited control over the borders of her body, and the negative reception her diary received after a first publication in Germany in 1959. Her story implicitly challenges a hegemonic discourse of war that treats mass rape as mainly an assault on the nation’s male defenders and that silences the victims’ traumatic experiences with reference to collective guilt and individual shame or treason.
This paper discusses the reception of a Barbary Coast Captivity Narrative by Robert Adams, published in 1816. The text has often been mentioned in studies of the Barbary Coast narrative but not as a document of a transatlantic discourse about African exploration, ethnography, and colonial development. The creation of Adams text and the creation of the Adams archive will be the subject of the paper as seen by contemporary sources on both sides of the Atlantic. The creation of the Adams narration in the city of London is played off again in the reception of the Adams narrative in Boston. Each set of textual “editors” and reviewers attempt to use the text to intervene in a debate about Timbuctoo, the future of African exploration, and the ways a literary “curiosity” is placed within the aesthetic and ideological needs of emerging discourses of African exploration and racial representation in the first decades of the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic.
On the seventh of March 1981 a rock club opened in Leningrad. This happened five years before Soviet cultural authorities were prepared to acknowledge that rock music existed in the USSR. According to official ideology, rock was a symptom of the moral and cultural decay of western capitalist societies, and therefore by definition unsuitable for Soviet audiences. Half a decade later, rock music broke out of its Leningrad reservation and onto public stages to become the soundtrack of perestroika. Rock tapes were distributed and recopied by the millions. The phenomenon received massive attention and generated fierce debates on home soil. Soon, western journalists and academics began arriving to study this curious phenomenon. By 1990, members of the rock community, regional cultural
authorities, and the KGB were all claiming the honour of being the initiators of the Rock Club.
Description:
This book is a revised and corrected version of Steinholts doctoral thesis from 2004.
Any study of punk rock in Russia will in some way come into contact with the massive influence of Egor Letov, his band Grazhdanskaia Oborona, and their extensive output during the late 1980s. Academia has thus far been reluctant to study the band because of its leader's involvement with dubious right-wing movements and his many tasteless and provocative media stunts during the 1990s. By taking its point of departure in Letov's songs from four stages of his band's development, this article seeks to shed light on Grazhdanskaia Oborona's contribution to the development of punk in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. When it comes to Letov's extremist views in the latter half of his career it attempts to venture beyond reductionist notions of fascism, into the complex landscape of the paradoxical and often confusing mixture of extreme ideologies that sprang out of the Soviet collapse. It will argue that Letov's work – his songs – come over as a lot less contradictory and ideologically extreme than their author's political stunts would suggest. Their aesthetics and ideology are first and foremost punk.
The present article deals with the various problems that faced N. V.
Gogol’ working on vol. II of his great novel. Attention is paid not only to
ideological and psychological matters, but also to the more complicated
composition pattern which can be discerned in the five preserved chapters
of “Dead Souls” II
In: Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund, Andreas Vårheim (eds.) (2007): "A Document (Re)turn". Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang,pp. 135-151 Reprinted with permission.
The notion of text has a long tradition inside the human science. A broad definition of this concept considers all man-made products as systems of signs and thereby as texts; but often not “as the physical manifestation as such, but as the abstract representation of a work” (Gunder: 2001, 86). Considering that everything – including sculpture, music, photography and film – can become a text, either a written text – like literature in a traditional sense – or a verbal text, one can at least wonder whether the concept is useful or not.
The notion of document with roots back to ancient times can be considered as multifaceted as the notion of text, but today’s literary critics or art scholars would probably hesitate to use this concept on literary texts or works of art. Speaking about literature as documents, art as documents, food or cloth as documents and so on, Documentation science at the University of Tromsø provokes many humanists. But if anything can be a document as well as a text – what difference does it really make if we are using the one or the other concept?
In this paper I will investigate the notion of document in comparison to the notion of text by means of some literary examples. Focusing on different aspects of literary works, I will try to argue that both concepts can exist side by side.
Description:
Paper presented at DOCAM ’04, University of California, Berkeley,
October 22-24, 2004
In this article the poetry of Jakov Polonskij is compared to Afanasij Fet's verse with a special focus on the motif "night". A juxtaposition of parallel passages demonstrates both similarities and profound differences: on the one hand, Polonskij is familiar with the various aspects of verse technique so brilliantly applied by Fet, while on the other hand he avoids the erotically coloured emotional climax which often concludes Fet's poems. In Polonskij a joyful mood is combined with dissonant notes of doubt and disillusion.