Narrating European Society


Book Description

Trenz introduces a sociological perspective on European integration by looking at different accounts of Europeanization as society building. He observes how Europeanization unfolds in ongoing practices and discourses through which social relations among the Europeans are redefined and re-embedded. The chapters describe how the project of European integration has been powerfully launched in postwar Europe as a normative venture that comprises polity and society building, how this project became ingrained in every-day life histories and experiences of the Europeans, how this project became contested and confronted resistances and, ultimately, how it went through its most severe crisis. A sociology of European integration is thus outlined along four main themes or narratives: first, the elite processes of identity construction and the framework of norms and ideas that carries such a construction (together with notions of European identity, EU citizenship, etc.); second, the socialization of European citizens, processes of banal Europeanism, and social transnationalism through everyday cross-border exchanges; third, the mobilization of resistance and Euroskepticism as a fundamental and collectively mobilized opposition to processes of Europeanization; and fourth, the political sociology of crisis, linked not only to financial turmoil but also, more fundamentally, to a legitimation crisis that affects Europe and the democratic nation-state.




Narrating the Nation


Book Description

A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation.




Narrating European Society


Book Description

Trenz introduces a sociological perspective on European integration by looking at different accounts of Europeanization as society building. He observes how Europeanization unfolds in ongoing practices and discourses through which social relations among the Europeans are redefined and re-embedded. The chapters describe how the project of European integration has been powerfully launched in postwar Europe as a normative venture that comprises polity and society building, how this project became ingrained in every-day life histories and experiences of the Europeans, how this project became contested and confronted resistances and, ultimately, how it went through its most severe crisis. A sociology of European integration is thus outlined along four main themes or narratives: first, the elite processes of identity construction and the framework of norms and ideas that carries such a construction (together with notions of European identity, EU citizenship, etc.); second, the socialization of European citizens, processes of banal Europeanism, and social transnationalism through everyday cross-border exchanges; third, the mobilization of resistance and Euroskepticism as a fundamental and collectively mobilized opposition to processes of Europeanization; and fourth, the political sociology of crisis, linked not only to financial turmoil but also, more fundamentally, to a legitimation crisis that affects Europe and the democratic nation-state.




Narrating Post/Communism


Book Description

This book examines communist and post-communist literary and visual narratives, including the writings of prominent anti-communist dissidents and exiles such as Vladimir Nabokov, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, exploring important themes including how Eastern European regimes and cultures have been portrayed as totalitarian, barbarian and "Orientalist" – in contrast to the civilized "West" – disappointment in the changes brought on by post-communist transition, and nostalgia for communism.




Narrating Europe


Book Description

Die Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes haben eine Reihe von Reden von Spitzenpolitikern zur europäischen Integration aus einer großen Zeitspanne (1946-2020) analysiert, wobei sie jede Rede in ihren zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext gestellt und in den biographischen Hintergrund des Redners eingeordnet haben. Die vergleichende Analyse zeigt, dass es notwendig ist, wieder zu entdecken, dass das Ideal des europäischen Einigungswerks genauso spannend sein kann wie andere nationale geschichtliche Kontroversen. Angesichts eines grassierenden Euroskeptizismus kann eine historische Einordnung und Kontextualisierung der Rolle der Kommunikation der europäischen Integration ein nützliches Instrumentarium sein, um die Bedeutung der europäischen Einigung und ihrer Werte zu erklären und zu verstehen. Mit Beiträgen von Dr. Andrea Becherucci, Prof. Frédéric Bozo, Prof. Elena Calandri, Prof. Andrea Catanzaro, Prof. Sante Cruciani, Dr. Deborah Cuccia, Prof. Elena Dundovich, Prof. Laura Fasanaro, Dr. Eva Garau, Prof. Dr. Michael Gehler, Prof. Piero Graglia, Prof. Giorgio Grimaldi, Prof. Gilles Grin, Prof. Maria Eleonora Guasconi, Prof. Giuliana Laschi, Prof. Guido Levi, Prof. Antonio Moreno Juste, Prof. Mara Morini, Prof. Marinella Neri Gualdesi, Dr. Jean-Marie Palayret, Prof. Simone Paoli, Prof. Daniele Pasquinucci, Prof. Laura Piccardo, Prof. Francesco Pierini, Prof. Ilaria Poggiolini, Prof. Daniela Preda, Prof. Sabine Russ-Sattar, Prof. Carlos Sanz Diaz, Prof. Jan Van der Harst, Prof. Antonio Varsori und Laura Wolf.




Reason and Society in the Middle Ages


Book Description

This book concentrates on the 250 years beteen the late 11th and early 14th centuries and studies two key facets of the rationalistic tradition.




Transcultural Modernities


Book Description

The swelling flows of migration from Africa towards Europe have aroused interest not only in the socio-political consequences of the migrants' insistent appeals to 'fortress Europe' but also in the artistic integration of African migrants into the cultural world of Europe. While in recent years the creative output of Africans living in Europe has received attention from the media and in academia, little critical consideration has been given to African migrants' modes of narration and the manner in which these modes give expression to, or are an expression of, their creators' transcultural realities. Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe responds to this need for reflection by examining the manner in which migrants compose and negotiate their Euro-African affiliations in their narratives. The book brings together scholars in the fields of literary and art criticism, cultural studies, and anthropology for an extensive interdisciplinary exchange on the specific modes of narration displayed in Euro-African literatures, the visual arts, and cinema, as well as offering ethnographic case studies. The result is a wide range of reflections on how African artists, writers, and ordinary people living in Europe experience and explore their transcultural and/or postcolonial environments, and how their experiences and explorations in turn contribute to the construction of modern Euro-African life-worlds.




The History of the European Union


Book Description

This book radically re-conceptualises the origins of the European Union as a trans- and supranational polity as it emerged between the Schuman Plan of May 1950 and the first enlargement of the European Communities at the start of 1973. Drawing upon social science theories and debates as well as recent historical research, Wolfram Kaiser and Morten Rasmussen in their introductory chapters discuss innovative ways of narrating the history of the EU as the emergence of a transnational political society and supranational political system. Building on these insights, eight chapters based on multilateral and multi-archival research follow each with case studies of transnational networks, public sphere and institutional cultures and policy-making which illustrate systematically related aspects of the early history of the EU. In the concluding chapter, leading political scientist Alex Warleigh-Lack demonstrates how greater interdisciplinary cooperation, especially between contemporary history and political studies, can significantly advance our knowledge of the EU as a complex polity. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Politics, European Studies and History.




Analysing Historical Narratives


Book Description

No detailed description available for "Analysing Historical Narratives".




Narrating the Past


Book Description

The relationship between fiction and historiography in Francoist Spain (1939–1975) is a contentious one. The intricacies of this relationship, in which fiction works to subvert the regime’s authority to write the past, are the focus of David K. Herzberger’s book. The narrative and rhetorical strategies of historical discourse figure in both the fiction and historiography of postwar Spain. Herzberger analyzes these strategies, identifying the structures and vocabularies they use to frame the past and endow it with particular meanings. He shows how Francoist historians sought to affirm the historical necessity of Franco by linking the regime to a heroic and Christian past, while several types of postwar fiction—such as social realism, the novel of memory, and postmodern novels—created a voice of opposition to this practice. Focusing on the concept of writing history that these opposing strategies convey, Herzberger discloses the layering of truth and meaning that lies at the heart of postwar Spanish narrative from the early 1940s to the fall of Franco. His study clearly reveals how the novel in postwar Spain became a crucial form of dissent from the past as it was conceived and used by the State. Making a decisive intervention in the debate about the ways in which narration determines both the meaning and truth of history and fiction, Narrating the Past will be of special interest to students and scholars of the politics, history, and literature of twentieth-century Spain.