Living Books


Book Description

Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative--not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality. In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project--not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality. Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn't cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.




Literature and Politics


Book Description

In the discourse of Indonesian literature history, the relationship between literature and politics is pressing issue, a situation that cannot be easily to overcome. A long time ago, during the Dutch colonial government, there was a rule that literature should not discuss ideology, religion, and politics. This colonial policy lasts and never changes even though Indonesia was already get its independence. Thats why Indonesian literary society and writers have a strong believe that literature must not be involved in politics and it must not have any moral and political goals. Literature cannot be related to real-life directly because literature is only a fictional work. The historical aspects outside literature are considered as a background or a foreground that cannot destroy the authentic characteristics of the literary works as imaginary fictional works. Literary works tend to be only considered as entertainment tools that narrate an alternative world, which is totally different from the world where we are living. This book will be the first in discussing the relationship between literature and politics. Students and experts of various sciences who would like to understand the episteme of the New Order can get benefits from this book. This book gives us a reflection that the development is for human beings, not the human beings are for the development. The humanistic development dimension must be a must. Literary works still exist continuously to guard the Indonesians' struggles in defending their human dignity.




The Literary Field under Communist Rule


Book Description

This volume widens the field of Soviet literature studies by interpreting it as a multinational project, with national literatures acting not as copies of the Russian model, but as creators of a multidimensional literary space. The book proposes a reconsideration of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of literary field and analyzes the interactions of literature, power, and economics under the communist rule. The articles selected include theoretical discussions and case studies from different national literatures presenting different structural elements of the Soviet literary field, as well as phenomena created by the complexity of the field itself, such as the Aesopian language, state of emergency literature, or compromise as the essential element of the writers’ identity.




Nature and National Identity After Communism


Book Description

In this groundbreaking book, Katrina Schwartz examines the intersection of environmental politics, globalization, and national identity in a small East European country: modern-day Latvia. Based on extensive ethnographic research and lively discourse analysis, it explores that country's post-Soviet responses to European assistance and political pressure in nature management, biodiversity conservation, and rural development. These responses were shaped by hotly contested notions of national identity articulated as contrasting visions of the "ideal" rural landscape.The players in this story include Latvian farmers and other traditional rural dwellers, environmental advocates, and professionals with divided attitudes toward new European approaches to sustainable development. An entrenched set of forestry and land management practices, with roots in the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras, confront growing international pressures on a small country to conform to current (Western) notions of environmental responsibility—notions often perceived by Latvians to be at odds with local interests. While the case is that of Latvia, the dynamics Schwartz explores have wide applicability and speak powerfully to broader theoretical discussions about sustainable development, social constructions of nature, the sources of nationalism, and the impacts of globalization and regional integration on the traditional nation-state.




Rethinking the Rule of Law After Communism


Book Description

"This book is concerned to assess, and to draw some of the implications of, the legal developments of these last dozen or so years, specifically as they speak to issues of constitutionalism, dealing with the past, and the rule of law."--Introduction.




Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse


Book Description

The collection Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse represents selected proceedings from the conference, Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse: 20th Century Experience, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in October 2009. The Tbilisi conference pioneered scholarly inquiry into post-Soviet space, which evaluated political and cultural realia, emphasizing the challenges facing literature and culture in totalitarian strangleholds, various kinds of ideological diktat, their possible forms and consequences. The Soviet type of totalitarianism was especially accentuated. Decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, full comprehension of the process of Sovietization has become possible, and in the field of literary studies scholars have worked on a number of issues: assessing conceptual and motivational models of Soviet-period texts; demonstrating the reaction of literary discourse to intellectual terror and systematizing alternative models offered by anti-Soviet discourse; exhibiting the myths and stereotypes of the totalitarian epoch; and classifying literary genres. The collection Soviet Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse has gathered papers by scholars from almost all of the post-Soviet states, as well as of some other countries. It is a first attempt to solve the above-mentioned issues and offers a wide array of questions.




Reassessing Communism


Book Description

The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon. The authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism. Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves. The book is interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history, intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.




Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature


Book Description

*Shortlisted for the 2018 Book Award in Social Sciences of the Central Eurasian Studies Society* Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature is a book about cultural transformations and trajectories of national imagination in modern Kazakhstan. The book is a much-needed critical introduction and a comprehensive survey of the Kazakh literary production and cultural discourses on the nation in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. In the absence of viable and open forums for discussion and in the turbulent moments of postcolonial and cultural transformation under the Soviets, the Kazakh writers and intellectuals widely engaged with the national identity, heritage and genealogy construction in literature. This active process of national canon construction and its constant re-writing throughout the twentieth century will inform the readers of the complex processes of cultural transformations in forms, genres and texts as well as demonstrating the genealogical development of the national narrative. The main focus of this book is on the cultural production of the nation. The focus is on the narratives of historical continuities produced in the literature and cultural discontinuities and inter-elite competition which inform such production. The development of Kazakh literary production is an extremely interesting yet underrepresented field of study. Since the late nineteenth century it saw a rapid transformation from the traditional oral to print literature. This brought an unprecedented shift in genres and texts production as well as a rapid growth of the ‘writing’ class – urban colonial and first generations of Soviet intelligentsia. Kazakh literary production became the flagman of republic’s rapid cultural modernization and prior to the World War II local publishing industry produced up to 6 million print copies a year. By the 1960s and 1970s – the golden era of Kazakh literature, the most read literary journal Juldyz sold 50,000 copies all over the country. Literature became the mass provider of knowledge about the past, the present and of the future of the country. Because “Kazakh readers were hungry to find out about their pre-Soviet past and its national glory” national writers competed in genres, styles and ways to write out the nation in prose, poems, essays and historical novels.




Youth in Regime Crisis


Book Description

How do political regimes respond to the challenges emanating from youth mobilization? This book seeks to understand regime resilience and breakdown by analysing the public meaning of youth, as well as the physical mobilization of young people. Mobilization carried by young people is a key component in understanding the stabilisation of the authoritarian regime structures in contemporary Russia, but the Russian experience makes only sense if placed in its broader historical context.Three comparative cases, the breakdown of the authoritarian Soviet Union, the breakdown of the democratic Weimar Republic, and the crisis of the democratic regime in France around 1968 highlight how regimes which lacked popular support have compensated for their insufficient legitimacy by trying to mobilize youth symbolically and politically. This book illustrates the symbolic significance of youth and its role in regime crisis by analysing a new data set of newspaper articles with a new method of discourse analysis. The combination of qualitative interpretation and quantitative network analysis enables a deeper and more systematic understanding of discursive structures about youth. Through this methodological innovation the book contributes to the way we define the categories of youth, generation, and crisis. It makes the case that our conceptualisation should reflect the way terms are being used - usages that can be captured in a systematic way with new methods of discourse analysis. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.




The Fateful Discourse of Worldly Things


Book Description

This broad interdisciplinary and comparative study of the ways in which we discursively "make" the world and its things aims to go beyond the "poetic thinking" of Heidegger toward a more pragmatic way of interpreting concrete social, cultural, and political experience. The book outlines three constitutive functions of world-making. Endowing signifies the direct provision of the "wherewithal" that must come into being if anything else is to come into being. Enabling develops or facilitates what is endowed; it is a kind of education in being-in-the-world. Entitling embraces the realm of justice and decision; it concerns what is right for human beings to have and do and be. Placing these functions in contemporary contexts, the book offers as an alternative some perspectives of American pragmatism (Dewey, Peirce, James, Mead, Buchler) and Continental philosophy (Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl, Barthes, Gramsci). The book closely examines the thinking of Hobbes, Descartes, Vico, Calderón, and Jefferson and several literary figures and thinkers (Yeats, Emerson, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Pascal, Rilke, Frost, Brecht). Throughout, the book investigates and questions the tradition of possessive individualism interpreted by modern scholars, notably Pocock. The book is in five parts. Part I argues a need to move beyond deconstructing toward reconstructing. Part II considers the interactions of endowing, enabling, and entitling. In Part III, the author explores the ways in which discourse works in the Cartesian discourse of reason, and the phenomenon of Manifest Destiny as rendered by Frost. The focus of Part IV is incorporating, which builds on Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh, or the process by which the body acts and becomes fully worldly. Part V addresses the phenomena of experience in a variety of modes, including the role of story and natality, experimental theater, the epistolary novel, and representations of the heroic Lucretia. A postscript, exploring the "conclusion" with which scholarly books typically end, offers a perspectivist reading of the final text, Emerson's "Experience."