Over the past twenty years, the traditional picture of Romanticism as an age of revolution has been significantly complicated by discussions of the protracted military campaigns that took place in Europe between 1792 and 1815 and in the colonies for much longer. As Mary Favret has suggested, understanding the art and literature of this period requires that we acknowledge that “Romantic writers found it nearly impossible to imagine any space or time free from the pains . . . of warfare” (609). While earlier scholarship concentrated on the aesthetic ramifications of discrete political events, particularly the French Revolution, we now give equal consideration to the militarization of experience endemic to European capitalism and imperialism and the resulting collapse of the distinction between wartime and peacetime. This reorientation of the critical focus has been extremely productive, allowing for important reassessments of canonical topics and texts. At the same time, this shift has occurred with little if any attention to how the Romantics themselves understood the relationship between war and revolution.1 The goal of this essay is to elucidate this aspect of the Romantic legacy. The first section explores the volatility of the word “revo-
{"title":"Shelley's Wars, Burke's Revolutions","authors":"J. Mieszkowski","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past twenty years, the traditional picture of Romanticism as an age of revolution has been significantly complicated by discussions of the protracted military campaigns that took place in Europe between 1792 and 1815 and in the colonies for much longer. As Mary Favret has suggested, understanding the art and literature of this period requires that we acknowledge that “Romantic writers found it nearly impossible to imagine any space or time free from the pains . . . of warfare” (609). While earlier scholarship concentrated on the aesthetic ramifications of discrete political events, particularly the French Revolution, we now give equal consideration to the militarization of experience endemic to European capitalism and imperialism and the resulting collapse of the distinction between wartime and peacetime. This reorientation of the critical focus has been extremely productive, allowing for important reassessments of canonical topics and texts. At the same time, this shift has occurred with little if any attention to how the Romantics themselves understood the relationship between war and revolution.1 The goal of this essay is to elucidate this aspect of the Romantic legacy. The first section explores the volatility of the word “revo-","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"52 1","pages":"105 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77257678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Throughout the almost two thousand pages of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago there radiates an excoriating condemnation of the Soviet state. However, though it is doubtless true that “Solzhenitsyn repudiates Marxism” (Medvedev 1974b: 69), a now axiomatic reading of The Gulag Archipelago and his other works, this does not rule out The Gulag Archipelago as a source for critical theorizing and social analysis in our own time. I argue that Solzhenitsyn cannot so easily be quarantined off from the practices, predicates, and propensities of the critical or even marxian tradition, just as one cannot really say that there are no tools of critical theory in Solzhenitsyn’s prose. There exists a more nuanced relationship in The Gulag Archipelago to the deeper tradition of critical philosophy through and beyond marxian critique. Most scholarship on Solzhenitsyn-the-Man has repeatedly read the book as a conservative counter-revolutionary tract, a view which has been entrenched since its original publication in the early 1970s. The consequence is that The Gulag Archipelago itself has today been incorporated into the totalizing reputation of Solzhenitsyn’s corpus, but a reputation mostly earned by Solzhenitsyn in other places. The triumphant, Fukuyamist, post-Soviet, and largely Atlanticist secondary scholarship has variously stressed Solzhenitsyn’s metaphysical idealism, religiosity (Ericson and Mahoney xli), conservative constitutionalism (Rowley; Ericson and Mahoney xxxix), anti-modernism (Tempest 2010), authoritarianism (Congdon 56–57; Laber 4), ethno-nationalism (Confino; Yanov 565–66; Mandel 56), Counter-Enlightenment proclivities (Medvedev 1974b: 71), and even putative propinquity to the extreme Right on certain issues (Rowley 336). However, though these observations and assessments have emerged primarily from his later publitsistika writings of the 1990s, they have generally built upon the condemnatory assessment of The Gulag Archipelago that emerged from the Left at the time it was first published in English in 1974. It is from this early critical literature that the enduring portrait of The Gulag Archipelago emerges as a work of
{"title":"Critical Theory from Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago: Style, Technique, and Ideologiekritik","authors":"John Welsh","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the almost two thousand pages of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago there radiates an excoriating condemnation of the Soviet state. However, though it is doubtless true that “Solzhenitsyn repudiates Marxism” (Medvedev 1974b: 69), a now axiomatic reading of The Gulag Archipelago and his other works, this does not rule out The Gulag Archipelago as a source for critical theorizing and social analysis in our own time. I argue that Solzhenitsyn cannot so easily be quarantined off from the practices, predicates, and propensities of the critical or even marxian tradition, just as one cannot really say that there are no tools of critical theory in Solzhenitsyn’s prose. There exists a more nuanced relationship in The Gulag Archipelago to the deeper tradition of critical philosophy through and beyond marxian critique. Most scholarship on Solzhenitsyn-the-Man has repeatedly read the book as a conservative counter-revolutionary tract, a view which has been entrenched since its original publication in the early 1970s. The consequence is that The Gulag Archipelago itself has today been incorporated into the totalizing reputation of Solzhenitsyn’s corpus, but a reputation mostly earned by Solzhenitsyn in other places. The triumphant, Fukuyamist, post-Soviet, and largely Atlanticist secondary scholarship has variously stressed Solzhenitsyn’s metaphysical idealism, religiosity (Ericson and Mahoney xli), conservative constitutionalism (Rowley; Ericson and Mahoney xxxix), anti-modernism (Tempest 2010), authoritarianism (Congdon 56–57; Laber 4), ethno-nationalism (Confino; Yanov 565–66; Mandel 56), Counter-Enlightenment proclivities (Medvedev 1974b: 71), and even putative propinquity to the extreme Right on certain issues (Rowley 336). However, though these observations and assessments have emerged primarily from his later publitsistika writings of the 1990s, they have generally built upon the condemnatory assessment of The Gulag Archipelago that emerged from the Left at the time it was first published in English in 1974. It is from this early critical literature that the enduring portrait of The Gulag Archipelago emerges as a work of","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"52 1","pages":"27 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74263690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
If war forms the prototypical content of Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction, his novels nonetheless repudiate war’s violence as they propel their heroes into a future of peaceful progress and development (Jameson 266). Epitomized by Scott’s first three Waverley novels, which recount the progress of Scottish manners and society in the second half of the 18th century (the novels “by the Author of Waverley”), the historical novel archetypally tracks a historical progression from military action to companionate love and a settled, domestic life (Duncan 51–105; Christensen 153–75). The hero’s path to maturity and social integration allegorizes the nation’s own historical movement away from a past dominated by civil war, fierce and bloody conflicts between Jacobites and Hanoverians or Saxons and Normans, and towards a liberal world of peace and prosperity in which conflict is resolved through the discursive institutions of the law and polite conversation. In this liberal reading, war may be central to the historical novel, but war appears as an aestheticized and archaic romance which can invigorate yet which stands outside the progress and political control of modern life. The passive hero of the historical novel is a key figure of liberalism and its peaceful negotiation of conflict, the capacious form of the novel itself mimicking the inclusiveness that defines civil society. It is the contention of this article, however, that the emergence of liberalism cannot be so easily disentangled from the violence that it disavows. Focusing on The Antiquary (1816), in which Scott concluded the first three of his Waverley novels by bringing his history of Scotland up to his own era, this article argues that the novel does not simply displace war into romance but, rather, reveals a transformation of war under liberal regimes into a new kind of militarized discourse of security, or what Jacques Rancière has described as the “pacification of the political” (1995: 20). Georg Lukács’s Marxist analysis of Scott’s fiction invites us to read war back into the historical novel: his thesis is that individuals first began to see themselves as historical participants in national life as a result of the mass mobilization and political propaganda of the French
{"title":"The Liberal Paradigm of Security in Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary","authors":"Neil Ramsey","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"If war forms the prototypical content of Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction, his novels nonetheless repudiate war’s violence as they propel their heroes into a future of peaceful progress and development (Jameson 266). Epitomized by Scott’s first three Waverley novels, which recount the progress of Scottish manners and society in the second half of the 18th century (the novels “by the Author of Waverley”), the historical novel archetypally tracks a historical progression from military action to companionate love and a settled, domestic life (Duncan 51–105; Christensen 153–75). The hero’s path to maturity and social integration allegorizes the nation’s own historical movement away from a past dominated by civil war, fierce and bloody conflicts between Jacobites and Hanoverians or Saxons and Normans, and towards a liberal world of peace and prosperity in which conflict is resolved through the discursive institutions of the law and polite conversation. In this liberal reading, war may be central to the historical novel, but war appears as an aestheticized and archaic romance which can invigorate yet which stands outside the progress and political control of modern life. The passive hero of the historical novel is a key figure of liberalism and its peaceful negotiation of conflict, the capacious form of the novel itself mimicking the inclusiveness that defines civil society. It is the contention of this article, however, that the emergence of liberalism cannot be so easily disentangled from the violence that it disavows. Focusing on The Antiquary (1816), in which Scott concluded the first three of his Waverley novels by bringing his history of Scotland up to his own era, this article argues that the novel does not simply displace war into romance but, rather, reveals a transformation of war under liberal regimes into a new kind of militarized discourse of security, or what Jacques Rancière has described as the “pacification of the political” (1995: 20). Georg Lukács’s Marxist analysis of Scott’s fiction invites us to read war back into the historical novel: his thesis is that individuals first began to see themselves as historical participants in national life as a result of the mass mobilization and political propaganda of the French","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"25 1","pages":"65 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87285541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The past decade has witnessed an explosive interest in graphic narrative, which was once dismissed as frivolous and heterodox but is now praised as innovative and flexible in its ability to accommodate both fiction and nonfiction and to address an array of topics, old or new. Among thought-provoking studies such as Hillary L. Chute’s Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010), Elisabeth El Refaie’s Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (2012), Karin Kukkonen’s Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013) and Studying Comics and Graphic Novels (2013), Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon’s From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (2013), Achim Hescher’s Reading Graphic Novels (2016), Kai Mikkonen’s The Narratology of Comic Art (2017), and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer’s The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (2018), Golnar Nabizadeh’s Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels is noteworthy for its original focus. It centers on the issue of how marginalized and minority groups reproduce their memories in comic form. Nabizadeh attempts to do justice to the enormous potential of a word-image alliance to “materialize” the past, contending that the fragmented panels, the gutters, and the drawings in comics document the episodic, imaginative, reconstructive, and visual nature of memory, especially traumatic memory. Comics are valorized as an effective medium for the socially excluded and the neglected to challenge authoritative discourses and to make their suppressed voices heard. The ethics of comics that stand for occluded voices is showcased in Nabizadeh’s selection of the works analyzed. The book covers memory of sundry types of human experience and shows how the texts discussed, incorporating both fictional and non-fictional, realistic and non-realistic constituents, represent individual and collective memories through multifarious visual techniques, media, and distribution channels. Chapter 1 examines two graphic narratives that display the experience of immigrant arrival in foreign countries. When analyzing Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 [Manga Yonin Shosei] (1999 [1931]), Nabizadeh attends to the work’s major technical features: humor, cinematic and comic elements, the appropriation of Western art styles, bilingual conversations, and, most importantly, references to influential historical events — for instance, “The Turlock Incident” — which are interconnected with episodes embodying the immigrants’ painful memories. When coming to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006), which reproduces the experience of an unnamed migrant in an unknown place, Nabizadeh dissects references to historical facts as well as the artistic and conceptual inspirations that the book draws from films, pictures, and literary works. She discusses the material features of the book — the spine, the cover, the page color, the use of a gold ribbon — which contribute to a sense of nostalgia and make t
{"title":"Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels by Golnar Nabizadeh (review)","authors":"Yun Lan","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The past decade has witnessed an explosive interest in graphic narrative, which was once dismissed as frivolous and heterodox but is now praised as innovative and flexible in its ability to accommodate both fiction and nonfiction and to address an array of topics, old or new. Among thought-provoking studies such as Hillary L. Chute’s Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010), Elisabeth El Refaie’s Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (2012), Karin Kukkonen’s Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013) and Studying Comics and Graphic Novels (2013), Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon’s From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (2013), Achim Hescher’s Reading Graphic Novels (2016), Kai Mikkonen’s The Narratology of Comic Art (2017), and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer’s The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (2018), Golnar Nabizadeh’s Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels is noteworthy for its original focus. It centers on the issue of how marginalized and minority groups reproduce their memories in comic form. Nabizadeh attempts to do justice to the enormous potential of a word-image alliance to “materialize” the past, contending that the fragmented panels, the gutters, and the drawings in comics document the episodic, imaginative, reconstructive, and visual nature of memory, especially traumatic memory. Comics are valorized as an effective medium for the socially excluded and the neglected to challenge authoritative discourses and to make their suppressed voices heard. The ethics of comics that stand for occluded voices is showcased in Nabizadeh’s selection of the works analyzed. The book covers memory of sundry types of human experience and shows how the texts discussed, incorporating both fictional and non-fictional, realistic and non-realistic constituents, represent individual and collective memories through multifarious visual techniques, media, and distribution channels. Chapter 1 examines two graphic narratives that display the experience of immigrant arrival in foreign countries. When analyzing Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 [Manga Yonin Shosei] (1999 [1931]), Nabizadeh attends to the work’s major technical features: humor, cinematic and comic elements, the appropriation of Western art styles, bilingual conversations, and, most importantly, references to influential historical events — for instance, “The Turlock Incident” — which are interconnected with episodes embodying the immigrants’ painful memories. When coming to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006), which reproduces the experience of an unnamed migrant in an unknown place, Nabizadeh dissects references to historical facts as well as the artistic and conceptual inspirations that the book draws from films, pictures, and literary works. She discusses the material features of the book — the spine, the cover, the page color, the use of a gold ribbon — which contribute to a sense of nostalgia and make t","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"54 1","pages":"179 - 183"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75152299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Perhaps more than any other era in literary historiography, Romanticism is defined by war; its pivotal dates anchored in key junctures of wars then raging in the background. The commonly accepted system of dating Romanticism thus alleges that the period properly started as new modes of thought and expression took root following the French Revolution of 1789, developed through the ensuing seven Wars of the Coalitions from 1792, and began to peter out when the latter ended in 1815, to conclude entirely around 1830. The Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, serves as a convenient turning point, typically taken to signpost the transition from wartime to peacetime: it defined the nature of modern warfare in an event of unprecedented and unrepeated proportions, involving some “200,000 men . . . on a scrap of land barely four kilometers (2.5 miles) square; never, either before or after, have such a great number of soldiers been massed on so circumscribed a battlefield” (Barbero 311). A landmark moment in the history of modern war, Waterloo can also be read as signaling the decline of Romanticism. From about 1815, Romantic thought is seen to divide against itself; into a precursor phase of confident, self-possessed production, followed by a secondary wind-down period marked by hesitant, self-deprecating reproduction (Nemoianu). This oft-alleged deflation of Romanticism following the conclusion of hostilities in 1815 holds a disquieting implication: war appears to be a necessary condition for Romanticism to inhabit itself fully. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointedly observes in his 1798 poem “Fears in Solitude,” Romantic poetry originates in war, which exercises the passions and the imagination as it is brought home through a fast-expanding machinery of periodical publication. In Coleridge’s reading, Romantic literature operates an aesthetic ideology which converts violence and conflict into bracing messages of sympathetic national unity, leaving behind the realities of war as a destabilizing if largely unobserved remainder:
也许在文学史上,浪漫主义比其他任何时代都更受战争的影响;它的关键日期定在战争的关键时刻,当时在背景中肆虐。因此,普遍接受的浪漫主义定年体系声称,这一时期的开端是1789年法国大革命之后,新的思想和表达方式开始扎根,从1792年开始,在随后的七次反法同盟战争中得到发展,并在1815年反法同盟战争结束时开始逐渐减弱,在1830年左右完全结束。1815年6月18日的滑铁卢战役是一个方便的转折点,通常被视为从战时过渡到和平时期的标志:它定义了现代战争的性质,这是一场前所未有的、规模空前的战争,涉及大约“20万人……”在一块只有四公里(2.5英里)见方的土地上;在此之前或之后,从来没有这么多的士兵聚集在如此狭窄的战场上”(Barbero 311)。滑铁卢战役是现代战明史上具有里程碑意义的时刻,也可以被解读为浪漫主义衰落的标志。大约从1815年开始,浪漫主义思想开始分裂;进入一个自信的、自持的生产的先导阶段,接着是一个以犹豫、自谦的繁殖为标志的第二个缓和期(Nemoianu)。1815年战争结束后,人们常说浪漫主义的紧缩,这有一个令人不安的暗示:战争似乎是浪漫主义充分扎根的必要条件。正如塞缪尔·泰勒·柯勒律治(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)在他1798年的诗《孤独中的恐惧》(Fears in Solitude)中所指出的那样,浪漫主义诗歌起源于战争,通过快速扩张的期刊出版机制,它可以锻炼人们的激情和想象力。在柯勒律治的阅读中,浪漫主义文学运用了一种美学意识形态,将暴力和冲突转化为充满同情的民族团结的振奋人心的信息,把战争的现实留在后面,作为一种不稳定的东西,如果很大程度上没有被注意到:
{"title":"Romanticism in the Age of World Wars: Introduction to the Forum","authors":"Brecht Groote, O. D. Graef","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Perhaps more than any other era in literary historiography, Romanticism is defined by war; its pivotal dates anchored in key junctures of wars then raging in the background. The commonly accepted system of dating Romanticism thus alleges that the period properly started as new modes of thought and expression took root following the French Revolution of 1789, developed through the ensuing seven Wars of the Coalitions from 1792, and began to peter out when the latter ended in 1815, to conclude entirely around 1830. The Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, serves as a convenient turning point, typically taken to signpost the transition from wartime to peacetime: it defined the nature of modern warfare in an event of unprecedented and unrepeated proportions, involving some “200,000 men . . . on a scrap of land barely four kilometers (2.5 miles) square; never, either before or after, have such a great number of soldiers been massed on so circumscribed a battlefield” (Barbero 311). A landmark moment in the history of modern war, Waterloo can also be read as signaling the decline of Romanticism. From about 1815, Romantic thought is seen to divide against itself; into a precursor phase of confident, self-possessed production, followed by a secondary wind-down period marked by hesitant, self-deprecating reproduction (Nemoianu). This oft-alleged deflation of Romanticism following the conclusion of hostilities in 1815 holds a disquieting implication: war appears to be a necessary condition for Romanticism to inhabit itself fully. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointedly observes in his 1798 poem “Fears in Solitude,” Romantic poetry originates in war, which exercises the passions and the imagination as it is brought home through a fast-expanding machinery of periodical publication. In Coleridge’s reading, Romantic literature operates an aesthetic ideology which converts violence and conflict into bracing messages of sympathetic national unity, leaving behind the realities of war as a destabilizing if largely unobserved remainder:","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"699 1","pages":"55 - 64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78711662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article discusses two “re-education” campaigns that have often been colocated by Romanian historiography: Anton Semyonovich Makarenko’s re-education of delinquents in the Soviet Union (1917–1936), and Eugen Ţurcanu’s re-education of prisoners in Romania (1949–1952). My aim is to demonstrate that although Makarenko’s and Ţurcanu’s projects of engineering a New Man show structural analogies, the texture of the experience was very different. I therefore propose an original Nietzschean reading of both projects, not from a historical perspective but rather as a history of ideas, where “‘[a]ction at a distance’ seems to be admissible in the field of intellectual influences” (Wiener 537). Without arguing that Makarenko and Ţurcanu were directly drawing on Nietzsche, my exploration of how their contemporaries distorted and adjusted Nietzsche’s dream of the Übermensch, as well as his ideas of the “will to power” and asceticism, can shed new light on the differences between the two projects. Makarenko was in charge of manufacturing the New Man in two self-supporting orphanages for besprizorniki (street urchins), the Gorky Colony (1917–1928) and the Dzerzhinsky labor commune (1928–1936). His reflections on the former appeared in Pedagogicheskaia poema (The Pedagogical Poem, translated as The Road to Life: An Epic of Education), and those on the latter in Flagi na bashnyakh (Flags on the Battlements, translated as Learning to Live). Ţurcanu’s program took place in the gruesome period of Stalinization when re-education was sought to turn political prisoners into New Men. By 1952, when news about Piteşti Prison spread in the West, the regime needed to prove itself innocent and therefore charged Țurcanu and his assistants with conspiracy. Alexandru
{"title":"Makarenko's and Țurcanu's Re-Education Projects: Debunking a Myth in Romanian Historiography","authors":"A. Ionescu","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses two “re-education” campaigns that have often been colocated by Romanian historiography: Anton Semyonovich Makarenko’s re-education of delinquents in the Soviet Union (1917–1936), and Eugen Ţurcanu’s re-education of prisoners in Romania (1949–1952). My aim is to demonstrate that although Makarenko’s and Ţurcanu’s projects of engineering a New Man show structural analogies, the texture of the experience was very different. I therefore propose an original Nietzschean reading of both projects, not from a historical perspective but rather as a history of ideas, where “‘[a]ction at a distance’ seems to be admissible in the field of intellectual influences” (Wiener 537). Without arguing that Makarenko and Ţurcanu were directly drawing on Nietzsche, my exploration of how their contemporaries distorted and adjusted Nietzsche’s dream of the Übermensch, as well as his ideas of the “will to power” and asceticism, can shed new light on the differences between the two projects. Makarenko was in charge of manufacturing the New Man in two self-supporting orphanages for besprizorniki (street urchins), the Gorky Colony (1917–1928) and the Dzerzhinsky labor commune (1928–1936). His reflections on the former appeared in Pedagogicheskaia poema (The Pedagogical Poem, translated as The Road to Life: An Epic of Education), and those on the latter in Flagi na bashnyakh (Flags on the Battlements, translated as Learning to Live). Ţurcanu’s program took place in the gruesome period of Stalinization when re-education was sought to turn political prisoners into New Men. By 1952, when news about Piteşti Prison spread in the West, the regime needed to prove itself innocent and therefore charged Țurcanu and his assistants with conspiracy. Alexandru","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"8 1","pages":"1 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73913909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Literary Communication as Dialogue: Responsibilities and Pleasures in Post-Postmodern Times. Selected Papers 2003–2020 by Roger D. Sell (review)","authors":"S. Gilead","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"5 1","pages":"175 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90241160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is Society at War? Le Colonel Foucault","authors":"Anders Engberg-Pedersen","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"62 1","pages":"104 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90094629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Our still fresh decade has quickly come to be defined by cultural upheaval, political turmoil, and societal rupture of, indeed, pandemic proportions. This pervasive state of flux and crisis underscores the calls for ideological reconfigurations presented in Possibility’s Parents, which is also to say that the publication of this book is nothing if not timely. Margaret Seyford Hrezo and Nicholas Pappas waste no time announcing that their work is an ambitious and academically idiosyncratic response to an age of crisis. The first line of the preface reads: “This book’s approach to the human search for communal order is unusual” (xi). Both authors are emeritus professors of political science, but Possibility’s Parents aims to use analyses of works of literature to suggest a full-scale alternative to the tradition of classical Western liberalism from Locke to these days, which Hrezo and Pappas deem “no longer viable,” so that “political philosophy must begin searching for new possibilities in answering the questions posed by human existence” (xi). The book is first and foremost unusual in the sense that it explicitly situates itself against certain academic norms, or what the authors see as a lack of accessibility and “overspecialization” that characterizes the field of political science. The need to ameliorate this alienation between theorists and a less specialized audience of readers is presented in the preface as the reason for the book’s deployment of literature as its prism for fleshing out ideas that are more often encountered within the realm of political philosophy. Furthermore, a glossary is appended “to help with unfamiliar terms” used throughout the book (x). Another rather unusual device used in the book’s attempt to further the general relatability of its subject matter is the choice to set off each chapter with a question posed by a grandson of one of the authors — questions such as, “Do you believe in magic?” and “What do you think happens to people when they die?” Yet, contrary to the helpful and commendable pedagogical enhancements provided by the glossary and the preface, this structural device does not add anything substantial to the book’s approach. In their quest for new ways of answering the questions posed by human existence, the authors erect a philosophical and terminological scaffolding that is lucidly explained in the book’s first chapter. The identification of Western lib-
{"title":"Possibility's Parents: Stories at the End of Liberalism by Margaret Seyford Hrezo and Nicholas Pappas (review)","authors":"Lasse Winther Jensen","doi":"10.1353/pan.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Our still fresh decade has quickly come to be defined by cultural upheaval, political turmoil, and societal rupture of, indeed, pandemic proportions. This pervasive state of flux and crisis underscores the calls for ideological reconfigurations presented in Possibility’s Parents, which is also to say that the publication of this book is nothing if not timely. Margaret Seyford Hrezo and Nicholas Pappas waste no time announcing that their work is an ambitious and academically idiosyncratic response to an age of crisis. The first line of the preface reads: “This book’s approach to the human search for communal order is unusual” (xi). Both authors are emeritus professors of political science, but Possibility’s Parents aims to use analyses of works of literature to suggest a full-scale alternative to the tradition of classical Western liberalism from Locke to these days, which Hrezo and Pappas deem “no longer viable,” so that “political philosophy must begin searching for new possibilities in answering the questions posed by human existence” (xi). The book is first and foremost unusual in the sense that it explicitly situates itself against certain academic norms, or what the authors see as a lack of accessibility and “overspecialization” that characterizes the field of political science. The need to ameliorate this alienation between theorists and a less specialized audience of readers is presented in the preface as the reason for the book’s deployment of literature as its prism for fleshing out ideas that are more often encountered within the realm of political philosophy. Furthermore, a glossary is appended “to help with unfamiliar terms” used throughout the book (x). Another rather unusual device used in the book’s attempt to further the general relatability of its subject matter is the choice to set off each chapter with a question posed by a grandson of one of the authors — questions such as, “Do you believe in magic?” and “What do you think happens to people when they die?” Yet, contrary to the helpful and commendable pedagogical enhancements provided by the glossary and the preface, this structural device does not add anything substantial to the book’s approach. In their quest for new ways of answering the questions posed by human existence, the authors erect a philosophical and terminological scaffolding that is lucidly explained in the book’s first chapter. The identification of Western lib-","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"1 1","pages":"183 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78431851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century by Regenia Gagnier (review)","authors":"D. Fishelov","doi":"10.1353/PAN.2021.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PAN.2021.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42435,"journal":{"name":"Partial Answers-Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas","volume":"10 1","pages":"371 - 375"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74066188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}