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This book brings together complex fields of knowledge and globally splintered discourses on a subject that is experienced not only by scholars, but in the everyday lives of people around the world. There is a common complaint about the loss of identity which, to a substantial degree, is being associated with the built environment in cities and specifically with their architecture. "Architecture and Identity" takes a global, multidisciplinary look on how identities in contemporary architecture are constructed. The general hypothesis underlying this book is that in a globalized world identity in architecture cannot be easily derived from distinct indigenous patterns. The book presents forty contributions from various disciplines aiming to destroy the myth of an inheritable or otherwise prefabricated identity. Some authors dismantle constructs of identity that have long been considered as "solid" and unbreakable while others meticulously unravel the "construction" process of identities in
How is it that some texts achieve the status of literature? Partly, at least, because the relationship they allow between their writers and the people who respond to them is fundamentally egalitarian. This is the insight explored by members of the Åbo literary communication network, who in this new book develop fresh approaches to literary works of widely varied provenance. The authors examined have written in Ancient Greek, Táng Dynasty Chinese, Middle, Modern and Contemporary English, German, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. But each and every one of them is shown as having offered their human fellows something which, despite some striking appearances to the contrary, amounts to a w...
The present volume is the last in the Entangled Balkans series and marks the end of several years of research guided by the transnational, “entangled history” and histoire croisée approaches. The essays in this volume address theoretical and methodological issues of Balkan or Southeast European regional studies—not only questions of scholarly concepts, definitions, and approaches but also the extra-scholarly, ideological, political, and geopolitical motivations that underpin them. These issues are treated more systematically and by a presentation of their historical evolution in various national traditions and schools. Some of the essays deal with the articulation of certain forms of “Balkan heritage” in relation to the geographical spread and especially the cultural definition of the “Balkan area.” Concepts and definitions of the Balkans are thus complemented by (self-)representations that reflect on their cultural foundations.
Contains essays that investigate how the cultures of the town and the countryside interact in architecture.
Brings together a range of contributions on the linguistics of humour. This title elucidates the whole gamut of humorous forms and mechanisms, such as surrealist irony, incongruity in register humour, mechanisms of pun formation, as well as interpersonal functions of conversational humour
The cultural politics of commemorating war.
It is a major challenge to write the history of post-WWII architectural theory without boiling it down to a few defining paradigms. An impressive anthologising effort during the 1990s charted architectural theory mostly via the various theoretical frameworks employed, such as critical theory, critical regionalism, deconstructivism, and pragmatism. Yet the intellectual contours of what constitutes architectural theory have been constantly in flux. It is therefore paramount to ask what kind of knowledge has become important in the recent history of architectural theory and how the resulting figure of knowledge sets the conditions for the actual arguments made. The contributions in this volume focus on institutional, geographical, rhetorical, and other conditioning factors. They thus screen the unspoken rules of engagement that postwar architectural theory ascribed to.
How did the Eastern European and Soviet states write their respective histories of art and architecture during 1940s–1960s? The articles address both the Stalinist period and the Khrushchev Thaw, when the Marxist-Leninist discourse on art history was "invented" and refined. Although this discourse was inevitably "Sovietized" in a process dictated from Moscow, a variety of distinct interpretations emerged from across the Soviet bloc in the light of local traditions, cultural politics and decisions of individual authors. Even if the new "official" discourse often left space open for national concerns, it also gave rise to a countermovement in response to the aggressive ideologization of art and the preeminence assigned to (Socialist) Realist aesthetics.
Exploring Discourse Practices in Romanian is a glimpse into Romanians’ style of interaction, which has developed eclectically at the crossroads of Eastern and Western cultures. It is oriented towards modern literacy while being deeply rooted in a long oral tradition, and paradoxically displays both attachment to local specifics and commitment to mimetic speech and act(ion)s imported from various cultural spaces. The book presents a characterisation of the Romanian cultural space in terms of various discourse practices, drawing on recent challenging theoretical proposals, and concluding with in-depth corpus-based analyses. The chapters focus on five main topics (the co-construction of discu...
Across the nineteenth century European history, philology, archaeology, art, and architecture turned from a common classical vocabulary and ideology to images of pasts and origins drawn primarily from the Middle Ages. The result was a paradox, as scholars and artists, schooled in the same pan-European vocabularies and methodologies nevertheless sought to discover through them unique and, frequently, oppositional national identities. These essays, edited by Patrick J. Geary and Gábor Klaniczay, focus on this all-European phenomenon with a special focus on Scandinavia and East-Central Europe, bearing witness to the inextricable links between cultural and scientific engagement, the search for national identity, and political agendas in the long nineteenth century that made the search for archaic origins an entangled history. Contributors include: Walter Pohl, Ian Wood, Sverre Bagge, Maciej Janowski, Sir David Wilson, Anders Andrén, Ernő Marosi, Carmen Popescu, Ahmet Ersoy, Michael Werner, Joep Leerssen, R. Howard Bloch, Pavlína Rychterová, Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, Stefan Detchev, Florin Curta, and Péter Langó.