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This book discusses how societies, groups and individuals remember and make sense of global neoliberal change in Eastern Europe. Such an investigation is all the more timely as the 1990s are increasingly looked to for answers explaining the populist and nationalist turn across the globe. The volume shows how the key processes that impacted many lives across the social spectrum in Eastern Europe, such as deindustrialization, privatization, restitution and abrupt social reorganization, are collectively remembered across society today and how memory narratives of the 1990s contribute to current identities and political climate. This volume establishes the memory of economic transformation as a ...
Perturbatory narration is a heuristic concept, applicable both quantitatively and qualitatively to a specific type of complex narratives for which narratology has not yet found an appropriate classification. This new term refers to complex narrative strategies that produce intentionally disturbing effects such as surprise, confusion, doubt or disappointment ‒ effects that interrupt or suspend immersion in the aesthetic reception process. The initial task, however, is to indicate what narrative conventions are, in fact, questioned, transgressed, or given new life by perturbatory narration. The key to our modeling lies in its combination of individual procedures of narrative strategies hitherto regarded as unrelated. Their interplay has not yet attracted scholarly attention. The essays in this volume present a wide range of contemporary films from Canada, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, France and Germany. The perturbatory narration concept enables to typify and systematize moments of disruption in fictional texts, combining narrative processes of deception, paradox and/or empuzzlement and to analyse these perturbing narrative strategies in very different filmic texts.
Against the backdrop of an insurgent far right and numerous deadly neo-Nazi attacks, various cultural practitioners have written far-right violence into Germany’s collective memory and imagined more inclusive futures in its wake. This volume explores contemporary examples from literature, music, theatre, film, television and art that respond to this situation. They demonstrate that, alongside the ways in which art expands the public sphere in terms of what is said and who is heard, aesthetic questions of how artistic works are presented are a crucial part of how they open up new perspectives.
More than 30 years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, its cinema continues to attract scholarly attention. Documenting Socialism moves beyond the traditionally analyzed "feature film production" and places East Germany's documentary cinema at the center of history behind the Iron Curtain. Between questions of gender, race and sexuality and the complexities of diversity under the political and cultural environments of socialism, the specialist contributions in this volume cohere into an introductory milestone on documentary film production in the GDR.
Audiences for contemporary German film and television are becoming increasingly transnational, and depictions of German cultural history are moving beyond the typical post-war focus on Germany’s problematic past. Entertaining German Culture explores this radical shift, building on recent research into transnational culture to argue that a new process of internal and external cultural reabsorption is taking place through areas of mutually assimilating cultural exchange such as streaming services, an increasingly international film market, and the import and export of Anglo-American media formats.
'Comprehensive and thorough, Utopias in Nonfiction Film takes a new direction in its surprise application to documentary that has the potential to shake up the field.'- Jane Gaines, Columbia University, USA 'Spiegel has introduced a new sub-genre to utopian studies, the documentary film. The book covers an impressive range of films, making the book one of the few truly international and comparative works in utopian studies.'- Lyman Tower Sargent, University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA "Simon Spiegel’s magisterial overview of utopian documentaries and nonfiction films is a treasure trove of information and unearths many forgotten and half-forgotten films, providing perceptive discussions of ...
This volume contends that young individuals across Europe relate to their country’s history in complex and often ambivalent ways. It pays attention to how both formal education and broader culture communicate ideas about the past, and how young people respond to these ideas. The studies collected in this volume show that such ideas about the past are central to the formation of the group identities of nations, social movements, or religious groups. Young people express received historical narratives in new, potentially subversive, ways. As young people tend to be more mobile and ready to interrogate their own roots than later generations, they selectively privilege certain aspects of their identities and their identification with their family or nation while neglecting others. This collection aims to correct the popular misperception that young people are indifferent towards history and prove instead that historical narratives are constitutive to their individual identities and their sense of belonging to something broader than themselves.
Shows that while the GDR is generally seen as - and mostly was - an oppressive and unfree country, from late 1989 until autumn 1990 it was the "freest country in the world" the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. Stephen Brockmann's new book explores the year 1989/1990 in East Germany, arguing that while the GDR is generally seen as - and was for most of its forty years - an oppressive and unfree country, from autumn 1989 until the autumn of 1990 it was the "freest country in the world," since the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. That such freedom existed in the last months of the GDR and was a result of the actions of East Germans t...
Seit der Jahrtausendwende sind in Deutschland zahlreiche Prosawerke jüngerer Autoren und Autorinnen erschienen, die den Umbruch von 1989/90 und dessen gesellschaftliche Folgen aus jugendlicher Perspektive thematisieren. Während diese Texte in Deutschland im breiteren Kontext der "Wendekinder"-Debatte rezipiert werden, gibt es ähnliche Diskussionen um besondere generationelle Erfahrungen in der jungen tschechischen Literatur vermeintlich nicht. Hier stehen Themen wie das Reisen oder Arbeitsmigration im Vordergrund. Rainette Lange zeigt indes, dass auch in diesen Romanen und Erzählungen Erinnerungsnarrative über das Ende des Sozialismus impliziert sind. Sie spürt adoleszente Umbruchserfahrungen in deutschen und tschechischen Texten auf, vergleicht deren erzählerische Spezifika und analysiert übergreifende Motive und gemeinsame poetologische Merkmale der "Wende"-Repräsentationen in beiden Literaturen.