Proletarian Imagination

Proletarian Imagination PDF Author: Mark D. Steinberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In fin-de-siècle and early revolutionary Russia, a group of self-educated workers produced a large body of poetry and prose in which they attempted to comprehend their rapidly changing world. Witnesses to wars and revolution, these men and women grappled on paper with the nature of civilization and the imperatives of ethical truth. In a strikingly original approach to Russian culture, Mark D. Steinberg listens to their words, which are little known today. The results of their literary creativity, he finds, were frequently not what the new Soviet order was expecting from its workers, despite its celebration of the notion of a proletarian art.Through insightful readings of a vast fund of lower-class writings, Steinberg shows that the authors focused above all on the uncertain nature and place of the self, the promise and dangers of modernity, and the qualities of the sacred in both their lives and their imaginations. Like their counterparts in the intelligentsia, these worker writers were ambivalent about Marxist ideology's celebration of the city and the factory and even about modern progress itself. Drawing on vast research, Steinberg demonstrates the texts' significance for an understanding of Russian popular mentalities, indeed for the very meaning, philosophically and morally, of these years of crisis and possibility at the end of the old order and the early years of the Soviet regime.

Proletarian Imagination

Proletarian Imagination PDF Author: Mark D. Steinberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501717790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
In fin-de-siècle and early revolutionary Russia, a group of self-educated workers produced a large body of poetry and prose in which they attempted to comprehend their rapidly changing world. Witnesses to wars and revolution, these men and women grappled on paper with the nature of civilization and the imperatives of ethical truth. In a strikingly original approach to Russian culture, Mark D. Steinberg listens to their words, which are little known today. The results of their literary creativity, he finds, were frequently not what the new Soviet order was expecting from its workers, despite its celebration of the notion of a proletarian art.Through insightful readings of a vast fund of lower-class writings, Steinberg shows that the authors focused above all on the uncertain nature and place of the self, the promise and dangers of modernity, and the qualities of the sacred in both their lives and their imaginations. Like their counterparts in the intelligentsia, these worker writers were ambivalent about Marxist ideology's celebration of the city and the factory and even about modern progress itself. Drawing on vast research, Steinberg demonstrates the texts' significance for an understanding of Russian popular mentalities, indeed for the very meaning, philosophically and morally, of these years of crisis and possibility at the end of the old order and the early years of the Soviet regime.

Proletarian Imagination

Proletarian Imagination PDF Author: Mark Steinberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781644698037
Category :
Languages : ru
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In fin-de-siècle and early revolutionary Russia, a group of self-educated workers produced a large body of poetry and prose in which they attempted to comprehend their rapidly changing world. Witnesses to wars and revolution, these men and women grappled on paper with the nature of civilization and the imperatives of ethical truth. In a strikingly original approach to Russian culture, Mark D. Steinberg listens to their words, which are little known today. The results of their literary creativity, he finds, were frequently not what the new Soviet order was expecting from its workers, despite its celebration of the notion of a proletarian art.

The Proletarian Dream

The Proletarian Dream PDF Author: Sabine Hake
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110550865
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
The proletariat never existed—but it had a profound effect on modern German culture and society. As the most radicalized part of the industrial working class, the proletariat embodied the critique of capitalism and the promise of socialism. But as a collective imaginary, the proletariat also inspired the fantasies, desires, and attachments necessary for transforming the working class into a historical subject and an emotional community. This book reconstructs this complicated and contradictory process through the countless treatises, essays, memoirs, novels, poems, songs, plays, paintings, photographs, and films produced in the name of the proletariat. The Proletarian Dream reads these forgotten archives as part of an elusive collective imaginary that modeled what it meant—and even more important, how it felt—to claim the name "proletarian" with pride, hope, and conviction. By emphasizing the formative role of the aesthetic, the eighteen case studies offer a new perspective on working-class culture as a oppositional culture. Such a new perspective is bound to shed new light on the politics of emotion during the main years of working-class mobilizations and as part of more recent populist movements and cultures of resentment. Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures 2018

The Proletarian Dream

The Proletarian Dream PDF Author: Sabine Hake
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110550202
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
The proletariat never existed—but it had a profound effect on modern German culture and society. As the most radicalized part of the industrial working class, the proletariat embodied the critique of capitalism and the promise of socialism. But as a collective imaginary, the proletariat also inspired the fantasies, desires, and attachments necessary for transforming the working class into a historical subject and an emotional community. This book reconstructs this complicated and contradictory process through the countless treatises, essays, memoirs, novels, poems, songs, plays, paintings, photographs, and films produced in the name of the proletariat. The Proletarian Dream reads these forgotten archives as part of an elusive collective imaginary that modeled what it meant—and even more important, how it felt—to claim the name "proletarian" with pride, hope, and conviction. By emphasizing the formative role of the aesthetic, the eighteen case studies offer a new perspective on working-class culture as a oppositional culture. Such a new perspective is bound to shed new light on the politics of emotion during the main years of working-class mobilizations and as part of more recent populist movements and cultures of resentment.

Proletarian Philosophers

Proletarian Philosophers PDF Author: Jonathan Rée
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Describes the origins and fate of the idea of 'proletarian philosophy', which captured the imagination of thousands of self-educated working people in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century.

A Flock of Swirling Crows

A Flock of Swirling Crows PDF Author: Denji Kuroshima
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824829261
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Why is education potentially subversive? How does ethnocentrism facilitate an oppressive status quo? Who actually benefits from war? Questions such as these were integral to the work of writer Kuroshima Denji (1898-1943), one of modern Japan’s most dedicated antimilitarist intellectuals. Kuroshima was wholeheartedly committed to fundamental change and produced numerous literary works expressing his passionate opposition to armed force as an instrument of imperialism. His only full-length novel, superbly translated here as Militarized Streets, was censored by both Japan’s imperial government and the U.S. occupation authorities. The present volume comprises much of Kuroshima’s most highly acclaimed work for the first time in English.

Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West

Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West PDF Author: R. Dyck
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230619541
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
In one consequential volume, Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West presents the cross-section of a fast-changing and greatly expanded field. Through interdisciplinary essays, this volume on the post-national West challenges the idea of a unified national story sustained by strategic exclusions. Contributors analyze the economic and environmental exploitation depicted in working-class Western literature, emphasize the transnational by approaching both the North/South and cross-Atlantic axes grapple with the role of Mormons, and dissect the new masculinity of "Silicon Gunslingers." Each essay successfully and compellingly models a new and fruitful way of engaging the West.

Russomania

Russomania PDF Author: Rebecca Beasley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192522477
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism provides a new account of modernist literature's emergence in Britain. British writers played a central role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture during the early twentieth century, and their writing was transformed by the encounter. This study restores the thick history of that moment, by analyzing networks of dissemination and reception to recover the role of neglected as well as canonical figures, and institutions as well as individuals. The dominant account of British modernism privileges a Francophile genealogy, but the turn-of-the century debate about the future of British writing was a triangular debate, a debate not only between French and English models, but between French, English, and Russian models. Francophile modernists associated Russian literature, especially the Tolstoyan novel, with an uncritical immersion in 'life' at the expense of a mastery of style, and while individual works might be admired, Russian literature as a whole was represented as a dangerous model for British writing. This supposed danger was closely bound up with the politics of the period, and this book investigates how Russian culture was deployed in the close relationships between writers, editors, and politicians who made up the early twentieth-century intellectual class—the British intelligentsia. Russomania argues that the most significant impact of Russian culture is not to be found in stylistic borrowings between canonical authors, but in the shaping of the major intellectual questions of the period: the relation between language and action, writer and audience, and the work of art and lived experience. The resulting account brings an occluded genealogy of early modernism to the fore, with a different arrangement of protagonists, different critical values, and stronger lines of connection to the realist experiments of the Victorian past, and the anti-formalism and revived romanticism of the 1930s and 1940s future.

Revolution and the People in Russia and China

Revolution and the People in Russia and China PDF Author: S. A. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139471015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
A unique comparative account of the roots of Communist revolution in Russia and China. Steve Smith examines the changing social identities of peasants who settled in St Petersburg from the 1880s to 1917 and in Shanghai from the 1900s to the 1940s. Russia and China, though very different societies, were both dynastic empires with backward agrarian economies that suddenly experienced the impact of capitalist modernity. This book argues that far more happened to these migrants than simply being transformed from peasants into workers. It explores the migrants' identification with their native homes; how they acquired new understandings of themselves as individuals and new gender and national identities. It asks how these identity transformations fed into the wider political, social and cultural processes that culminated in the revolutionary crises in Russia and China, and how the Communist regimes that emerged viewed these transformations in the working classes they claimed to represent.

Republic of Labor

Republic of Labor PDF Author: Diane P. Koenker
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The long decade from the October Revolution to 1930 was the beginning of a great experiment to create a socialist society. Throughout these years, socialist trade unions attempted to transform the Russian worker into a productive and enthusiastic participant in this new order. How did the workers themselves react to these efforts? To what extent were they and their culture transformed into the ideal forms proclaimed in the official ideology? In Republic of Labor, Diane P. Koenker illuminates the lived experience of Russia's printers, workers who differed from their comrades because of their skill and higher wages, but who shared the same challenges of economic hardship and dangerous conditions. Paying close attention to the links between work, politics, and the everyday, the author focuses on workers' efforts to define their place in socialist society. Gender issues are also emphasized, and here we see the persistence of a masculinist working-class culture counterposed to an official culture promoting gender equality. Through this engaging narrative, Koenker develops a highly original discourse about class in Soviet society that will interest all students of Russian history as well as those readers who wish to reinvigorate class as a historical and sociological tool of analysis.