Closely Observed Trains
This is an excerpt from the paper...
History as a record of events and dates can be a dull affair because it does not necessarily capture the dynamics of personal or even state actions as they were experienced by the people involved. Yet people are what make history and what made up the culture or cultures in which events and actions unfolded. Professional historians, if they are skilled enough, can make an account of an era or a significant set of events lively, but the life's blood of a culture, a people, a person, or a nation can often be most effectively conveyed by way of art--from architecture to the plastic arts to poetry to prose to biography. The purpose of this research is to examine a set of selected texts covering a rather sweeping cultural range--from mndern South Afriba to Central Europe to New England in America--with a view toward identifying the ways and to what extent they evoke and amplify linkages between and among world history, national history, art history, and personal history.For centuries, the history of Africa and the Americas was really the history of Europe in Africa and the Americas. Accordingly, it seems appropriate to begin with the big picture of history in Europe, notably the Czech Republic. Until the end of World War I comprised regions known as Bohemia and Moravia, plus Slovakia, with which they would merge to form Czechoslovakia. Sayer's account of the Czech Republic is framed chiefly as a cultural history, with art being a defining feature of Czech national and indeed inte
. . .
ical experience has historically unfolded on the boundaries of non-Czech political entities. Kundera's employment of discontinuous action has been likened to narrative structure as a species of musical variations in a single piece (DF 30). Discontinuous action and opaque diction can also be interpreted as something of a Czech, or perhaps Slavic, tradition that Kundera valorizes. In an essay on what he sees as unsatisfactory translations of Kafka that rob Kafka's texts of their Czech identity, Kundera cites "the specific beauty" of Kafka's art, such as his use of "existential or phenomenological" [= philosophical] metaphor (TB 106), which, in Kafka's lifetime, seem to have been original with him (Sartre was born a generation later). Lamenting the aesthetic betrayal of the great artist, Kundera takes French translators and German typographers especially to task for "the sadness of the posthumous fate of Kafka's work" (TB 119).
Just as Czech territories were historically marginalized by the grand historical designs of the rest of Europe, so was South Africa marginalized in the modern period by reason of its rulers' specific and programmatic embrace of apartheid as a primary sociocultural value. Thompson cites the agenda of fulfillme
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Age Iron, South Africa, Irena Josef, La BohFme, Laughter Forgetting, Curt Lemon, , Hades Hell, Czech Slavic, Czech Republic, south africa, asher york harperperennial, york harperperennial, asher york, czech identity, personal level, observed trains, closely observed, university press, personal experience, south african, closely observed trains, true war story, tell true war, book laughter forgetting,
Approximate Word count = 2504
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Closely Observed Trains
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
