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According to Milovan Đilas, already during the years of World War Two, Josip Broz Tito was perceived as standing for the constitutive concept (brotherhood and unity) of the second Yugoslavia, then only a state-to-be. Ultimately though he came to personify the country itself. In order to understand what this means and what the consequence of such developments were, the author uses the concept of the king's two bodies as explained by Ernst Kantorowicz: king's Body Natural and thus mortal and king's super-body or his Body Politic. The working hypothesis of this article is that Tito stood with his body natural for the body politic of Yugoslavia. There is a strong case to be made that he was the only truly Yugoslav institution. But this was not body made incorporeal, quite the contrary: it was Tito's real, natural body that was not only the embodiment of central power, but that, paradoxically, was the name and the face of what was supposed to be the continuous Yugoslav social body. Using Louis Marin's theory of representations, the author investigates Tito's representations in several shorter narrative segments and one pictorial image (a relief by Želimir Janeπ).
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Two male authors, in two different contexts, imagined their female protagonists: Kostas Tachtsis, a prolific Greek author and himself a homosexual, wrote a novel on a woman's endurance in the challenging and dangerous Greek political urban context over a period of some 50 years, under the title Third Wreath ("The Third Wedding Wreath", 1962); Serbian author Dragoslav MihajloviÊ, a former pro-soviet sympathizer and political prisoner on Goli Otok, at the half-way point to his present-day nationalism, wrote the novel Petria's Wreath (1975), in which a rural female protagonist is a suffering icon ‡ beaten, ill, poor, abandoned, widowed, a metaphor for collective, people's suffering. In both cases, a feminine persona is supposed to deconstruct, construct, or destabilize the ruling/serving female prototype. In both inventions a shadow-male is inscribed into the proposed female model. In both cases, the female protagonist serves as a screen for criticism of the correspondent local male-dominant model. Both authors voice a kind of (male) de-centered gender position, or, put more simply, an endangered sexuality: a sexually instable voyeur, a homosexual, a traumatized/tortured former prisoner. Women's criticism of Balkan men's attitudes does not correspond fully with this: in women's writing men are usually accused of selfishness, inclination to war and violence, and power-struggle. The quest for a similar de-centered gender presentation could revive the debate on gender of the author, somehow lost in the late 70s.
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Commencing from the cultural dichotomy between rural hinterland (Morlach) and urban coastal (Romano-Slavic) Dalmatia, the author studies the similarities and diversities in the accounts of the then- -contemporary Venetian-Turkish wars in the works of Dalmatian writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. The analysed corpus of texts is made up of: chronicles of the Makarska Franciscans (P. ©ilobadoviÊ, N. Gojak, P. AntuloviÊ); F. DivniÊ's historical account of the Candian War in Dalmatia; and works by J. Kavanjin, F. Grabovac and A. KaËiÊ MioπiÊ. The analysis focuses on: the mechanisms used in explanation and contextualisation of the wars in Dalmatia; evaluations of border area war strategy (pillaging and enslavement); the conception of the enemy and inter-Christian divisions (confessional, social, and the like). Finally, the accounts of war in the texts in question (narrative sources) are compared with published archive sources.
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The author deals with the relationship between creativity and tradition in Slamnig's radio-play from 1976. He analyses the interweaving of mythic, folklore, literary, historical and political elements in the play and explains the cause of its lack of success at the Prix Futura Festival in Berlin.
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The Patum of Berga is a Corpus Christi festival featuring the danced combats of effigies and masked figures, performed since the early 17th century in an industrial town in the Catalan Pyrenees. During the Spanish transition, the festival attracted massive participation from all over Catalonia, becoming a focus of democratic and nationalist resistance. This article describes the gendered character of the political struggle over the festival, showing how the limits of the Oedipal metaphor create a problem for community reproduction. The author explores the conservative nationalist and Francoist contexts of the feminization of the Patum, the moment of generational confrontation during the Transition, and the subsequent problem of imagining a new, nonrepressive social order.
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There is a growing trend across the field of architectural research towards a practice-led approach. This has seen researchers move beyond the established limits of quantitative and qualitative research, in pursuit of a new distinct paradigm called 'performative research' [Haseman, 2009]. This type of research allows practitioners to explore and question the issues that they believe are relevant through practice. As such, an architectural researcher may deploy a method called 'research through design', with a view to developing new knowledge. This paper gives an overview of performative research in architecture schools across the world, before discussing forms of design research. It gives an outline of the diverse field in which practice-led research can take place and an insight to the broad spectrum of practices that can supplement practice-led research and the different degrees and balance of methods that may be supported. In turn, this enables a discussion regarding the type of knowledge that can be developed through research by design. 'Relational knowledge' does not necessarily seek a formula or hypothesis, but aims to work in context and between tensions. This type of knowledge can help us to explore connections across a broad field and work across disciplines, in order to gain a deeper understanding of relationships in context and with society.
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The paper aim is to present the architecture of Yugoslav pavilions built in four different World Expositions: Barcelona (1929), Paris (1937), Brussels (1958), and Montreal (1967). To clarify the architectural circumstances of great exhibitions the paper starts with a brief overview of the history of World’s Fairs. The core of the paper starts with a section containing four case studies, each of them representing one pavilion, designed by a Yugoslav architect. An analysis of the selected case studies is made from the historical perspective with the emphasis on the architect’s point of view. National pavilions of guest countries are still prevailing in recent World Expositions. They are usually planned and designed by the architects of a certain country, since each country wants to show its own priorities on lifestyle, industry, technology, and art. The discussion shows the influence of World Exposition pavilions on contemporary architecture, and the characteristics of architecturally successful pavilions. At the end, some general architectural observations about pavilions at World Expositions are given.
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Within the field of architectural and urban research, this work addresses the complexity of contemporary public space, both in a conceptual and concrete sense. It aims at systematizing spatial attributes and their categories and discussing spatial complexity and measurability, all this in order to reach a more comprehensive understanding, description and analysis of public space. Our aim is to improve everyday usage of open public space and we acknowledged users as its crucial factor. There are numerous investigations on the complex urban and architectural reality of public space that recognise importance of users. However, we did not find any that would holistically account for what users find essential in public space. Based on the incompleteness of existing approaches on open public space and the importance of users for their success, this paper proposes a user-orientated approach. Through an initial survey directed to users, we collected the most important aspects of public spaces in the way that contemporary humans see them. The gathered data is analysed and coded into spatial attributes from which their role in the complexity of open public space and measurability are discussed. The work results in an inventory of attributes that users find salient in public spaces. It does not discuss their qualitative values or contribution in generating spatial realities. It aims to define them clearly so that any further logical argumentation on open space concerning users may be solidly constructed. Finally, through categorisation of attributes it proposes the disciplinary levels necessary for the analysis of complex urban-architectural reality.
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From the early years of communist regime the Romanian rulers and the Soviet counsellors triggered actions of destruction over the Romanian culture. Great cultural personalities were imprisoned in unsanitary and remote prisons, some scientists became fugitives and tried to survive away from the big cities. The persecution was triggered against the Romanian language and Romanian literature by having them excluded from the school textbooks and university programs the representative patriotic writers. The press overwhelmingly praised the soviet and Russian writers. The Russian language became compulsory in elementary schools and universities. Access to Western literature was banned. It was asserted that Romanian language is not of Latin origin but Slavic origin. The study presents the stages of this cultural aggressiveness.
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This essay discusses some topics related to the problems of faith and, above all, of how people experience the limit(s) of their consciousness and of the world they live in. The main concern is to show how these issues are expressed in modern literature and especially within the specific field of modern Japanese literature. Therefore, our demonstration is stressed upon Shusaku Endo’s work, taking into consideration his unusual personal experience within Christianity. The author himself often spoke of Christianity as an ill-fitted suit for his Japanese frame. In this respect, we may state that what Endo inherited rightly was his vision of the world, a sacramental worldview that sees human action within the grand narrative of God’s redeeming activity in the world. After all, what Shusaku Endo rebuffed in European Catholicism was not the idea of Catholicism “per se”, but some particular modes of thought and cultural assumptions about strength and weakness.
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