European Narratives Research Articles

MODERNISMO EUROPEO E CULTURA ITALIANA IN CONSERVATORIO DI SANTA TERESA DI ROMANO BILENCHI

The essay intends to highlight how Romano Bilenchi’s novel represents one of the most interesting outcomes of the Italian culture of the novel in the early twentieth century in the broader framework of European Modernism. In Conservatorio di Santa Teresa, that fracture between life and experience, that crisis of the narration of experience and its representation as the mainstay of the early twentieth-century European narrative, is fully represented. The crumbling of certainties, in an atmosphere dominated by an empty allegory and by a condi- tion – that of the protagonist – of continuous tension, suspended between a desperate search for harmony now lost, in a reality that is now definitively dissonant, and the painful acknowl- edgment of the truth of men and nature, bring the novel closer to both Kafka’s metaphysical progress and Benjamin’s reflections on the relationship between memory and experience, by virtue of a narrative weaving supported by the lever of creative memory. A fully European novel, which dialogues fruitfully with the most advanced Trieste literary experiences (in the ever-living relationship between Florence and Trieste) and which is a prelude to Italian nov- els with similar themes and style (Agostino, Il ragazzo morto e le comete, L’isola di Arturo), Conservatorio di Santa Teresa is also a novel in which Bilenchi works a synthesis between the Italian tradition of the novel – which has some of its essential references in Tozzi and Manzoni – and the suggestions and expressive novelties and European themes of the twentieth cen- tury, through a controlled writing and a denotative style whose ultimate goal is to reveal the authentic substance of the characters, grasp their most underground movements, grasp their essence, by means of the tapering of any psychologism and a terseness of the prose that aims to rediscover that lost unity between word and thing from whose fracture modernity is born.

Wojna rosyjsko-ukraińska w percepcji państw Bałkanów Zachodnich

The outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022 has been met with a mixed reaction from the Western Balkan states. Residents of the region, remembering the break‑up of Yugoslavia and the bloody civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, perceive the Russian‑Ukrainian conflict unevenly. Each of the Western Balkan states, due to their own historical experiences and geopolitical circumstances, perceives, analyses and reports on the war in Ukraine in a slightly different way. Although all countries in the region aspire to membership of the European Union, not all have implemented sanctions against the Russian Federation. Western Balkan perspectives on Russia’s war against Ukraine presented in the article through a comparative analysis, enrich the European narrative and attempts to understand or evaluate the war.

Valentin and his Wild Brother in European Literature: How French is a French Romance?

The medieval romance about the two brothers Valentin and Orson (also known as Nameless) crossed various linguistic and cultural borders in the European Middle Ages and beyond. It is said to have originated in a Francophone context, but the French origin, which is believed to be a chanson de geste, has not been preserved – the earliest surviving sources are three Middle Dutch fragments. The different versions of the tale are generally divided into two strands: the first covers versions in Middle Dutch, Middle Low German, Middle High German, and Old Swedish, and the second includes versions in French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Icelandic, and Yiddish. In this article, we give an up-to-date overview of the two strands and raise the question whether Valentin should be considered as a primarily French tradition. We argue that Valentin cannot be understood only in a monolingual or national context, and that a linear model of transmission does not do justice to the complexity of this tradition. We consider what it means to approach Valentin as a shared European narrative, how each version places itself in this larger tradition, and what insight this approach can give us into the tension as well as fruitful co-existence between local and supralocal. By putting the different versions of the tale in dialogue and paying attention to the places and social networks along which they travelled, the article presents a new way of understanding a literary tradition that once enthralled audiences from Flanders to Silesia, and from Venice to Sweden.

The experience of common European heritage: A critical discourse analysis of tourism practices at Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe

Routes and networks with a heritage theme can be seen as alternative ways of approaching heritage, as they situate heritage sites in larger geographical and cultural contexts. The development of routes and networks can benefit places and stakeholders by attracting tourists, but in practice most routes and networks do not use their potential to become an experience-based form of tourism. In this article, seven Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe are researched to see how they connect places, present European narratives and provide tourism experiences. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to examine the use of tourism in Cultural Routes. Most Cultural Routes are networks of sites that share a theme, without being physically connected. These networks, often led by governments and heritage experts, aim at creating a pan-European identity by showing the connections between historic narratives over Europe. In this way, local narratives are placed in a European perspective to teach Europeans about their common heritage. However, despite the aim of the Cultural Routes to let visitors experience common European heritage, practical information for tourists is often missing in information sources of the Cultural Routes. In addition, it is impossible to let people experience a complete European network, so the word route can be misleading. This raises the question whether creating tourism itineraries is really one of the main goals of the Cultural Routes, or if it is more about bringing stakeholders together in a European network.

From Realpolitik to Gefühlspolitik: strategically narrating the European Union at the national level

ABSTRACT Studies on European narratives predominantly focus on which narratives about the EU exist and which are more salient for political actors and audiences. The question remains as to how political actors can strategically utilize those EU narratives at a national level to justify their decision-making and further their objectives. We argue that to render narratives efficacious in convincing audiences of the appropriateness of political decisions, actors engage in Gefühlspolitik – emotional politics – rather than Realpolitik by strategically (re)constructing EU narratives and emphasizing their intersections with national narratives and collective memory to construct emotionally compelling stories and moral imperatives. Therefore, how EU narratives are utilized on a national level is more dependent on the national context and their affective appeal than on their actual content. We demonstrate our argument by looking at the case of the German government narrating the EU during the migration crisis. We show how the government anchored the European peace narrative in German collective memory to construct compelling moral imperatives that significantly narrowed the discursive space and let the German government’s policies appear as apolitical necessities without alternative.

Entangled Geographies, Contested Narratives: The Canning Marbles and the Ottoman Response to Antiquity

Abstract The history of archaeology in the nineteenth century has conventionally been studied from the point of view of Europeans, who are credited as the inventors of modern archaeology. Although the blatantly Eurocentric perspective of earlier scholarship has been challenged in recent decades by a proliferation of works on the “source countries” where the bulk of archaeological material originated before being displaced to Europe, the trajectory of European archaeology has not been abandoned as the measure by which to assess emerging sensibilities about antiquity in the nineteenth century. In this essay, I trace the origins of a group of “marbles” from the British Museum, the Canning marbles, and propose to rethink a mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman attempt to establish a museum to house such “marbles” in the light of the Ottoman exhibitionary practices in the longue durée. My aim is to challenge both contemporaneous European narratives on nineteenth-century Ottoman attitudes to antiquity and current scholarship on Ottoman museology that attributes its proper emergence to the last two decades of the century, after the well-known Ottoman polymath Osman Hamdi Bey resumed the directorship of the Müze-i Hümāyūn (Ottoman Imperial Museum).

‘What I shall miss’: European heritage in Tom Lanoye’s Fortress Europe (2005)

Tom Lanoye’s ‘theatre novella’ Fort Europa: Hooglied van Versplintering ( Fortress Europe: A Canticle of Fragmentation) (2005) features a range of characters who probe Europe’s possible future by turning to its past. The Eurocentric heritage narratives on which they draw perpetuate an idea of Europe as a civilization founded on Christianity and on the Enlightenment and racially defined as White. The way in which Lanoye stages these conservative narratives and the way in which he employs irony, however, invites critical reflection, thus calling for a postcolonial perspective on Europe and on European heritage. We approach Fortress Europe as a literary text that reflects on and intervenes in dominant heritage discourses. Through close reading, we investigate how this work stages and engages with European heritage and how it thereby explores specific ideas about European culture and identity. Our focus is on the literary means by which Lanoye reflects on the place of heritage in narratives of Europe.

The invention of the European legal tradition and the narrative of rights

Before the Second World War, the concept of Europe was a secondary moniker in a nationalistic world, which made the post-war rise of Europe and European legal heritage as concepts remarkable development. The idea of European integration was in part a post-war reaction to the ultranationalism touted by totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. In a few years after the war, there emerged a new theory which argued that Roman law provided the foundation for a common European legal heritage, as well as a basis for future integration. This contribution explores the emergence of this idea and traces its history from the 1930s to the present, equally by scholars working in Europe and those who were exiled in the United States, arguing that with the rise of human rights instruments it created a foundation for the European narrative of rights that was a key part of the legitimation of European integration. This article demonstrates how these narratives of Roman law legitimated changing conceptions of European self-understanding and self-definition by engaging in a type of heritage discourse where the past was seen as a framework for the future.

Narrative Ökonomik: Europa als „Transferunion“ oder „Risikogemeinschaft“?

Abstract Economic developments are often accompanied by narratives, which correspond to popular or generally understandable as well as easily reproducible descriptions, images and interpretations. In debates about European integration, the sovereign debt crisis, and solutions to the Corona crisis – the latter of which has rekindled concerns about the public finances of thrifty states – the narrative of Europe as a “transfer union” plays a major role. Unilateral payments from economically strong to economically weaker countries are assumed. An evaluation of all plenary minutes of the German Bundestag shows that this narrative has spread since the introduction of the Euro. Its peak has been reached with the European sovereign debt crisis of 2010/11. However, this is a distorted picture, which identifies Germany as the loser of European integration. The advantages to all member States deriving from currently discussed – or already implemented – measures to stabilize the EU can be explained by means of more appropriate descriptions of Europe as a “stability union” or “risk community”.

Smart Contracts, Consumer Protection, and Competing European Narratives of Private Law

AbstractThe author makes brief Considerations on the Treatment of the Theme of the Relationship Between New Technologies and Private Law. In particular, she believes that the criticism of Lessig’s statement according to which “the values of real-space sovereigns will at first lose out” is correct, adding, however, that one must monitor the evolution of new technologies. We are, in fact, at the crossroads of a technological revolution which, as jurists, we are not able to fully understand. The author also questions the position taken in the volume on the US neoliberal approach v. European solidarity approach, inviting the authors to question the difference between the narrative that sees the European system as all about ensuring solidarity and the reality about the economic thinking that informs the different disciplines. Finally, she takes a position on the relationship between ordoliberalism and consumer protection.

The Shortest Way with Defoe: “Robinson Crusoe,” Deism, and the Novel

The Shortest Way with Defoe: “Robinson Crusoe,” Deism, and the Novel

Eric Voegelin's and Simone Weil's return to Ancient Greece

Summary Two enigmatic figures of 20th-century political theory, Eric Voegelin and Simone Weil, stand out with idiosyncratic receptions of ancient Greek texts. Both thinkers diagnosed that, as political agents in late modernity, we have unlearned to read world-making ancient texts and their narratives in their cosmic dimension and thus lost what has rooted European culture and history. Against this backdrop, Voegelin and Weil share ‘antidotal’ practises of combining historically and generically distinct material. These practices aim at fathoming a primordial experience at work in European narratives. With this comparative analysis of Voegelin's and Weil's symbolic readings (exemplified in this paper by passages from the Iliad, the History of the Peloponnesian War, and the Symposium), I present some considerations how their combinatory imagination of ancient material could supply late modern political agents with a pathos, a meaningful self-world relationship that was thought to have gone missing.

Colonial Galant: Three Analytical Perspectives from the Chiquitano Missions

Abstract During the eighteenth century, a vibrant tradition of choral and orchestral music flourished among the Chiquitano Indigenous people. Coerced into entering Jesuit missions in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru (now eastern Bolivia) the Chiquitano first heard and then began to make music in a European style. Archival sources preserve several operas and large-scale liturgical compositions written entirely in the Chiquitano language and attributed to Indigenous composers. Unlike the heavy counterpoint of other New World sacred music, this repertoire is characterized by simple harmonies, regular cadence patterns, and transparent textures. In three analytical vignettes, this article explains how the galant style of this mission music helped to achieve the colonial aims of European settlers. Previous scholars have generally celebrated the exceptional status of this unusual body of music and pointed to it as proof of an isolated set of instances in which traditional power hierarchies between colonizers and Indigenous colonized were unstable. Drawing on Brian Larkin, Homi Bhabha, and Franz Fanon, this article by contrast suggests that the specific aesthetic forms produced by the Chiquitano were vital in helping to shape them as colonial subjects. The galant style of their music was both easy to participate in and impressive to experience. Taking this seriously means rewriting our European narrative of the galant and retelling it, in part, as one of cultural imperialism and colonial hegemony.

The Visegrád Group – A United Front Against a Common European Narrative?

The Visegrád Group – A United Front Against a Common European Narrative?

Representations of World War II in Lithuanian Cinema in the 2000s: Between National and European Narratives

After years of discussion, testimonies, judgements, and resolutions of international organisations, the Holocaust has become the cornerstone of WWII memory and European identity in Western Europe. For East European nations emerging from decades of communist rule, the cosmopolitan ethics of the Holocaust memory have remained in the background while attention has been focused on national suffering and resistance to the Soviets. Since regaining independence in 1991, and especially since accession to the European Union in 2004, Lithuania has sought to formulate its own mnemonic narratives of WWII asserting Lithuania’s role in the European framework. This article traces influential manifestations of this narrative in popular historical feature films released since 2004. These films have tended to reproduce, rather than transcend, the national ‘fighting and suffering’ paradigm of the early 1990s and have only just begun to tackle the more challenging aspects of the war such as the role of Lithuanian collaborators in the genocide of the Jews or the atrocities against the civil population committed by some Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisans.

How shareholders react to sustainable narratives about leading European energy companies? An event study using sentiment data from the global database for events, language and tone (GDELT)

ABSTRACT This study aims to investigate how the shareholders of leading European energy companies value sustainability narratives. It uses news from the Global Database of Events, Location, Language, and Tone (GDELT) and analyses the cumulative average abnormal returns (CAAR) and abnormal volatilities (AV), incorporating the event study methodology. A total of 279,546 big news items were used, and 4,026 event studies were conducted. The extensive analysis of data and the segmentation of the news by tone, type of energy generation and environmental consequences helps to understand shareholders’ investment decisions. This study found that the sustainability narrative significantly impacts shareholder value; however, this narrative’s interpretation has no consensus. The sustainability news about these companies moves the stock market upwards for some shareholders, while others do the contrary. These results are observed by comparing CAAR and AV. The results found by this article are crucial for regulators to push forward an effective ecological transition. It should be legislated so that there is a common shareholders’ narrative, discouraging highly polluting investments.

Conceptul de inter-imperialiate în periferie: modelul Wallerstein și cazul romanului Adam și Eva de Liviu Rebreanu

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the concept of “inter-imperiality” elaborated by Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă can be more useful for analyzing East European narratives than Laura Doyle’s initial concept of “inter-imperiality.” The reason for this differentiation is the fact that Doyle operates with a descriptive deep time model, reminiscent of Wai Chee Dimock’s method, while Parvulescu and Boatcă use a critical model influenced by world-system studies (Immanuel Wallerstein) to portray capitalist modernity. In order to prove the latter’s actuality, this study analyzes the novel Adam și Eva [Adam and Eve] by Liviu Rebreanu from an inter-imperial perspective, portraying its trans-imperial universalism as a symptom of its peripherality.

Why Personal Dreams Matter: How professionals affectively engage with the promises surrounding data-driven healthcare in Europe

Recent buzzes around big data, data science and artificial intelligence portray a data-driven future for healthcare. As a response, Europe's key players have stimulated the use of big data technologies to make healthcare more efficient and effective. Critical Data Studies and Science and Technology Studies have developed many concepts to reflect on such overly positive narratives and conduct critical policy evaluations. In this study, we argue that there is also much to be learned from studying how professionals in the healthcare field affectively engage with this strong European narrative in concrete big data projects. We followed twelve hospital-based big data pilots in eight European countries and interviewed 145 professionals (including legal, governance and ethical experts, healthcare staff and data scientists) between 2018 and 2020. In this study, we introduce the metaphor of dreams to describe how professionals link the big data promises to their own frustrations, ideas, values and experiences with healthcare. Our research answers the question: how do professionals in concrete data-driven initiatives affectively engage with European Union's data hopes in their ‘dreams’ – and with what consequences? We describe the dreams of being seen, of timeliness, of connectedness and of being in control. Each of these dreams emphasizes certain aspects of the grand narrative of big data in Europe, makes particular assumptions and has different consequences. We argue that including attention to these dreams in our work could help shine an additional critical light on the big data developments and stimulate the development of responsible data-driven healthcare.

Східне для Західних

Periodization of art as a subject of research is a challenge for writing a monograph on the region of Central and Eastern Europe. Due to the dense layering of different cultural contexts and the presence of experience that Western Europe did not have (for example, the existence of the Soviet regime), it does not allow applying the optics of traditional art history to the Eastern European region. The authors of the collective monograph Periodization in the Art Historiographies of Central and Eastern Europe joined in solving this problem, where researchers from the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland and other countries of the region analyze periodization in the art historiography of specific countries, which sheds light on the "non-linear" art history, which combines three main discourses – imperial, academic and nationalist. The authors focus their attention on such problems as the Byzantine heritage, which in the historiography of the 19th century was supposed to replace the Italian Renaissance for a number of Eastern European countries, the interaction of large Western European narratives with local Eastern European ones, a change in the view of periodization under the influence of national movements, etc. Although the articles are devoted to different problems and topics, they are united by the application of postcolonial theory to the periodization and recognition of the Central/Eastern European region as a "near Other" in relation to the Western European one. In this article, I compare the ideas highlighted in the monograph with other concepts exploring Eastern Europe from a postcolonial perspective. In the end, I come to the conclusion that all of them, taking into account the book under review, are aimed at revealing questions that interest Western researchers, namely, what is the region of Central and Eastern Europe: a colonizer, a colony, or combines both of these features. At the same time, basing on Piotrowski’s concept of "horizontal history", I argue that for the Eastern European audience, what is relevant is not the deconstruction of narratives within the boundaries of modern Central and Eastern European states, but on the contrary, tracing the intersection of different cultural contexts of neighboring countries outside the borders of national narratives, since Eastern European countries know more about the art of the West than about each other’s art.

Simbolist’uri kalakis mxat’vrul-msoplmxedvelobrivi ret’rosp’ekt’iva Sandro cirekidzis miniat’urebshi /სიმბოლისტური ქალაქის მხატვრულ-მსოფლმხედველობრივი რეტროსპექტივა სანდრო ცირეკიძის მინიატურებში [Artistic-Worldview Retrospective of Symbolist Сity in Miniatures by Sandro Tsirekidze

In literary studies, there is a firmly rooted idea that generally the genre specificity of the symbolist creative thought is merely poetic imagology, however, the genre area in the European history of Symbolism has also embraced prose, fiction, drama, miniature literature as well as essays. In this regard, the Georgian Symbolist school which represents a creative variation of the European narrative is consistent. Sandro Tsirekidze’s name is unquestionably associated with the history of the Georgian Symbolist prose; he, all the way through his life and work, fully embraced the destiny of the so-called “cursed poets” and the fate of the “forgotten artists”, although, back then, he along with others from the Blue Horns was constructing the new history of the Georgian literature. Sandro Tsirekidze’s ideas about literature and art serve as another analogue of the assessment of creative events, performed professionally with a then-innovative and modern approach. These attitudes have been demonstrated in his miniatures in which the Georgian reflection of the creative and worldview discourse of Paul Verlaine, Émile Verhaeren, Arthur Rimbaud, Georges Rodenbach, Valery Bryusov, and other Symbolists becomes fully conscious. For the character of Sandro Tsirekidze’s miniatures, the city is the space for action as well as the space for thinking; the city which, at the same time, is a symbolic binary essence, and an artistic and creative stepping stone. Here, the author’s subjective opinions and attitudes undergo a certain artistic transformation, when the author rather proceeds along the “footbridge” of literature positioned between the emotion and analysis, where the author’s genuine emotional experiences are explicitly identified. The city text by Sandro Tsirekidze is related to the conceptual symbolist perception. It is the complex of concepts, motifs and plots, which covers the author’s model of city life – both generally and in its private manifestations.