Modern Narratives Research Articles

Дискурс исторической справедливости: этико-политические основания и концептуальные противоречия

The article examines the use of the “historical justice” category as a public justification for political actions. Despite its frequent use in public discourse, the scientific legitimacy of the concept remains questionable, as its formal definition encounters a range of challenges. Firstly, the status of the main subjects of justice – perpetrators and victims – remains uncertain, since the assessment of their activities in the historical perspective may change over time. Secondly, the so-called non-identity problem is essential, as it complicates establishing the continuity between the victims of historical injustice and the modern communities claiming to represent them. The active use of appeals to historical justice rooted in the doctrine of “moral remembrance”, which arose as a result of World War II and consists of three main principles: the duty to remember, the duty to face the past, and the duty to ensure justice for victims. As the composition and number of leading political actors changed, there was a sharp increase in memorial narratives, and the automatic extension of demands for historical justice to these narratives resulted in an increase in memorial conflicts. In modern public space, the discourse of historical justice has become a crucial tool of symbolic struggle, often replacing moral attitudes towards the past with political manipulation. In this regard, it seems necessary to distinguish between historical justice as a political tool and as a category of historical ethics that allows determining and assessment of the relationship between historical facts and modern narratives.

«ЗВОРОТНИЙ ЗВ’ЯЗОК» ПЛАТОНІВСЬКОЇ АКАДЕМІЇ ТА УНІВЕРСИТЕТУ ПОСТМОДЕРНУ

The problematic theme of the article is determined by the tendencies of the postmodern pragmatic rationality and hermeneutical interpretation, which exclude the ideals of Truth, the Good and Beautiful substituting them by the interests of money and consumerism. The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training of minds, which had been the focus of education for ages is becoming one the false grand narratives of modernity. The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending to assume the form of value: university education is and will be implemented in order to be sold; "the goal is exchange". The purpose of the article is an attempt to conceptually reconstruct the idea of the spiritual factors in the platonic academies; the concern of the authors is not how to manage changes but how best conceptualize and understand them with the interdisciplinary analysis of the place of universities in the postmodern world: the phenomenological, hermeneutic and existential approaches are used to this purpose. The scientific novelty of the article reflects the idea of the platonic dialogism, which played a great sense-forming function in the formation of the classical universities. The emphasis on the "non-structural", "non-linear" ways of obtaining knowledge in the postmodern university leads to the new phenomenon in the university education that has changed the classical status and mission of the university as an agent of Truth, Good and Beautiful, which represent the "non-interested", "non-involved" university being the repository of the cultural heritage of mankind.

Lyotard versus Hegel: The violent end of postmodernity

In the final phase of the Cold War, Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard popularized the end of modernity and the dawn of a new era, ?postmodernity?. But postmodernism is already over again. In the resurgence of the great empires and civilizations that perished in European colonization and European-American hegemony, the rise of the ?others?, a new epoch of history is emerging that will define the entire 21st century. Lyotard?s position is characterized by three different approaches that seem to flow into each other but need to be separated: A critique of Hegel with the core assertion that Auschwitz, as a symbol of infinite suffering, abrogated his philosophy of history, and the extension of this critique to the great narratives of modernity. This is followed by a meta-discourse on the great narratives of history on the basis of linguistic-philosophical considerations (in fact a meta-meta-narrative) and, finally, the construction of an alternative great narrative, that of the individual, particular, other, of postmodernity. This latter is only ostensibly not an alternative construction because it is intimately connected to the critique of grand narratives. In all three subfields, Lyotard has made groundbreaking considerations - but their immediate connection has reversed these advances. Lyotard exchanged a totalizing discourse of the absolute through a similar totalizing discourse of the particular. We not only need a radical reversal of the concepts of Western modernity, but also of those of post-modernity and re-invent a kind of different dialectics. It must be granted to Lyotard that an abridged interpretation of Hegel could support his critique. However, it is completely disputed whether Hegel?s approach is based on a closed or an open system. The thesis presented here is that Hegel?s approach is both open and closed at the same time. A simple and illustrative example is a sine curve on a slightly rising x-axis. This wave model is closed on the y-axis, but completely open and even infinite on the x-axis. Critics and proponents of Hegel?s philosophy of history misunderstood his approach as a closed system and derived from it an ?end of history? (Marx as well as Fukuyama). With Hegel, however, it can be argued that we are at the violent end of postmodernity. I wanted my text not only to attempt a critique of Lyotard and a reconstruction of the Hegelian method, but also to lay out the consequent substantive perspectives, even if they are necessarily not yet fully elaborated. In addition, I see Lyotard as an outstanding representative of post-structuralism, with whom he shares comparable problems, so that I make cross-references to similarities in this position, even if I do not treat them separately here.

South Korean Historiography on Civil Service Examination, Max Weber, and the Cold War Transpacific Invention of Confucian Modernity

Abstract: This article first offers a postcolonial critique on Japanese colonial historiography and post-1945 South Korean historiography on Confucian tradition of Korea that they both have shared a very essentialized understanding on Confucian tradition of Korea as unique nature of Korean society based on the same overarching evolutionary modernization narrative in spite of their contradictingly different definition of it as either premodern backwardness or Confucian modernity. In order to go beyond these still dominant essentialized bipolar views on Confucian tradition of Korea, based on a transnational perspective, this paper seeks to show how post-1945 South Korean historiography has redefined Confucian tradition of Korea. Then, to do so, this paper tries to historicize post-1945 South Korean historiography's appropriation of Max Weber's bureaucracy and modernization theories from U.S. academia of social science and East Asian studies for its studies of Koryŏ-Chosŏn civil service examination and social status system. Then, this paper goes further to look at how post-1945 South Korean historiography on late Koryŏ and early Chosŏn history has struggled from 1945 to early 2000 to redefine and reinvent Confucian tradition of Korea such as Koryŏ-Chosŏn civil service examination as the unique origin of its own meritocratic modernity that is as close as "Western Modernity," based on this appropriation of Max Weber's bureaucracy and modernization theories. Then, this paper finally turns to rethink the meaning of this appropriation within the broader context of Cold War and South Korean postcoloniality.

The "Personal Myth" in the Context of Modern Narratives about Shamans.

The "Personal Myth" in the Context of Modern Narratives about Shamans.

The experience of foreignness in The Double Book by Dimitris Hatzis

Dimitris Hatzis’ novel, The Double Book (1976), a work of migrant literature, is an interweave of paradigmatic stories of Greeks who emigrate and reshape their identity, after leaving behind their life in their native land. The experience of foreignness is experienced both by characters in the book who consciously choose to uproot themselves from their homeland and struggle to adapt to the unfamiliar cultural environments of foreign lands, while battling against nostalgia, alienation and loneliness, and also by others who are forced to leave their provincial birthplace and end up feeling alien to themselves. The present study attempts to view these stories as the axes of a modern narrative about the “romeiko” and its lost generations, which presents different but equally painful experiences of expatriation and the aspects of the hard struggle for survival in an unwelcoming land. Taking into account postmodern theoretical approaches to migrant writing which describe it as “writing between the two” (“écriture de l’entre-deux”), it examines both the nostalgic recollections of a fragmented individual and collective memory of the recent or distant past, linked to the longing to return, and the ideological and ontological problems created by experiencing “déterritorialisation” and a sense of not belonging (“désappartenance”). The study also contemplates the marginal psychological states that arise during the process of acculturation, which are caused by difficulties in communication or by the subjective and national identity crisis of the immigrants. Nevertheless, hope of an interdependent multi-ethnic world emerges at the end of the novel, and gives rise to a humanist reflection on the need to form intercultural consciences and open “rhizomatic identities” (“identités rhizomatiques”) in contemporary multicultural communities.

Rethinking the 20th-Century Korean Embroidery from Gender Perspectives

The rupture in the history of Korean embroidery is generally perceived as a severance from the traditional embroidery, made due to the Japanese colonial rule. However, it cannot be denied that the narrative of modern and contemporary Korean art history, mainly constructed around artistic movements and groups, also played a major part. The dispute encompasses the fundamental question of whether embroidery can be seen as a form of fine art from the perspective of modernist aesthetics, and the matter of hierarchy between different crafts. Also inherent are the tensions between contradictory values such as tradition and modernity, Western or Japanese and Eastern or Korean, abstract and figurative, and others peculiar to Korea, and the effects of such binary oppositions are closely related to gender problems. This paper re-examines, from gender perspectives, the chronological history of embroidery since the late 19th century, which had been placed on the periphery of Korean art history until now. In the traditional society, embroidery was produced and enjoyed privately, but moved into the public sphere through education and exhibitions for women during modernization. In the process, in order to be recognized as a form of pure art, embroidery gave up its unique characteristics as craft and took on the formative language of paintings. In the years immediately after liberation from Japanese colonial rule, which was the era of eradication of Japanese influences, establishment of national identity, and industrialization, embroidery was divided into abstract embroidery understood as more masculine, and traditional embroidery considered more feminine. Korean embroidery artists in the 20<sup>th</sup> century, as women experiencing particular historical contexts, worked with confidence in the artistic value of embroidery due to or despite their specific circumstances.

Екатерина II как воплощение Белой Тары: обожествляли ли буряты Романовых?

Introduction. The tradition of worshipping the Russian Empress Catherine II by Buryat Buddhists as an earthly incarnation of the enlightened Buddhist deity White Tara is regarded as an established historical fact by researchers (and officials of Russia’s largest Buddhist organization ‘Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia’), and has never been questioned. Yet a careful analysis of Buryat written sources and Russian historical documents makes the statement somewhat problematic. Goals. The article attempts a comparative insight into a range of documentary, narrative and folklore sources in Buryat, Russian and Tibetan to clarify the issue of actual relationships between Buryat Buddhists and Catherine the Great. Results. The paper establishes that the statement insisting the title of Bandido Khambo Lama was recognized by Catherine II in 1767 goes back only to Buryat written sources — and is not corroborated by Russian historical documents. Our analysis of Russian-language sources, including letters and writings by Catherine II, makes it possible to surmise that the Empress’s attitude towards her ‘Lamaist’ subjects was dictated by her foreign policy plans in Asia and the Renaissance disregard for archaic cultures of ‘Siberian idolaters’ believed by eighteenth-century scholars to comprise Buryat Buddhists too. Insights into the surviving Buryat sources, including historical chronicles and biographies, also do not confirm the existence of a developed cult of venerating Catherine II as incarnate goddess White Tara. Nevertheless, such evidence has been preserved in Buryat song folklore and religious poetry but it should be borne in mind that, apparently, those are modern narratives dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the latter period that was characterized by the wide dissemination of the idea of the sanctity of the Romanov Dynasty in the eyes of Buddhists, which may have been backed by prominent opinion leaders of the Russian political establishment to further promote the concept of Russia’s expansion deep into Buddhist Asia.

Capitalist modernity and gendered subalternity in contemporary Muslim fiction: Saudi Women in Raja Alem’s Fatma: A Novel of Arabia (2002)

ABSTRACT Contemporary Muslim women’s writing can help to shed light on how the ostensibly incommensurate relationship between the conditions of women’s lives and gendered forms of social reproduction in modern Muslim societies are intimately connected with the uneven development of capitalist modernity, especially in oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia. This paper traces the ways in which gendered forms of social reproduction and patriarchal oppression are mediated but also contested in the form of a text from modern Saudi Arabia: Raja Alem’s Fatma A Novel of Arabia. It considers how this novel combines elements of magic, fantasy, and realism to foreground how the oppression of Muslim women and their relegation to a position of gendered subalternity is a crucial determinant in the combined and uneven development of petro-capitalist modernity in the modern Muslim world. By drawing on Sufism in a modern narrative of so-called magical realism, the novel, I argue, contests gender roles in contemporary capitalist modernity by offering a view that stems from the Islamic tradition but does not align with patriarchy and capitalist ideology; on the other hand, it registers the coexistence of the religious and the magical within the modern world.

Mærkelig planet, mærkelig litteraturhistorie

The planet has recently become a popular figure for the study of literary history, comparatists having spent recent years speculating on global or planetary space. However, this work has not adequately addressed the issue of how to planetarize our understanding of time, that is, literary history. My paper addresses this issue by harnessing the weirdness of the planet to defamiliarize our conceived understandings of literary history. I argue that, to counter progressivist, modernist narratives of eternal growth, it is necessary to overwrite a notion of literary history as a horizontal line divided into neat periods with a vision of literary history as a cobweb, the literary historian spinning together past and present to make them weird again.

Narrative of Malaysian modernity: COVID-19, Malay women portrayals and popular television serials

Academic studies often explore the dynamics between Malay women and popular culture within the context of Malaysian modernity. Researchers commonly investigate resistance to the government’s moral initiatives for women in society. This article examines how popular culture, specifically serial television drama, depicts the portrayal of Malay women during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on the concepts of obedience, disobedience, and control. The government’s “Duduk Rumah” [Stay at home] and “Kita Jaga Kita” [We take care of ourselves] campaigns, initiated by then Prime Minister Muhyidin Yassin to combat the COVID-19 epidemic, placed additional burdens on women, assigning them significant domestic responsibilities as household managers, including the well-being and education of their children, as well as maintaining family cohesion. We argue that these targeted government policies exacerbated the concerns and uncertainties experienced by Malay women during lockdowns. Furthermore, we contend that the government demonstrated less sensitivity, care, or coordination in managing the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to an increase in domestic violence, divorce, depression, and emotional stress among Malay women. These challenges were prominently depicted in Malay television serials, serving as a vital platform for contemplating the impact of the government’s moral initiatives on Malay women. Our research offers insights into the enduring progress, or lack thereof, in the status of women both within and beyond the domestic sphere, as part of Malaysia’s pursuit of modernity.

Vlast' svetskaya i cerkovnaya: cezarepapistskij konflikt v Rossii XX v.

The article examines the experience of research in the current historiography of the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Their clash in the modern history of Russia (in the events of the revolution of the early 20th century) is described as a Caesarepapist conflict that came at the stage of active modernization and revolutionization of public consciousness. The change of the state system entailed the rejection of a number of traditional public institutions, including the ''dominant Orthodoxy''. Historiographical interpretations of this conflict, which is significant for national history and self-consciousness, influence modern research discourses and self-identification of governmental and confessional institutions, the practice of their appeal to historical experience, defining the modern narrative of state-church relations in Russia of the 20th century.

How Triple Talaq Violates Fundamental Rights of Muslim Women

Generally human rights are equated with more freedom and progress. However it becomes pertinent to note that conferring rights do not always result in emancipation. The major reason behind this exclusionary nature of human rights is the universal assumption on which it is based. The darker side of human rights most apparently manifests itself in case of women as they are caught at the intersection of community identity and the narrative of modernity. One such universalistic subject is the image of a thoroughly victimised Muslim women who is in need of protection through the liberal rights discourse. The current debate around triple talaq, centred on the Sharaya Bano and several batches of petitions as well as Supreme courts own suo moto PIL considers certain aspects of Islamic personal laws which amount to gender discrimination and hence violates the constitution misses the point of intersectionality. As per the liberal understanding of rights for empowerment of women we need to subordinate the category of religion and culture. However constitutional rights would remain a dead letter if we do not understand the manner in which identity politics unfolds especially in case of women. The whole triple talaq issue has become a battleground for the culture versus mordernity debate. It is important to realize that women’s experiences cannot be understood in these reductive binaries as “she” is produced from the very power relations which subordinate them. In this paper the author deals with the question of triple talaq in the light of the recent petition filed in the Supreme Court for declaring such talaq invalid. The author argues that there is an already existing legal precedent established by the apex court with respect to triple talaq which should be followed instead of resorting to a confrontational approach which may become hegemonic to Muslim women themselves. The author shall advocate that taking cue from third wave feminism, the identity of Muslim women must be understood at the intersection of gender and religion.

The Emergence of Secondary Professional Education in Kazan Educational District in the course of the Russian Empire Modernization

The conditions of modernization at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the Russian Empire gave rise to an “educational revolution,” which, among other outcomes, led to the rapid development of professional education. In an article drawing on data from the Kazan educational district, the author posits that the emergence of secondary professional schools wasn’t driven merely by economic imperatives. Rather, it was molded by the rising educational demands of the populace, policies of social segmentation, and a strengthened collaboration between state and public sectors in the domain of education.
 The first professional schools appeared in the provinces of the district in the mid-19th century, aligning with the onset of the peasant reform and the region’s agrarian specialization. The period spanning the late 1870s to the 1880s witnessed the state laying the groundwork for a structured professional education system, a move colored by the prevailing politics of social segmentation. As the 19th century waned and the 20th dawned, mounting requirements for economic expansion – rooted in a more inclusive societal stratum, evolving liberal economic policies, and the recognition of education as pivotal to progress – enhanced social mobility. This progression reached its zenith with the bolstering of state-public partnerships in education and a marked surge in the number of professional schools. Viewing the state as a beacon of progress, a portion of public schools transitioned to state governance. Concurrent with the rise of educational institutions bearing mixed ownership, this highlighted the burgeoning ambitions of the bourgeoisie to shape policy. The educational overhauls, coupled with a broadening educational footprint, redefined the social milieu, accentuating elite hegemony and recalibrating class and cultural inequities. The educational system’s institutional path mirrored the dynamics of social segmentation, progressively bridging the gap between secondary vocational and classic general education.
 This article caters to scholars delving into domestic education, as well as the social, cultural history, and the modernization narratives of the waning imperial epoch.

Jilali Gharbaoui and Decolonization

This paper proposes a new reading of Moroccan abstract painter Jilali Gharbaoui through the lens of decolonization. Gharbaoui fits uncomfortably into the narrative of modernism in Morocco. Unlike other painters, interested in direct connections between their shapes or abstractions and traditional visual culture or Islamic art as a postcolonial claim of local identity, Gharbaoui’s work is more elusive. Many critics have framed his abstraction primarily through his schizophrenia, as Gharbaoui died from suicide in 1971; this continual recourse to biography over the actual art objects puts Gharbaoui definitively at the margins of narratives of modernism. Moreover, this analysis precludes close attention to the ways in which Gharbaoui, like other painters of his generation, was shaped by the discourses of decolonization and the role that art could play in the new nation. Within this paper, in contrast, staying close to the work itself allows the possibility to understand the active ways in which Gharbaoui was negotiating questions of what postcolonial modernism could be. He sought to position himself as an international artist that was continually trying to bypass traditional aesthetics as a statement about modernity, but equally saw himself as deeply marked by his homeland. Read in dialogue and confrontation with cosmopolitanism, Gharbaoui’s oeuvre can be analyzed in terms of the multiple ways in which Gharbaoui tried to understand the materiality of the art itself, his relationship to the space of production, and the political stakes of abstraction.

Modern narrative structure in animated short films: a tool to increase suspense

Classical narrative structure introduces specific principles and features to keep the audience engaged with the film. Modern, nonlinear narrative structures, however, provide their own techniques and tools in this sense. They can be utilized in animated short films to develop anticipation and suspense. The majority of animated short films are still focusing on classical narrative principles which only allows chronological order of time and sequence of events. Yet, a considerable potential of applying various nonlinear structures can be addressed when it comes to modern storytelling in animation. Consequently, filmmakers are able to increase suspense by solely adopting such variations. This paper discusses nonlinear narrative structures in five animated short films, “If anything happens I love you” (2021), “Alma” (2009), “Skhizein” (2008), “The house of small cubes” (2008) and “Maestro” (2005), and the way they suggest increased suspense by deviating from classical narrative principles. The present paper explains such potential by relying on David Bordwell theories, where he put an emphasis on important aspects of nonlinear narratives such as time, order, duration and frequency in particular. This paper argues that not only applying nonlinear structures are viable in the context of animated short films, different variations can be utilized as a powerful, innovative and beneficial tool in order to grab and hold the audience’s attention without having to concentrate on an excessively complicated timeline in the story.

“Mimic Men” versus Conscientious Women in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace

Abstract The paper attempts to read the narrative of colonial modernity which runs throughout Amitav Ghosh’s novel, The Glass Palace and then also examines how that modernity is gendered. I have shown how the novel unfolds the various layers of this modernity which exposes the abrasive opposition between the ideas of colonialism. This opposition is not limited to the ideological realm only but spills and then creates an uncomfortable silence between the native men and women, particularly in the bhadralok section (Western educated urban middle or upper middle class Bengali people). I have approached the text through the theories of Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Michel Foucault principally.

Greetings from Spinalonga! O wyspie ciszy w fotografii społecznościowej i o kulturze pamięci na Instagramie

In modern narratives, the island of Spinalonga appears an attractive tourist destination with an interesting and enigmatic history. In fact, Spinalonga is a memory space, encumbered with past political decisions and medical negligence. This is the story of the great confinement, the isolation of the sick who were symbolically killed. Meanwhile, the photos shared on Instagram show theisland in a completely different light.The article seeks to answer the following questions: Does the behavior of Instagram users disrupt the culture of memory and how do these photos (digital representations of memory) influence the image of the island? To this end, I outline the history of the island in the context of exclusion mechanisms for those with Hansen's disease. I discuss the issues of dark tourism, social photoand desemantization of communication. I juxtapose the whole thing with the examples of photos from Spinalonga published on Instagram in 2022.

The introduction from a narrative perspective in the 'Smart book'

There is no doubt that the news is one of the closest narratives to the story, and people have transmitted the news in their first era until it became their companion and the fruit of their conversations, where the Arabs were passionate about narrating and documenting the news until many of those news documents reached us, many of which have not been studied yet, and Arab researchers in the modern era have paid attention to this huge narrative heritage that our ancestors left written in the folds of huge volumes, although most of it was lost and lost, and perhaps the development that has reached the methods of studying and criticizing narrative genres, which resulted in a science in itself, is “narrative science” One of the reasons for this attention. The narrative structure of the news consists of several elements, one of which complements the other in its introduction, which is the introduction that the research seeks to study in one of the Arabic news documents attributed to Ibn al-Jawzi and titled (The Smart), due to the importance that this narrative element is distinguished by being an effective element in The structure of the news is what begins with the narration and what first strikes the ears. The structure of the research was based on three demands. The first one stopped at the concept of both news and introduction, as the research is based on showing (the introduction) from a narrative perspective in a book (news), while the second demand defined the general structure of the book under study and showing the most prominent narrative characteristics in it. To end up with us at The third requirement, which was concerned with studying the introduction in this book, is a study that is consistent with modern narrative discourse.

Decolonizing the “state of nature” in political thought

The study of coloniality as a “social imaginary” (Charles Taylor) from the perspective of decoloniality invites European scholars, to “think again”, to interrogate their own traditions, including their modern political philosophical tradition. In this article, I will discuss a powerful modern political imaginary, namely the democratic narrative of the “social contract”. Such narratives or “imaginations of our origin” (Ursprungsphantasien: Philip Manow) give us answers to the enigma of our social and political existence: what does it mean to live in this political community? What does it give us, ask from us? In the modern narrative of the “social contract”, we are told that, to be a good citizen, we have/had to leave the “state of nature” (status naturalis), a state often described as a state of disorder, conflict, and war, and accept the status of citizenship (status civilis) and a powerful state as guarantee of peace and the rule of law. In this article, I will firstly give some examples of the use of this narrative in very diverse contexts: 1) in the context of the European religious civil wars in the 16th and 17th centuries (birth of the modern liberal political philosophy), 2) in the context of the transition of European nation-states to the European Union after WWII, 3) in the context of the transition of Apartheid South Africa to a non-racial democracy. Secondly, I will concentrate on one of the first philosophers who introduced the state of nature/civil state narrative, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), to discover that his political imagination is deeply influenced by the colonial experience in the “New World”, especially the meeting with the indigenous Indians in America. In several aspects, they are in Hobbes’ imagination the incarnation of the life in the “state of nature”. This raises the question, how the idea of a democratic social contract can be reformulated, without Eurocentric and racist premises, and without simply reversing the Hobbesian narrative: since the “colonizer” is the root of our conflict and controversies, to expel him will restore a durable peace.