Eastern University Books

Thomas, Alfred. "The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture", University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.

Czech Literature and Film

Amos Lassen and Literary Pride

If you have followed my reviews you know that I usually dabble in lighter literature but every once in a while a scholarly book comes along that I feel deserves to be mentioned. Such is the case with Alfred Thomas's "The Bohemian Body". The Czech Republic has always been a land of intrigue as well as a place that we do not know much about. Alfred Thomas changes that. He looks at the gamut of the nation and writes about it with beauty. The Czech Republic is a small country that more than once has been on the verge of disappearing altogether culturally while still holding on to cosmopolitanism. Thomas looks at the culture of the country in ways that will undoubtedly bring about discussion.
Looking at modern Czech literature and film through a variety of lenses can only bring about greater understanding. Looking at the texts ad films from the point of view of gender analysis reveals a relationship between the personal and the political and also joins local and European identities. Thomas looks at the forces of modernism that helped to shape Czech nationalism and the interaction between the arts and between ethnic and social groups. He examines the contributions of all--gays and straights, men and women and Czechs and Germans.
Taking the period form the National Revival and going to the Velvet Revolution. We notice an attempt to be more personal and to separate from the political. Here is where the true culture of the country lies. The modern Czech identity has been brought about by those delving in the arts and culture and identity are very closely related and intertwined. Czech culture is filled with nuance and paradox and up until quite recently has been overlooked by the rest of the world. With this book, we get a clear look at the culture and the people.

I was forced to read this book, in that I took a class taught by the author. Fortunately, I didn't have to steel my soul and tell her to her face that it reeked (not that I would have had the guts to do that anyhow), for it was definitely the best book we read in that particular Russian history class. Recounting the histories of Soviet women both well-known (Kollontai) and not so well-known (Zemliachka), Clements shows, in well-structured arguments, how the women of the Bolshevik movement, feminists as well as socialists, interpreted their feminist mission in the context of what they felt must happen in Russia before women and other oppressed minorities truly gained equal rights. One of the most fascinating themes in the book is how Soviet women viewed their task in contrast to the Western suffragist movement, which was largely led by the well-to-do. This book is an excellent introduction to Soviet history in the early years and offers several directions for study in the history of the Soviet Union and of feminism.

A Brilliantly written work on the origins and the evolution of the Bengali and Subcontinental revolutionary nationalist movements that aimed to overthrow the despotic imperialist-fascist occupation forces of the British in the Indian subcontinent. Chronological,lucid and absorbing, the author brings in a tremendous amount of authentic sources to give us life-like impressions of freedom fighters such as the immortal Khudiram Bose. The beginnings of Jugantar and the Anushilan Samiti under Aurobindo Ghose and Pulin are also closely studied (there is more emphasis on Jugantar and Aurobindo Ghose, also see Asok Ray's 'Party of the Firebrand Revolutionaries' for more on the Anushilan Samiti) A whole decade of nationalist endeavour passes before our eyes from the creation of these groups to their attempts to defeat the illegal occupation of the subcontinent. And although these movements would be dealt severe blows, it must not be assumed that they were defeated. Jugantar and Anushilan Samiti continued [as fragments] to fight British occupation.Ultimately their efforts would be justified when another great revolutionary,Bengali statesman and nationalist leader Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army would provide the impetus for the British withdrawal from the subcontinent in 1947. Indeed it was British Premier Clement Attlee who in 1956 said that it was Netaji and the INA who rocked the very foundations of British rule in the Indian subcontinent and created the revolutionary atmosphere [including inspiring the revolt of the sailors of the British Indian Navy and raising the spectre of the First War of Independence of 1857 which threatened defeat for the occupiers of the subcontinent] which made the situation untenable in 1946-47 for British rule in the subcontinent.[when asked what role had Gandhi or Nehru played in forcing the British withdrawal from the subcontinent, Attlee had smiled and said one word, 'minimal'] This book is a must for background to the Indian Subcontinent's independence movement.

This is a very useful study of the history of the book (defined rather broadly) in Japan. It is well written and makes interesting even topics that at first glance seem inherently dull--the chapter on bibliographies and catalogs, for example. Kornicki combines extensive old-fashioned archival scholarship with a good sense for recent theory on such topics as the death of the author, media technologies, and the shifting history of reading practices.

In recent years, a seemingly endless variety of poetic and political signifiers have been invoked in attempts to describe the experiences of dispossession, minorities, and regions: border, creolization, transculturation, transnationalism, hybridity. These spatial/historical paradigms are often at the crux of cultural debates in much the way that W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness would have once occupied center stage. At the top of the list ranks diaspora (and frequently the somewhat elusive diasporic) which is the focus of journals such as Diaspora and Transition as well as a wide range of academic periodicals that have devoted special issues to the theme. But in one way or another, these permutations and mutations of diaspora can be traced to a late nineteenth-century movement among Jewish historiographers, who sought ways to account for the Jews' persistence over the long span of centuries in a variety of lands that were not their homeland. Unfortunately, the rapidly increasing ways that "diaspora" has been appropriated, has led to an unfortunate increase in intellectual fuzziness and rhetorical imprecision to which even the rigorous field of Jewish Studies is far from immune. Fortunately for the latter, Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi's ambitious new study offers both theoretical rigor and innovation, taking the critique of literary Homecoming to a more sophisticated discursive space that will raise essential questions for future investigations of many of the poets and writers considered here. Although Jewish diasporism has often been a focus of Jewish literary analysis, nothing like this book has ever been attempted. Offering a wealth of original translations of abundant prooftexts, rich biographical and literary detail, Ezrahi has produced a consistently lively and erudite work. Divided into two major sections, "Jewish Journeys" and "Jewish Geographies" this book examines the tension between "Jewish story and territory" (139). Ezrahi's touchstone, Yehuda Halevi's "Songs of Zion" provides the essential metaphors of displacement, desire, voyage, and Return that guide her provocative readings. For Ezrahi, the essential terms that haunt the Jewish literary imagination to our own age were embedded in the Kabbalistic texts of Halevi's medieval contemporaries where the theosophical orientation shifts "from a geographical locus to the mobile body of the Jew, leading to later Kabbalistic and eventually Hassidic notions of individual salvation and symbolic rather than concrete connections with a sacred center" (49). In her shrewd analysis of the "diasporic journey" encoded here, Ezrahi is keenly attentive to the creative polarizations that continually reverberate between the metaphorizing and concretizing forms of narrative. For Ezrahi, the diasporic Jew imaginatively transforms the theological dynamic of deferral into profoundly skeptical visions of incomplete pilgrimages and mimetic culture. Ezrahi sees in the Jewish writer's faithful occupation of mimetic, rather than original space, a profound struggle against "contemporary complacencies" as well as "utopian desires" (53) that pose the true dangers to the Jewish spirit: "Herzl's 'if you will it, it is not a dream,' the emblem of the Zionist emergence from the 'dream-state' of the aggadically minded, reflects a cultural challenge of the highest order... 'will,' the fuel that empowers the imagination, is meant eventually to supersede it" (91). In contrast, Ezrahi makes a compelling case for a surprising continuum in the Jewish narrative journey and her study constitutes an ingathering of a highly disparate group of writers whose works (modernist and postmodern alike) nonetheless share a certain primordial trajectory: the literary "decoding of Jewish fate" invariably culminates in a "basic, primordial exilic pattern" in which "the topos of the journey to the Holy Land [is] a tale of the endlessly deferred end" (194). Ezrahi's readings of the spiritual and intellectual struggles encoded in Pagis and Celan's post-Shoah responses to the disenchanted universe are particularly stirring. For instance, in the latter's doomed search for a redemptive encounter with "an Other who has not come" Ezrahi notices the exile's mimicry of the "Zionist intoxication with a return to the primordial self" but finds that such recovery invariably reverts to "the legendary geography of the aimless and endlessly proliferating Jewish journey" (151). Also of note is Ezrahi's analysis of the Israeli poet and medieval scholar Dan Pagis's late works. In the latter's deeply wounded poetics of fragments she discovers "unfathomable depths poised at the borders of language...enigmatic signals sent directly to the reader" (176). Zion remains unattainable destiny rather than the place of arrival. There are also impressive readings of a number of novels by the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, some of which are still unavailable in English translation. Of particular note is the author's fascinating "Epilogue," an iconoclastic and evocative meditation on the competing claims of nationalism and what the author regards as the truly sacred. No future study of canonical Jewish literature will be sufficient without reference to this luminous study.-Ranen Omer-Sherman, author of Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish-American Literature

This is the best book on the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the war ended in 1995.

The book is excellent overview of the Bosnia's spirituality in the past and the future. Great reading material.

"A Brave New Quest: 100 Modern Turkish Poems" is a beautiful , rare jewel . Illuminate by a sapphire blue with white, flame and peacock cover photographed detail from Iznik tile in the Rutwem Pasha Mosque, in Istanbul, this is the only anthology of modern Turkish poetry translated into English. Coming from a nation where virtually everyone is a poet, the anthology contains a vibrant, varied and sophisticated sampling of modern Turkish poetry. Here you will find poems about fear, death, love, nature, change, bewilderment of the senses, transfiguration, cruelty and social injustice, pain, hope, laughter, tears, joy and despair, and above all passionate longing. Poets whose work are included in this translation include Nazim Hikmet, Fazil Husnu Daglarca,Orhan Veli Kanik, Behdet Necatigil, Attila Ilhan, Melih Cevdet Anday, Edip Cansever, Ece Ayhan, Kemal Ozer, Ulku Tamer, and so many more. Each poetic work is selected and translated with loving care for the fine imagery, the lyrical syllables even in English. Editor Talat S. Halman has many starry credentials to explain the fine workmanship in "A Brave New Quest." Besides being a leading translator of Turkish literature and many books about modern Turkish playwrights and poets, he is an award winning avatar for Turkish culture and literature. Besides translating major works of English into Turkish and vice versa, he is an accomplished playwright, poet, and writer. Awards he has received include Columbia University's Thornton Wilder Translation Prize, the 1999 Service Award from the Turkish Academy of Sciences for enhancing the recognition of Turkish literature, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2000. His offering in "A Brave New Quest" seems equivalent to a prism that allows the rainbow of beauty and complexity of modern Turkish poetry to sing, quietly, to an English speaking audience. It is very difficult to select a quotation from such a fine collection, but here is one choice from a poem called (untitled) by Nazim Hikmet:

Let us give the world to the children at least for one day
Let them play with it as if it's a spangled balloon
Let them sing and dance among the stars

Let us give the world to the children
Like a huge apple or a warm loaf of bread
at least for one day
so that they'll have enough to eat

Let us give the world to the children
so that even if it's for one day
it will learn what friendship is

The children will take the world
out of our hands
and they will plant immortal trees. (p. 20)

Here is yet another fragment, the sixth definition of poetry from fifteen in a from a poem entitled "Responses for Poetry" by Ulku Tamer:
Poetry is the drinking bucket's fountain
the well's traveler.

It is the guard at the source (p. 160).

"A Brave New Quest: 100 Modern Turkish Poems" will enthrall, entice, and enlighten its lucky readers. May its copies fly off the shelves into the hands of those who truly appreciate what poetry has to offer.

This introductory textbook on Buddhism covers the essentials that a Western reader might expect, but it goes deeper than a recitation of facts, dates, and names from the past 2,500 years. Anyone curious about the beliefs, the culture, and the practitioners of dharma will benefit from this attractively designed presentation. It covers its origins, Theravada and Mahayana "vehicles," and then explores in separate sections how Buddhism spread into Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, China, and Tibet.

Included you'll find additional aids for understanding what can be for a newcomer like me (therefore I cannot pass judgment on doctrinal or academic debates that may arise from a specialized familiarity with this subject) daunting obstacles. The textual legacy of each national expression of Buddhism gains elucidation, with excerpts from verses, illustrations (unfortunately all monochrome, but the costs are kept down as a result), and the best part: testimonies from current practitioners of the Thai, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and American-- from a convert who became a monk-- "cultural experiences." These, as well as panel sidebars with brief narratives or anecdotes by scholars and believers that retell stories or lessons, enrich this volume.

I also like the attention given to morality throughout the text; this concentration, blended with more focus in the second edition on the U.S. transformation of Buddhist practice, makes the mentions of the influences of feminism, ecumenism, ecology and globalization also relevant. In fact, I wish more space had been devoted to each of these topics, but the limit to eleven chapters, so as to fit a semester or even a quick quarter of a course, may have necessitated a narrower scope. However, each part concludes with an up-to-date reading list. There's also a technical glossary of terms with accent and vowel markings to guide pronunciation of what can be formidable terms for teachers and students alike.

Again, while I cannot weigh in on the demerits (if any) of this textbook's scholarly claims, for an introduction, this deserves attention beyond the required textbook list on a syllabus. Libraries and seekers and followers all can find, I predict, valuable information made more accessible. Westerners often think Buddhism's detached, secretive, or nihilistic, but a careful grasp of the multiplicity of how its precepts come into daily practice to assist others, and its emphasis on the social impact of its teachings, may help change many prejudices we may have about this ancient, resilient, and flexible approach towards compassionate wisdom and spiritual fulfillment.

The book takes you on a journey through the development of some of the most important and historic structures in China. Surprisingly, many of these significant building, structures, and university campuses were not designed by the Chinese, but by an American! Apparently, much of the book is taken from the doctoral dissertation of the author, Jeffery Cody and therefore is extremely well researched and documented. Photos bring life to the book throughout. For someone interested in China, this book is a must read! Michael Werner, University of Miami, Tsinghua University, Visiting Professor.