Worlds of Dissent : Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism / Jonathan Bolton.
Bolton, Jonathan, author.
2012
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Title Worlds of Dissent : Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism / Jonathan Bolton.
Author Bolton, Jonathan, author.
ISBN 9780674064836
DOI https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674064836
Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2012]
Copyright ©2012
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource
Item Number 10.4159/harvard.9780674064836 doi
Summary Worlds of Dissent analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents." Their personal and political experiences-diverse, uncertain, nameless-have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia.Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Václav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West-including Ludvík Vaculík, whose 1980 diary The Czech Dream Book is a compelling portrait of dissident life. Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. Worlds of Dissent offers a rare opportunity to understand the texture of dissent in a closed society.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)
In E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2012
E-BOOK PACKAGE HISTORY; POLITICAL SCIENCE, SOCIOLOGY 2012
E-BOOK PAKET GESCHICHTE, POLITIKWISS., SOZIOLOGIE 2012
HUP Complete eBook Package 2011-2014
HUP eBook Package 2012
HUP eBook Package Backlist 2000-2013
HUP eBook Package Backlist 2000-2014
HUP eBook Package Backlist 2000-2015
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Frontmatter
Contents
Introduction
1. The Impasse of Dissent
2. The Stages of Demobilization
3. The Shadow World
4. Legends of the Underground
5. Everything Changed with the Charter
6. The Public of the Powerless
7. Dreams of a Dissident
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

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