Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Second World, Second Sex, and Literature on the European Left

Second World, Second Sex, and Literature on the European Left N 1996 AN OBITUARY FOR the ideals of socialism appeared on the streets of Berlin. Framed in a black border, the notice invited the public to join a funeral procession leading from the Memorial Church in the Western half of the city to the “Cemetery of the Welfare State” that had been temporarily marked out in the East. The artists who orchestrated this performance struck a peculiar chord—one that resonated not only in Germany, but across Western Europe as well. For although many Europeans considered the project to build a workers’ state to be a failure, they nevertheless proceeded to mourn its collapse. Indeed, over the past two decades leftist writers in both Eastern and Western Europe have looked back to the moments when the promise of solidarity manifested itself among the men and women who labored together on the factory floor. Although this collective hope was shared by miners in England, laundresses in France, and machinists in the Germanies and Poland, it registered most deeply in the former people’s republics that the new world order has since pronounced obsolete. Yet wasting pockets of this so-called “second world” have persisted in the outskirts of London, Paris, and other http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Second World, Second Sex, and Literature on the European Left

SCRIBNER, CHARITY
Comparative Literature , Volume 55 (3) – Jan 1, 2003
Download PDF
12 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/second-world-second-sex-and-literature-on-the-european-left-dwf2mPtbQJ

References (14)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2003 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/-55-3-217
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

N 1996 AN OBITUARY FOR the ideals of socialism appeared on the streets of Berlin. Framed in a black border, the notice invited the public to join a funeral procession leading from the Memorial Church in the Western half of the city to the “Cemetery of the Welfare State” that had been temporarily marked out in the East. The artists who orchestrated this performance struck a peculiar chord—one that resonated not only in Germany, but across Western Europe as well. For although many Europeans considered the project to build a workers’ state to be a failure, they nevertheless proceeded to mourn its collapse. Indeed, over the past two decades leftist writers in both Eastern and Western Europe have looked back to the moments when the promise of solidarity manifested itself among the men and women who labored together on the factory floor. Although this collective hope was shared by miners in England, laundresses in France, and machinists in the Germanies and Poland, it registered most deeply in the former people’s republics that the new world order has since pronounced obsolete. Yet wasting pockets of this so-called “second world” have persisted in the outskirts of London, Paris, and other

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2003

There are no references for this article.