How Literature Helped Prisoners Survive the Gulag скачать в хорошем качестве

How Literature Helped Prisoners Survive the Gulag

Versus a regime that seeks to crush their spirit, prisoners turn to the humanities to preserve their sanity & connection to the past Defending the Liberal Arts playlist:    • Defending the Liberal Arts   0:11 Agenda for this video 0:34 She couldn't shake the view that the humanities were superfluous 0:59 Her coworker's father's story, quote (1) below 1:42 The stereotype of fluffy useless liberal arts is a lie, quote (2) below 2:20 Stories from Romanian prison memoirs 2:48 Attacks on the humanities are attacks on the ability to think, quote (3) below Comment on: http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/201... #LiberalArts #Humanities #Communism Thumbnail Image: Prison, photo by Ben_Kerckx on Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/photos/gang-build... Excerpts: “Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania: Covertly Studying Language and Literature Connected Captives and Freed Their Minds BY IRINA DUMITRESCU | MAY 25, 2016 (1) "In order to maintain his sanity, the young man turned to his education. He knew French, his cellmate knew English, so they spent their captivity teaching one another their foreign languages. After his release, the student was forced to work in a factory, where he met a woman who had also studied literature and been imprisoned as a result. Neither could marry people with clean records for fear of ruining their “files” with the government, so they married each other. Their apartment in Bucharest became a kind of salon, with artists and writers always coming and going. This man, who had learned English in a jail cell, ultimately became a literary translator of English poetry." (2) "When I heard this story, I understood that the stereotype of the fluffy, useless liberal arts was a lie. If the study of literature or history were really that pointless, a government trying to control the minds of its subjects would not go to the trouble of putting humanities students and professors in jail. For educated prisoners, the love of language, art, and scholarship was no mere hobby. It was a lifeline, sometimes the only thread tying them to their identities, their dignity, their shredded sense of humanity. Nothing could be more practical." ... (3) "We have been taught to think of the liberal arts as unnecessary and wasteful…. Memoirs of the Romanian gulag showed me what a dangerous lie this is. Educated political prisoners drew on rich inner resources to preserve their sanity and their spirits. They used their knowledge to help their fellow inmates survive as well. Their experiences reveal what the attack on the humanities really is. It is an attack on the ability to think, criticize, and endure in crisis, and its virulence betrays how vital the liberal arts are. The political rhetoric against the humanities exposes what is most important in our education, even as it attempts to destroy it."