Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities
Author | : Darko Suvin |
Publisher | : BRILL |
Total Pages | : 450 |
Release | : 2016-06-27 |
ISBN-10 | : 9789004325210 |
ISBN-13 | : 9004325212 |
Rating | : 4/5 (212 Downloads) |
Download or read book Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities written by Darko Suvin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-06-27 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suvin’s ‘X-Ray’ of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century socialism. It shows that the plebeian surge of revolutionary self-determination was halted in SFR Yugoslavia by 1965; that between 1965– 72 there was a confused and hidden but still open-ended clash; and that by 1972 the oligarchy in power was closed and static, leading to failure. The underlying reasons of this failure are analysed in a melding of semiotics and political history, which points beyond Yugoslavia – including its achievements and degeneration – to show how political and economic democracy fail when pursued in isolation. The emphasis on socialist Yugoslavia is at various points embedded into a wider historical and theoretical frame, including Left debates about the party, sociological debates about classes, and Marx’s great foray against a religious State doctrine in The Jewish Question.