[Xmca-l] Re: Fate of a Man

[Christopher Schuck]

But that's both the limitation and strength of art or fictional narrative
as opposed to real life, isn't it? That art focuses our attention and
highlights certain features in a way that is idealized and artificially
"designed" to convey something more clearly and purely (but less
organically and authentically) than it would be conveyed in the course of
living it, or observing someone else living it? One way to get around this
would be, as David says, to analyze the film in terms of clues as to the
stages of emergence. But maybe another way to use the film would be to view
it not so much as a complete, self-sufficient "example" of perezhivanie, as
a *tool *for pivoting back and forth between the concept of perezhivanie as
imaginatively constructed (through fiction), and the concept of
perezhivanie as imaginatively constructed (through our real living
experience and observation of it). So, it would be the *pivoting* between
these two manifestations of the concept (designed vs. evolved, as David put
it) that reveals new insights about perezhivanie, rather than understanding
the concept from the film per se.

On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 3:08 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think there's a good reason why Andy started a new thread on this: he's a
> very tidy thinker (quite unlike yours truly) and he knows that one reason
> why xmca threads are seldom cumulative is that they digress to related
> problems without solving the immmediate ones.
>
> Yes, of course, a film allows us to consider an example of "perezhivanie",
> but it is a designed perezhivanie rather than an evolved one; it doesn't
> explicitly display the various stages of emergence required for a genetic
> analysis, unless we analyze it not as a complete and finished work of art
> but instead for clues as to the stages of its creation (the way that, for
> example, "Quietly Flows the Don" was analyzed to determine its
> authenticity).
>
> I remember that In the original short story, the schnapps drinking
> scene seemed like pure sleight of hand: an artistically gratuitous example
> of what eventually gave Soviet social realism such a bad name.
>
> David Kellogg
> Macquarie University
>
> On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 10:04 PM, Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Fellow XMCa-ers
> >
> > I have watched it through now, thank you Andy, but right now only
> empirical
> > psychological categories come to mind.  I will watch it again and in the
> > meanwhile let my fellows with more recent experience of /perezhivanie/
> take
> > the discussion further.
> >
> > It is a kind of timeless story, and modern film techniques would perhaps
> be
> > more explicit. At the least I would say it has for me a Russian
> > understanding of suffering, perhaps because of their unique experience of
> > it. But having said that, WWII must have generated other similar
> > experiences, apart from the first part about Andrei's family dying in the
> > famine.
> >
> > Carol
> >
> > On 14 January 2017 at 02:15, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> >
> > > I watched it in two parts with subtitles:
> > >
> > > http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x16w7fg_destiny-of-a-man-
> > > 1959-pt-1_creation
> > > http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x16wat4_destiny-of-a-man-
> > > 1959-pt-2_creation
> > >
> > > Andy
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > > Andy Blunden
> > > http://home.mira.net/~andy
> > > http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making
> > > On 14/01/2017 2:35 AM, Beth Ferholt wrote:
> > >
> > >> > >Thank you for taking us to a shared example.  I think that having a
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Carol A Macdonald Ph.D (Edin)
> > Cultural Historical Activity Theory
> > Honorary Research Fellow: Department of Linguistics, Unisa
> > alternative email address: tmacdoca@unisa.ac.za
> >
>