The excesses of melodrama serve as a model for citizenship in the postwar, decolonizing world. Challenging notions of singular nationality or uncomplicated allegiance in light of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Spark employs melodrama to parse the meanings of betrayal and belonging. Because protagonist Barbara-a British, half-Jewish, Catholic convert, like her author-does not swear fealty exclusively to Britain, Judaism, Israel, or Catholicism, she is seen as betraying each in turn. In the context of the Cold War, national belonging and citizenship are politically charged endowments: conflicting memberships can only belong to double agents. In her novel The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), Spark experiments with a different kind of citizenship and community belonging than the Cold War climate typically allows, and she does so in content as well as through the style of her prose. more Muriel Spark investigates the meanings of community, nationality, duty, and betrayal across her oeuvre. Muriel Spark investigates the meanings of community, nationality, duty, and betrayal across her o. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he puts this into practice: where politics – totalitarianism as one of its most acute iterations – requires unitary meanings, perfect façades, and generic, kitschy artistic forms, these texts, in true novelistic fashion, deal exclusively in complexity, unsightliness, and unformulaic genre mixing. In The Art of the Novel (1986), Kundera theorizes the novel form as radically apolitical. Kundera finds a literary mode of resistance to the overwhelming politicization of culture in the late Cold War years. He was critical of any regime or party that prioritized political ends over cultural ones, or that treated culture as a means rather than an end in itself. Kundera resisted the politicization of culture, both within Czechoslovakia and internationally. On the other, in the international arena cultural workers were being employed like never before in a war for cultural supremacy. On the one hand, within his own country, writers, artists, and intellectuals were forced to fit the socialist cultural program, or they were silenced. more ABSTRACT As a cultural worker during the Cold War writing from behind, and about, the Iron Curtain, Czech writer Milan Kundera was subject to a double politicization of his vocation.
ABSTRACT As a cultural worker during the Cold War writing from behind, and about, the Iron Curtai.
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