Cynthia Simmons | Boston College (original) (raw)
Papers by Cynthia Simmons
The Carl Beck papers in Russian and East European studies, 2010
Submissions to The Carl Beck Papers are welcome. Manuscripts must be in English, double-spaced th... more Submissions to The Carl Beck Papers are welcome. Manuscripts must be in English, double-spaced throughout, and between 40 and 90 pages in length, including notes.
The International Fiction Review, Jun 6, 2007
The Slavic and East European Journal, 2005
Page 1. ^^ ^ On thp 77. fhreshold»f , _ ld°ftht m^^*^ 1995-2002 NN Page 2. Page 3. RUSSIAN LITE... more Page 1. ^^ ^ On thp 77. fhreshold»f , _ ld°ftht m^^*^ 1995-2002 NN Page 2. Page 3. RUSSIAN LITERATURE, 1995-2002: ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM Writers have a difficult time making a living in contemporary Russia. ...
The Harriman Review, 2000
Post-Communist Transition and Women's Agency in Eastern Europe, 2013
From Petersburg to Bloomington: Essays in Honor of Nina Perkins, 2012
Slavic and East European Journal, 1981
In their book Cohesion in English,1 M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan categorized those items or ... more In their book Cohesion in English,1 M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan categorized those items or operations which are available to the speaker of English for the establishment of relationships between sentences-for the creation of a text. By choosing any item or device which presupposes information in another sentence, the speaker (writer) establishes an intersentential cohesive "tie" within the text. Halliday and Hasan attempted to classify all such text-forming mechanisms in English. The implications of these linguists' work are many. For example, any English text can be analyzed definitively as to the number and kind of cohesive ties. Texts can be compared in terms of the types and the degree of cohesion. The student of English composition can learn to recognize and then to provide unity in a text. The categories of cohesion can be applied in an analysis of other languages and thereby, the concept might attain universal significance. In this paper, Halliday and Hasan's description of cohesion will be adapted to Russian.2 This study is only one of many which follow naturally from a reading of Cohesion in English. In Halliday and Hasan's terminology, "cohesion" is a product of certain options in the linguistic system per se. They are to be differentiated from structural choices which must be made as to information structure and topic versus comment.3 Although these latter are textual phenomena and do contribute to coherence in discourse, they do not provide the wide range of options or allow for the same degree of variation between texts as do the "non-structural" devices of cohesion. Halliday and Hasan discovered five types of cohesion in English: Reference, Substitution, Ellipsis, Conjunction, and Lexical Cohesion. For reasons which will be made clear, an analysis of Russian revealed only four of the above categories-substitution is not a viable category of cohesion in Russian.
Journal for Peace and Justice Studies, 2016
Post-communist Eastern and Central Europe has witnessed a rise in ethnonationalism. The struggle ... more Post-communist Eastern and Central Europe has witnessed a rise in ethnonationalism. The struggle o f identity formation has often involved a re/turn to traditional, or even fundamentalist, religious practices that are authoritarian and patriarchal. Faith communities within such a sway often undermine the organs o f society that ideally in a democracy negotiate between the government and the citizenry, the domain o f civil society. Since the end o f the civil war o f 1992-1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has struggled under the constraints o f the Dayton Peace Agreement, which institutionalized a tri-partite government along ethno-national lines. Today this country lags behind every successor state o f Yugoslavia (measured by GDP per capita), and political instability continues to thwart hopes for EU ascension. A civil society that fosters a critical citizenry offers hope for support o f constitutional amendments that would recreate and support a functioning multiethnic state. Despite the common association o f faith communities and ethno-nationalism, some work, usually "on the ground," to create a civil society that engages both the political and religious hierarchies. The representatives o f faith communities considered here, in BiH and Croatia, who must maintain a lower profile politically, receive, consequently, less attention in the international arena. Yet, their work provides crucial support for European integration and open societies in the region and deserves special attention now, when the threat to their work is on the rise. 4 PE A C E A N D JU ST I C E ST U D IES by their beliefs-in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Croatia are dedicated to the development o f civil society in the region, with the goal o f protecting and expanding human rights. A more optimistic current o f research on the post-communist sphere has chronicled the growth o f civil society. Western foreign policy has long championed the institutions o f civil society for promoting the growth o f democracy and the market economy.1 The Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, which ended the Bosnian war o f 1992-1995, and subsequent agreements concerning BiH 's economic and political future, identify the development o f civil society as key to these transitions.2 O f the sectors o f civil society functioning in Western democracies as a third zone between the state and the body politic (citizens' action groups, NGOs, an independent media, and a critical public), in BiH, the initial and for many years the almost sole responsibility for the growth o f civil society was that o f the NGOs. From 1992 (the start o f the war) until 2001, approximately 8,000 NGOs, from various donor nations, were operating in the country, with a variety o f missions. These included democratization, human rights, wom en's rights, intercultural communication, political education, ecology, and, o f course,
The Slavic and East European Journal, 1988
The Slavic and East European Journal, 1987
The Slavic and East European Journal, 1998
The Modern Language Journal, 1992
The Slavic and East European Journal, 2001
... flawed democracy (Slovenia and Macedonia since 1990) and nationalism (Croatia, Serbia and Bos... more ... flawed democracy (Slovenia and Macedonia since 1990) and nationalism (Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia ... until the 1990s could women's movements escape the common cultural and national ... in other countries, women's participation in war transformed gender relations in important ...
Nationalities Papers, 2008
to the conflagration. Borzecki is also rightly hard on the Russian side for, in effect, negotiati... more to the conflagration. Borzecki is also rightly hard on the Russian side for, in effect, negotiating in bad faith. Of course, if the negotiators could speak from beyond the grave, they would claim that as good communists they could not allow themselves to be constrained by mere "bourgeois morality." On the other hand, the Polish political scene was chaotic, and that chaos was mirrored in terms of the composition of the Polish team. Had the Poles shown a little more unity of purpose, perhaps the Russians would not have been so duplicitous. The author could have made more of this point. As indicated above, Borzecki sometimes gets lost in the detail. As a result, the broader picture of the " ... creation of interwar Europe" is alluded to rather than analysed. Rather, the negotiations of the treaty itself and the reasons for its somewhat patchy implementation take precedence over contextual analysis. There is also repetition of basic points, such as those that mention Lenin's character and, indeed, the wider Bolshevik strategy. Unfortunately, the maps towards the end of the volume are not large enough. This is a real pity, as larger maps would have enabled those unfamiliar with both the geography of the region and the changing nature of fronts and borders to have rectified this gap in their knowledge. Having said that, this book is a "must" for all serious scholars of Polish politics, Russian politics and those interested in the wider politics of the region. It is an important contribution to our stock of knowledge on a crucial episode of twentieth-century history, the importance of which all too many are barely aware.
Canadian Slavonic Papers, 1998
Lifting the Siege: Women's Voices on Leningrad (1941-1944)* I. THE SIEGE AS A GENDERED EXPERI... more Lifting the Siege: Women's Voices on Leningrad (1941-1944)* I. THE SIEGE AS A GENDERED EXPERIENCE AND THE EARLY HISTORY In this last decade of the twentieth century, intellectual inquiry has survived the rage of subversion for subversion's sake and has settled, for the most part, with the type of revision of our knowledge that is not anarchistic; rather it is contextual and "polyphonic." History is everywhere being rewritten. The discovery and integration of the "other voices," those not writing History, is undeniably warranted when their narratives are in some cases the most authentic. So it is with a number of recently published or newly available diaries, memoirs, oral recollections, and works of fiction dealing with the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944). The Siege has received considerable academic and artistic attention both as a cataclysmic event and as an example of how starvation became a military weapon against a civilian population.2 With the recent fifty-year commemorations of various events of World War II, and, alas, the siege of Sarajevo, the Siege of Leningrad and the siege phenomenon in general have become subjects of popular and academic discussion. Yet even in the contemporary academic climate, when we grant ever more authority to the individual's voice in history, few have recognized the Siege of Leningrad as an ordeal endured primarily by women. The primary goal of this analysis is to examine the Siege as a gendered experience. Such an approach implies that gender matters, that the feminine (whether biological or environmental) leaves its stamp on the testimony of the women who suffered and survived the Siege. Although the testimonies of women survivors (blokadnitsy) were solicited early on and formed the foundation of the canonical history of the Siege-a process we will survey below-political exigencies of the post-war period led to government (and self-) censorship. If we hope to study the Siege from the perspective of gender, we must consider those testimonies that were written or given in the greatest atmosphere of freedom-i.e., documents authored in private (not intended for publication), in emigration, as well as oral testimonies given in the current context of relative freedom. We might at least expect certain consequences to follow from the traditional responsibilities of women in Russian culture, even during the "great socialist experiment" of Soviet rule. Women were responsible for the private domain, home and children, even if they held public positions; hence their "relegation" to the literary genres of private life-memoirs and poetry. Moreover, the traditional role of woman as arbiter of morality was codified for centuries in the admonitions to the lady of the house in the Domostroi. Yet there must be a caveat. As we know, and as the documents that follow will attest, women's personalities and experiences vary. The stereotypes that arise from what women share biologically and mass-culturally cannot serve to characterize the remaining multitude of differences. For some women, their differences, real or perceived, from the archetypal Soviet woman bore greater significance than what they may have shared with their gender's common lot. Although this study has led to generalizations concerning the Soviet woman's experience during the Siege of Leningrad, the women tell the stories themselves. They are members of various ethnicities (some are Jewish and ethnic Germans-minorities the Soviets found politically advantageous to term "nationalities"), professions, and socio-economic classes. For some, membership other than that in Soviet womanhood proved more consequential, and their testimony proves the exception to our generalization. What has been recognized, but what must now be emphasized, is that relatively early during the 900 days, the Siege of Leningrad became a woman's experience. Indeed the battlefront, the male domain, was close by-so perilously close that some soldiers attempted to return to the city sporadically at night to bring a portion of their rations to their starving families. …
The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, 2010
In postwar and post-Communist Bosnia-Herzegovina, civil society has been developing along with a ... more In postwar and post-Communist Bosnia-Herzegovina, civil society has been developing along with a signifi cant recasting of women’s roles in public life. Researchers have equated civil society since the war in Bosnia almost exclusively with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Certainly this has been the most infl uential sphere of both women’s work and of public activities contributing to a nascent civil society. Researchers have given insuffi cient attention, however, to the contributions of women in the burgeoning free press in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as to the increasing social engagement and infl uence of women artists and arts administrators. The contribution of the arts to civil society receives little attention, but women writers, artists, and arts administrators are addressing in their work and projects issues of justice, reconciliation, and human rights. Some who began their creative life in Yugoslavia, and who formerly sought independence from ideology in pure aesthe...
The Women's Review of Books, 2002
Поиск в библиотеке, Расширенный поиск. ...
World Literature Today, 1982
The Carl Beck papers in Russian and East European studies, 2010
Submissions to The Carl Beck Papers are welcome. Manuscripts must be in English, double-spaced th... more Submissions to The Carl Beck Papers are welcome. Manuscripts must be in English, double-spaced throughout, and between 40 and 90 pages in length, including notes.
The International Fiction Review, Jun 6, 2007
The Slavic and East European Journal, 2005
Page 1. ^^ ^ On thp 77. fhreshold»f , _ ld°ftht m^^*^ 1995-2002 NN Page 2. Page 3. RUSSIAN LITE... more Page 1. ^^ ^ On thp 77. fhreshold»f , _ ld°ftht m^^*^ 1995-2002 NN Page 2. Page 3. RUSSIAN LITERATURE, 1995-2002: ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM Writers have a difficult time making a living in contemporary Russia. ...
The Harriman Review, 2000
Post-Communist Transition and Women's Agency in Eastern Europe, 2013
From Petersburg to Bloomington: Essays in Honor of Nina Perkins, 2012
Slavic and East European Journal, 1981
In their book Cohesion in English,1 M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan categorized those items or ... more In their book Cohesion in English,1 M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan categorized those items or operations which are available to the speaker of English for the establishment of relationships between sentences-for the creation of a text. By choosing any item or device which presupposes information in another sentence, the speaker (writer) establishes an intersentential cohesive "tie" within the text. Halliday and Hasan attempted to classify all such text-forming mechanisms in English. The implications of these linguists' work are many. For example, any English text can be analyzed definitively as to the number and kind of cohesive ties. Texts can be compared in terms of the types and the degree of cohesion. The student of English composition can learn to recognize and then to provide unity in a text. The categories of cohesion can be applied in an analysis of other languages and thereby, the concept might attain universal significance. In this paper, Halliday and Hasan's description of cohesion will be adapted to Russian.2 This study is only one of many which follow naturally from a reading of Cohesion in English. In Halliday and Hasan's terminology, "cohesion" is a product of certain options in the linguistic system per se. They are to be differentiated from structural choices which must be made as to information structure and topic versus comment.3 Although these latter are textual phenomena and do contribute to coherence in discourse, they do not provide the wide range of options or allow for the same degree of variation between texts as do the "non-structural" devices of cohesion. Halliday and Hasan discovered five types of cohesion in English: Reference, Substitution, Ellipsis, Conjunction, and Lexical Cohesion. For reasons which will be made clear, an analysis of Russian revealed only four of the above categories-substitution is not a viable category of cohesion in Russian.
Journal for Peace and Justice Studies, 2016
Post-communist Eastern and Central Europe has witnessed a rise in ethnonationalism. The struggle ... more Post-communist Eastern and Central Europe has witnessed a rise in ethnonationalism. The struggle o f identity formation has often involved a re/turn to traditional, or even fundamentalist, religious practices that are authoritarian and patriarchal. Faith communities within such a sway often undermine the organs o f society that ideally in a democracy negotiate between the government and the citizenry, the domain o f civil society. Since the end o f the civil war o f 1992-1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has struggled under the constraints o f the Dayton Peace Agreement, which institutionalized a tri-partite government along ethno-national lines. Today this country lags behind every successor state o f Yugoslavia (measured by GDP per capita), and political instability continues to thwart hopes for EU ascension. A civil society that fosters a critical citizenry offers hope for support o f constitutional amendments that would recreate and support a functioning multiethnic state. Despite the common association o f faith communities and ethno-nationalism, some work, usually "on the ground," to create a civil society that engages both the political and religious hierarchies. The representatives o f faith communities considered here, in BiH and Croatia, who must maintain a lower profile politically, receive, consequently, less attention in the international arena. Yet, their work provides crucial support for European integration and open societies in the region and deserves special attention now, when the threat to their work is on the rise. 4 PE A C E A N D JU ST I C E ST U D IES by their beliefs-in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Croatia are dedicated to the development o f civil society in the region, with the goal o f protecting and expanding human rights. A more optimistic current o f research on the post-communist sphere has chronicled the growth o f civil society. Western foreign policy has long championed the institutions o f civil society for promoting the growth o f democracy and the market economy.1 The Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, which ended the Bosnian war o f 1992-1995, and subsequent agreements concerning BiH 's economic and political future, identify the development o f civil society as key to these transitions.2 O f the sectors o f civil society functioning in Western democracies as a third zone between the state and the body politic (citizens' action groups, NGOs, an independent media, and a critical public), in BiH, the initial and for many years the almost sole responsibility for the growth o f civil society was that o f the NGOs. From 1992 (the start o f the war) until 2001, approximately 8,000 NGOs, from various donor nations, were operating in the country, with a variety o f missions. These included democratization, human rights, wom en's rights, intercultural communication, political education, ecology, and, o f course,
The Slavic and East European Journal, 1988
The Slavic and East European Journal, 1987
The Slavic and East European Journal, 1998
The Modern Language Journal, 1992
The Slavic and East European Journal, 2001
... flawed democracy (Slovenia and Macedonia since 1990) and nationalism (Croatia, Serbia and Bos... more ... flawed democracy (Slovenia and Macedonia since 1990) and nationalism (Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia ... until the 1990s could women's movements escape the common cultural and national ... in other countries, women's participation in war transformed gender relations in important ...
Nationalities Papers, 2008
to the conflagration. Borzecki is also rightly hard on the Russian side for, in effect, negotiati... more to the conflagration. Borzecki is also rightly hard on the Russian side for, in effect, negotiating in bad faith. Of course, if the negotiators could speak from beyond the grave, they would claim that as good communists they could not allow themselves to be constrained by mere "bourgeois morality." On the other hand, the Polish political scene was chaotic, and that chaos was mirrored in terms of the composition of the Polish team. Had the Poles shown a little more unity of purpose, perhaps the Russians would not have been so duplicitous. The author could have made more of this point. As indicated above, Borzecki sometimes gets lost in the detail. As a result, the broader picture of the " ... creation of interwar Europe" is alluded to rather than analysed. Rather, the negotiations of the treaty itself and the reasons for its somewhat patchy implementation take precedence over contextual analysis. There is also repetition of basic points, such as those that mention Lenin's character and, indeed, the wider Bolshevik strategy. Unfortunately, the maps towards the end of the volume are not large enough. This is a real pity, as larger maps would have enabled those unfamiliar with both the geography of the region and the changing nature of fronts and borders to have rectified this gap in their knowledge. Having said that, this book is a "must" for all serious scholars of Polish politics, Russian politics and those interested in the wider politics of the region. It is an important contribution to our stock of knowledge on a crucial episode of twentieth-century history, the importance of which all too many are barely aware.
Canadian Slavonic Papers, 1998
Lifting the Siege: Women's Voices on Leningrad (1941-1944)* I. THE SIEGE AS A GENDERED EXPERI... more Lifting the Siege: Women's Voices on Leningrad (1941-1944)* I. THE SIEGE AS A GENDERED EXPERIENCE AND THE EARLY HISTORY In this last decade of the twentieth century, intellectual inquiry has survived the rage of subversion for subversion's sake and has settled, for the most part, with the type of revision of our knowledge that is not anarchistic; rather it is contextual and "polyphonic." History is everywhere being rewritten. The discovery and integration of the "other voices," those not writing History, is undeniably warranted when their narratives are in some cases the most authentic. So it is with a number of recently published or newly available diaries, memoirs, oral recollections, and works of fiction dealing with the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944). The Siege has received considerable academic and artistic attention both as a cataclysmic event and as an example of how starvation became a military weapon against a civilian population.2 With the recent fifty-year commemorations of various events of World War II, and, alas, the siege of Sarajevo, the Siege of Leningrad and the siege phenomenon in general have become subjects of popular and academic discussion. Yet even in the contemporary academic climate, when we grant ever more authority to the individual's voice in history, few have recognized the Siege of Leningrad as an ordeal endured primarily by women. The primary goal of this analysis is to examine the Siege as a gendered experience. Such an approach implies that gender matters, that the feminine (whether biological or environmental) leaves its stamp on the testimony of the women who suffered and survived the Siege. Although the testimonies of women survivors (blokadnitsy) were solicited early on and formed the foundation of the canonical history of the Siege-a process we will survey below-political exigencies of the post-war period led to government (and self-) censorship. If we hope to study the Siege from the perspective of gender, we must consider those testimonies that were written or given in the greatest atmosphere of freedom-i.e., documents authored in private (not intended for publication), in emigration, as well as oral testimonies given in the current context of relative freedom. We might at least expect certain consequences to follow from the traditional responsibilities of women in Russian culture, even during the "great socialist experiment" of Soviet rule. Women were responsible for the private domain, home and children, even if they held public positions; hence their "relegation" to the literary genres of private life-memoirs and poetry. Moreover, the traditional role of woman as arbiter of morality was codified for centuries in the admonitions to the lady of the house in the Domostroi. Yet there must be a caveat. As we know, and as the documents that follow will attest, women's personalities and experiences vary. The stereotypes that arise from what women share biologically and mass-culturally cannot serve to characterize the remaining multitude of differences. For some women, their differences, real or perceived, from the archetypal Soviet woman bore greater significance than what they may have shared with their gender's common lot. Although this study has led to generalizations concerning the Soviet woman's experience during the Siege of Leningrad, the women tell the stories themselves. They are members of various ethnicities (some are Jewish and ethnic Germans-minorities the Soviets found politically advantageous to term "nationalities"), professions, and socio-economic classes. For some, membership other than that in Soviet womanhood proved more consequential, and their testimony proves the exception to our generalization. What has been recognized, but what must now be emphasized, is that relatively early during the 900 days, the Siege of Leningrad became a woman's experience. Indeed the battlefront, the male domain, was close by-so perilously close that some soldiers attempted to return to the city sporadically at night to bring a portion of their rations to their starving families. …
The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, 2010
In postwar and post-Communist Bosnia-Herzegovina, civil society has been developing along with a ... more In postwar and post-Communist Bosnia-Herzegovina, civil society has been developing along with a signifi cant recasting of women’s roles in public life. Researchers have equated civil society since the war in Bosnia almost exclusively with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Certainly this has been the most infl uential sphere of both women’s work and of public activities contributing to a nascent civil society. Researchers have given insuffi cient attention, however, to the contributions of women in the burgeoning free press in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as to the increasing social engagement and infl uence of women artists and arts administrators. The contribution of the arts to civil society receives little attention, but women writers, artists, and arts administrators are addressing in their work and projects issues of justice, reconciliation, and human rights. Some who began their creative life in Yugoslavia, and who formerly sought independence from ideology in pure aesthe...
The Women's Review of Books, 2002
Поиск в библиотеке, Расширенный поиск. ...
World Literature Today, 1982