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Paper Agora: The Samizdat Periodical Vokno and the Provincial Czech Underground in Historical and Social Perspective
Tharp, Martin ; Maslowski, Nicolas (advisor) ; Rulíková, Markéta (referee) ; Kilias, Jaroslaw (referee)
Dissertation Abstract Paper Agora: The Samizdat Periodical Vokno and the Provincial Czech Underground in Historical and Social Perspective Martin Tharp, Department of Historical Sociology. The present work takes as its central subject a Czech samizdat publication, the magazine Vokno, primarily during its years of illegal operation, i.e. from 1979 until 1990, considered within the wider context of civil and cultural resistance to the oppressive social order of European state socialism. It treats Vokno as an instance of social action amid state forces inimical towards it, discussing the interplay and interaction of oppositional practice and the forces it opposes, both of state authority and more subtle ones of state cultural hegemony. It is argued that Vokno formed an attempt at a "counterculture" in the late 20th-century sense of an impulsive critique of a regimented modernity, yet within its immediate conditions was necessitated to assume three specific forms: as an aesthetic sub/counterculture, as a social network with differing levels of involvement and connections (whether to established intellectual dissent or to other social strata), and finally as a conscious oppositional social movement.
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