In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul

“I love life in its living form, life that’s found on the street, in human conversations, shouts, and moans.” So begins this speech delivered in Russian at Cornell University by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. In poetic language, Alexievich traces the origins of her deeply affecting blend of journalism, oral history, and creative writing. Cornell Global Perspectives is an imprint of Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The works examine critical global challenges, often from an interdisciplinary perspective, and are intended for a non-specialist audience. The Distinguished Speaker Series presents edited transcripts of talks delivered at Cornell, both in the original language and in translation

Voices from Chernobyl

Two credited images from Darwell's series Legacy: Inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are used in this article, written by Svetlana Alexievich. The article reflects on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster through the experiences of survivors and people from the surrounding area who were affected/displaced as a result. It is an excerpt from Svetlana Alexievich's book 'Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster' (2005)

The polyphonic performance of testimony in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Voices from Utopia

This article claims that Svetlana Aleksievich’s Voices from Utopia should be read as testimony. Although based on eyewitnesses interviewed by Aleksievich, the voices represented in the five books are interpreted as the creation of an implied author. In contrast to a theoretical standpoint defining fact in a dichotomous relation to fiction, this study identifies the historical value of Aleksievich’s writing as intimately connected to the aesthetic composition. The article has two major aims. The first is to describe how the monologues and choirs in Voices from Utopia are represented. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the polyphonic novel, the internal focalization of the testimonies, in combination with a significant reduction of the external perspective, both on the level of dialogue and narration, are described as together constituting a polyphonic composition. The second aim is to demonstrate how this polyphony is interrelated to trauma theory and the psychological hardships experienced by the witnesses in the act of representing a traumatic experience. The hypothesis is that the polyphonic structure could be interpreted as an ethical representation of the interviews: first, it reflects an empathy with the witnesses’ ambivalence when confessing their traumatic past; secondly, because it contributes to ethically engaging the implied reader

Path Dependency in Marketing Systems

Path dependency in marketing systems occurs when what has happened at an earlier time affects the possible outcomes of a sequence of events occurring at a later point in time (Sewell 1996). Unlike the wider category of all social systems, in marketing systems path dependency is innate in the evolutionary dynamics underlying the formation and growth of a marketing system, beginning with the historical framing of choices made by all participants, generating, through self-organization and emergence, four complex social mechanisms - delivery systems, stakeholder action fields, technology evolution systems and value change fields. These complex social mechanisms interact over time generating marketing system outcomes that feedback continually into participant choices. The paper argues that all marketing systems, whether micro, meso or macro in scale and level, exhibit path dependence, and explores the implications of this finding. The paper identifies three ways of approaching path dependence in marketing systems - a narrative, partial and strong approach. It concludes that in a specific marketing systems setting all three approaches complement each other, the first establishing in narrative terms what happened, the second identifying the key path dependencies in a partial analysis, and finally, the third, drawing on a detailed or strong understanding of the causal dynamics at work to provide insights needed to extend theories of marketing system formation and growth and to provide the foundations for policy prescription. The occurrence of path dependency in all marketing systems and the complementary nature of the three distinctive approaches are the two major contributions of this paper