Nostalgia

This article considers The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012) in order to argue through Fredric Jameson that postmodern aspects of a text are capable of obfuscating, if not altogether obliterating, any Marxist polemics. The first portion engages with Jameson's The Political Unconscious, particularly his emphasis on class struggle and identification of ideologemes which manifest in the text. The subsequent section considers The Dark Knight Rises as a postmodern text through Jameson's concepts of pastiche and nostalgia. Moreover, The Dark Knight Rises is contextualized within the recent spate of class-oriented cinema. Collectively, the goal is to identify a trend within such films of establishing a correlation between capitalism and inequality, ideologemes and postmodernism. The final result is an increasingly impressive group of genre-spanning films which address contemporary inequality in its multifarious forms, but which treat these issues more so as narrative devices than tenable critiques of the sites of oppression.

This article addresses the recent attempts to integrate evolutionary history in the US national narrative. Focusing on the cultural, legal, and scientific controversy over Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains discovered in Washington state in 1996, the article explores the narrative politics of American national belonging. Through a popular historical novel on Kennewick Man's life, the article further theorizes nostalgia as a narrative tool in imagining the evolutionary origins of the nation. The article argues that nostalgia produces a temporal dynamic that bridges the gap between national history and global prehistory, and that this dynamic is reinforced through cultural ideas of genetic knowledge. At the same time, prehistoric nostalgia renders problematic ideas of ethnic difference largely invisible.

This article aims to investigate the relationship between nostalgia, solitude, and skepticism in Emil Cioran’s thought. In the first place, we will examine how the concepts of Sehnsucht, saudade and dor are interpreted by Cioran as similar forms of radical nostalgia. In the second place, we will see how the skeptical attitude of doubting reality relates to the nostalgic impossibility of belonging to reality itself. Finally, we will suppose that the metaphysical feeling of being isolated and separated from the world implies a skeptical criticism of subjectivity itself and a humoristic interpretation of existence.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

Millennials, or Generation Y, represent one of today’s most prominent age cohorts: with their increasingly stronger purchasing power and importance in the global economic landscape, it is no wonder that marketers are striving to find new ways to appeal to the taste of this peculiar generation of consumers. Among the various modern research fields in business, one in particular is offering incredibly interesting insights to both scholars and professional marketers: the concept of nostalgia proneness in consumer behavior. While several studies examine the dynamics of this phenomenon, none of them so far examined the impact of nostalgia proneness in shopping behavior, especially examining the dynamics on a sample of Generation Y consumers.
This study was conducted in order to explore the dynamics of nostalgia proneness, linking the constructs to both desire for uniqueness and shopping behavior, using the framework provided by the Consumer Styles Inventory (Sproles & Sproles, 1990).
After a theoretical review on the matter, several hypotheses and a conceptual model were developed to serve as the core framework of the quantitative analysis. The data, obtained from a convenience sample of 222 respondents, were subsequently examined using several statistical techniques (ANOVA, correlation and factor analysis), with the intent to test the hypotheses and shed light on the research questions. The outcome was then presented and interpreted using both the theoretical background and other complementary relevant literature.
The results showed a positive relationship between nostalgia proneness and desire for uniqueness, with both variables being further connected to several shopping traits of the Generation Y consumer. The cluster and factor analysis eventually showed patterns that could be interpreted using the theory of hedonic and utilitarian shopping motivations.

In videogames, classical buildings and objects are usually tarnished and collapsed. This chapter surveys how different styles of videogame from the 1980s to the 21st century depict antiquity. Four versions can be identified: its original freshness, its modern traces, and the moments of its destruction are three. The fourth is that ancient Greece and Rome were already made of ruins. This range reflects the nature of games themselves, as well as the tastes of modern audiences.

Nostalgia is a Summary of bitter and sweet inner sense to individuals, past, occasions, hometown or country, utopia and hidden inner wishes. in psychological view, this sense is a result of mental remen berance or idealism, and for several reason such as to be far away from hometown, immigration, failure in personal life, mourning of the friends' loss, loss of golden situation, listening to music, gazing remnants and past generation works, aging and physical decline, occur in the inner sight of individual that is out of authority of individual. Since literature is manifestation of human's pure emotions and feelings, this unconscious sense has special sight in literary text and undoubtedly it is more clear in some literary text for special reasons. For instance we can point the samples such as: Ivan madaen, majestic and Luxurious place of Sasanid period which became wreckage over time that was effective in nostalgia sense in Bohtori (Arabic poet of Third century) and Khaghni (Persian poet of sixth century). Both Arab and Persian poet after gazing remnants of this palace with exemplary view from nostalgia sense, they felt sorry about glorious period of palace and its lords; they sighed to present loneliness with mental remembrance about past generation and past golden occasions and they protested to the present while the time is going on. So, this article is to clear and bold it's nostalgic components. Besides how much both mentioned poets could reflect it in there poems.
Word, image, color, allegorical and national-religious hints, allusion with implicit meaning, the type of used sentences in second goals are most important lingual components that come from this unconscious sense in Bohtori and Khaghani's odes that have been analyzed in this Article

This article proposes a phenomenological interpretation of nostalgia for communism, a collective feeling expressed typically in most Eastern European countries after the official fall of the communist regimes. While nostalgia for communism may seem like a paradoxical feeling, a sort of Stockholm syndrome at a collective level, this article proposes a different angle of interpretation: nostalgia for communism has nothing to do with communism as such, it is not essentially a political statement, nor the signal of a deep value tension between governance and the people. Rather, I propose to understand this collective feeling as the symptom of a deeper need at a national level for solidarity and ultimately about recapturing a common feeling of identity in solidarity. This hypothesis would be in line with a phenomenological approach to memory as a process of establishing shared codes by rewriting the past in such a way as to strengthen social bonds and make possible a re-imagining of a common future. Nostalgia for communism does not need to be ultimately an uncritical stance as it has been depicted, instead one could interpret it as a form of critical reflexion about our current forms of life. Instead of seeing communism nostalgia as a specific form of being stuck in the past, one could explore its potential for pointing at the things that are still not working in the current neo-liberal regime.

The East End remains a topographically uncertain territory. Its multiple ontological properties as well as its representation as an intensely mythicized location have been immersed in discourses of de- and regeneration. The east side of London has been visualised as a run-down dock area; an atrophied part of the urban body; an ill-favoured, stigmatised social space associated with evil, with the primitive and the uncivilised. In contrast to these bleak, abysmal visions, some cultural constructions and urban policies concentrate on dreams of rebuilding and curing the dis-eased urban body, treating it as "a recovered lung". A belief in the transformative potential of the run-down urban landscape pervades the writings of Philip Ridley. The article argues that rather than celebrating the eradication of post-industrial scars, Philip Ridley finds the dilapidated sights of the East End valuable and proposes to repackage them as objects of reflective nostalgia or objets trouvés – surreal found objects – and thus as properties of the unconscious. Further on, the article argues that Ridley's re-envisioning of the East End enable his young protagonists to conceive a self-image that permits a transcendence of their sense of loss and dislocation, a perilous process in which the desire to protect normative behaviour signals its presence through the endurance of an imagined or recollected, dreadful but regenerative cityscape.

Keywords: Philip Ridley, ruins,  nostalgia, gentrification, revitalisation, storytelling

El presente estudio explora las dinámicas de la comensalidad  entre los preparadores de alimentos  que laboran en restaurantes de comida mexicana en Estados Unidos  a través  las  resistencias alimentarias que se visibilizan al interior de las cocinas de dichos establecimientos.  Así mismo, se  explica cómo estas prácticas forman parte constitutiva de la identidad alimentaria transmigrante.

Archaeological excavations and presentations are memory-work, offering tactile and visual materials for consideration of the past. In a coastal Florida city, growing rapidly through in-migration of retirees and service industry employment opportunities, few are aware or concerned over history. A recent heritage revival for an African American neighborhood in Sarasota is transforming the landscape with heritage interpretation signs. Yet segregation haunts that history, with a reaction marring the positive trajectory for the city. Understanding the swirl of hidden histories and memories in terms of race, community, and heritage radiates from social justice and the concept of social justice is expanded through discussion of a tradition rarely mentioned in heritage studies: tikkun ha-olam.

Drawing on recent interviews of Indian returnees from Burma, this article sheds light on a well-known yet understudied moment of Burma’s postcolonial history, the forced repatriation of Indian communities during the 1960s. The research has gathered first-hand narratives about the traumatic experiences shared by Indian repatriated families, from their much debated decision to leave Burma, to the perceived humiliation of departure and the dramatic (re)migration to India. The article builds on the scholarship on exile and nostalgia, which claims that repatriation processes often lead to a retrospective idealization by the returnees of what has been left behind. Interviews have indeed revealed how nostalgic memories of a “golden past” and a “paradise lost” in Burma have been shaped among the first generation of Indian repatriates ever since their resettlement in India. In contrast with the classic diaspora literature, which postulates that diasporic groups tend to idealize their homeland, Indians in Burma have tended to rather romanticize their Burmese host- land. They cherish the “golden days” they once lived in Burma, whilst expressing highly condescending feelings about their new Indian “homeland” where resettlement and re-integration to the Indian national space have proved harsher than expected.

Finalist, 2021 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies

Honorable Mention, 2021 Saul Viener Book Prize, given by the American Jewish Historical Society

Reveals nostalgia as a new way of maintaining Jewish continuity

In 2007, the Museum at Eldridge Street opened at the site of a restored nineteenth-century synagogue originally built by some of the first Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City. Visitors to the museum are invited to stand along indentations on the floor where footprints of congregants past have worn down the soft pinewood. Here, many feel a palpable connection to the history surrounding them.

Beyond the Synagogue argues that nostalgic activities such as visiting the Museum at Eldridge Street or eating traditional Jewish foods should be understood as American Jewish religious practices. In making the case that these practices are not just cultural, but are actually religious, Rachel B. Gross asserts that many prominent sociologists and historians have mistakenly concluded that American Judaism is in decline, and she contends that they are looking in the wrong places for Jewish religious activity. If they looked outside of traditional institutions and practices, such as attendance at synagogue or membership in Jewish Community Centers, they would see that the embrace of nostalgia provides evidence of an alternative, under-appreciated way of being Jewish and of maintaining Jewish continuity.

Tracing American Jews’ involvement in a broad array of ostensibly nonreligious activities, including conducting Jewish genealogical research, visiting Jewish historic sites, purchasing books and toys that teach Jewish nostalgia to children, and seeking out traditional Jewish foods, Gross argues that these practices illuminate how many American Jews are finding and making meaning within American Judaism today.

Los libros de memorias juegan un rol importante en la literatura escrita por policías. Sobresalen aquí los relatos del “vigilante de la esquina”, que muestran al policía de antaño y su relación de confianza con la comunidad.
Este artículo analiza las conexiones entre pasado, memoria y emoción que subyacen a la construcción de este relato, proponiendo que la nostalgia es una herramienta inherente a la construcción de un determinado sentido del tiempo. Examinar el relato del “vigilante de la esquina” implicará analizar los valores con que la agencia policial se representa y rescatar el rol que las emociones juegan en la reproducción de las tradiciones institucionales.

Nostalgic preferences are widespread—people believe past movies, music, television shows, places, and periods of life to have been better than their present counterparts. Three experiments explored the cognitive underpinnings of nostalgic preferences. Participants rated past experiences to have been superior to similar present and recent experiences. These nostalgic preferences appeared to be due to the belief that the atypically
positive experiences that participants recalled at the time of judgment were more representative of their past experiences than of their present experiences.

This chapter examines the meaning of and nostalgic yearning for transistor radios in the lyrics of popular songs. Popular music provides a treasure of lyrics that deal explicitly with the transistor radio as a cultural phenomenon – a neglected
topic in scholarly work on the history of radio so far. From Chuck Berry’s “Oh Baby Doll” to Buck Owens’ “Made in
Japan,” the Beach Boys’ “Magic Transistor Radio” to Kraftwerk’s “Transistor,” a broad range of popular music genres reflects the transistor radio’s deep cultural impact in youth culture and popular entertainment. In analyzing both contemporary lyrical reflections and nostalgic echoes of the transistor radio in popular music, this chapter provides an unorthodox take on the rich and fascinating sound souvenirs of a technology that blazed the trail of mobile electronic devices.

If we critically examine what our nostalgic responses to craft tell us about what we want from life, we can use this information as a catalyst for actions, practices that transform our present and start the process of preparing for a climate changed and post peak oil future.  This paper examines the role of craft in bridging gaps between ourselves and nature and between ourselves and each other, and in using nostalgia as a focus for these explorations.  In looking towards the past, could craft engage with wider contemporary critical debates? In showing what we feel we are missing from the past in our present society, might we use nostalgia as a tool for envisioning how we would prefer a new society to be, post peak oil and in a time of climate change?

The relationship between humankind and technology is fundamental, but also a longstanding source of unease, particularly as that relationship has become ever more intimate and irreversible. In this paper, I connect this age-old anxiety with the age-old figure of the giant, a monster similarly intertwined with ancient questions on the boundaries of humanity. I focus on two examples: the Human-Reaper larva in Mass Effect 2 and Liberty Prime in Fallout 3 and 4. Although different in approach, these examples demonstrate a use of a phenomenon I call the 'techno-giant' to explore and reflect the powerful anxieties in our cultures to do with the future of the human-technology relationship. In particular, both examples expose the human-nonhuman boundary as being exceeding difficult to define and place, despite a constant desire to. The figure of the giant offers a powerful focal point for these representations.

This article analyzes the evolution of nostalgic sentiment in Russia over the past 25 years. Unlike in the 1990s, the nostalgic perception of the Soviet past in 2000s transformed under the influence of new government ideology.
Leonid Parfenov's project “Namedni” in both its forms – a TV program and a book anthology – is an example of reflexive nostalgia for the Soviet period of 1946-1991.  Reflexive nostalgia as expressed by liberal intellectuals presumes a freedom of interpretation. Thus, “Namedni” does not reflect the official “patriotic” discourse. The article discusses the specifics of the TV and book versions, significance of visual and literary imagery, and the relationship between history and historical memory. Because “Namedni” exhibits signs of an autobiographical text, it is concluded that memory takes a higher priority than historical science.

Keywords
Leonid Parfenov, "Namedni", media project, Soviet history, post-Soviet nostalgia, history and memory.

Notably, Margaret Atwood prefers to call her future-oriented novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), “speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction,” in order to foreground its characteristic as a cautionary tale extrapolated from things and events in the past. In this sense, prediction is deeply connected with history and nostalgia; the future is something already embedded in the past, and Atwood’s task is to (re-)discover it, not to create it. Meanwhile, criticisms of Atwood’s dystopia tend to evaluate the protagonist’s resistance to authority either as defeatist or militant. Yet what is lacking from these lines of argument is a close re-examination of the concept of resistance itself, which could be achieved by the analysis of nostalgia. As working models for exploring various aspects of nostalgia in The Handmaid’s Tale, the following types are presented: forbidden nostalgia, mythophilia and inhibited nostalgia. The analysis of nostalgia will be combined with that of the notion of trauma; although it appears to be an opposite concept, Offred’s narrative proves that they can be dialectically intertwined. In particular, what is striking in Offred’s nostalgia is that it is rather repetition compulsion than a longing, and homesickness is presented as a chronic condition; this characteristic can be traced back to Atwood’s more explicitly nostalgic novel, Surfacing (1972). Offred is always/already a refugee; her resistance is centred on her refusal of the one-dimensional conception of time and space, yet at the same time, Offred remains as “a blank […] between parentheses. Between other people”.

Note: This essay was one of a set commissioned by Two Temple Place in 2021 to begin an ongoing project investigating the building’s history and assist cultural engagement with that history.
William Waldorf Astor engaged in projects aimed at the materialisation of history.  His collection of historic properties, and the enormous volume of possessions from historical figures which he collected, created contexts that whilst owing much to historical accuracy, were also his own romantic creations. Two Temple Place shows that this was even true of his office. Was this desire to materialise his actual and literary journeys not a profound psychological one?

Originally conceived as an adaptation of the works of Jules Verne by Hayao Miyazaki and eventually developed by Hideaki Anno and the studio Gainax, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990 - 1991) acts as one of the clearest examples of the fascinating interdependencies that are evident between the Japanese entertainment industries and the movement that has become known as steampunk. Variously defined as ‘neo-victorientalism’ and ‘steampanku’ by those with an interest in its representations of industrial nostalgia, Japanese steampunk has served as a rich resource for representations of Japan’s past, present and future to be filtered through the iconography of fantastical steam-powered and piston-driven machinery. This article offers a close analysis of the series and considers the ways that its reworking of archetypal representations of nineteenth-century science fiction offers opportunities to evaluate the enormously complex and contradictory facets of nostalgic reminiscence. By considering the ways that the series fetishizes referents to this past age of technological development, I evaluate the means through which a legacy of bygone scientific romance and imperial adventure continues to reflect the fin-de-siècle concerns of a latter century and Japan’s own orientation in a globalised and post-colonial world.

In March 2017, Netflix released a twelve-episode Japanese show titled Samurai Gourmet, about 60-year-old Takeshi Kasumi who has trouble adapting to his recent retirement. In the show, Kasumi attempts to navigate his retirement by eating in different establishments, often encountering social and age- or class-related cultural roadblocks. These roadblocks frustrate him, and he often longs for the freedom of an ancient Japanese samurai. To overcome these roadblocks, he imagines what the samurai would do in these situations as a learning process in how to act and respond.

This paper will explore how the past is used as contrast of the present, to critically engage with memory and the longing for the past in the present. This is done visually, with Kasumi imagining the samurai in real life, blending the space between past and present in his mind, setting images of the contemporary restaurants against a backdrop of characters in period clothing.

The visual blending of past and present in Kasumi’s mind challenges the role nostalgia has on us, as well as how we engage with the past as a form of understanding our present. I will use two episodes (3: “Mackerel in the Morning” and 12: “A Memory of Hashed Beef and Rice”) as examples for how Kasumi’s blending of the past and present strengthens the ties between geographical and temporal nostalgia of two different pasts: his, and the (imagined past of the) samurai. The episodes also situate Kasumi’s nostalgia against discovering meaning in life as a retiree.

In his essay "A Rosebud given to Jolanta Słobodzian" Mariusz Koryciński
presents the Polish educator and film director, revealing the idea behind the monograph "80s Again!" and pondering what makes the 1980s distinct as an era in the culture of the 20th century.

This book examines the post-1960s era of popular music in the Anglo-Black Atlantic through the prism of historical theory and methods. By using a series of case studies, this book mobilizes historical theory and methods to underline different expressions of alternative music functioning within a mainstream musical industry. Each chapter highlights a particular theory or method while simultaneously weaving it through a genre of music expressing a notion of alternativity―an explicit positioning of one’s expression outside and counter to the mainstream. Historical Theory and Methods through Popular Music seeks to fill a gap in current scholarship by offering a collection written specifically for the pedagogical and theoretical needs of those interested in the topic.

“This study of ‘insurgent’ modes of popular music in the last third of the 20th century accomplishes quite a feat.  It yokes together a wide swath of sub-genres and styles--including reggae, punk, hip hop, alternative rock and country—through the lens of what the authors are calling “historical theory,” in order to chart a different, more comprehensive pathway through the annals of pop music history.  Shonk and McClure achieve an enviable balance of accessibility and scholarly depth, making this volume ideal for introductory college courses as well as more experienced researchers seeking a quick guide to specialized topics.”

--Pamela Fox, author of Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music; co-author of Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music

Social History Society Conference, Lancaster University, March 2016


Abstract:

The paper uses working-class autobiographical writing of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, in order to examine how authors conceptualised and narrated their sensory experience of the country and the city.

A recurring theme in the autobiographies is the olfactory and aural landscapes of the turn-of-the-century city, contrasted to the more sanitised urban environment of the twentieth century. In the autobiographies, the late Victorian and Edwardian city is recollected and re-created through vivid descriptions of the sights, sounds and smells of the urban landscape. Yet such accounts cannot be read straightforwardly as factual recollection of contemporary urban experience: when read against the grain, they also reveal the emotional nature of sense experience, the unreliability of memory, and the ways in which sensory experience is used to articulate nostalgia for the past.

In the accounts of urban-born autobiographers, the borderline between country and city often becomes a site of emotional revelation and discovery; at such moments, authors narrate their memories of the heightening, intensifying and intermingling of sense experience. A common theme in autobiographies is the author’s epiphanic experience, as a child, of encountering nature for the first time. Such experiences are often conveyed through a kind of free-association of sense impressions. In this respect, the paper will also explore synaesthesia as a form of emotional recollection, in which the sympathetic association of fleeting sense impressions becomes a form of narrating autobiographers’ self-awareness and subjectivity.

In his book, Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman traces the evolution of the attitude toward Stalinism in post-Soviet cinema. Initially, the post-Soviet-era film-makers focused primarily on the "demonic" aspects of Stalin, which were, incidentally, first attributed to him even during his lifetime. Later, another cinematic tradition, which established itself by the mid-2000s, pictured the Stalinist era as both tragic and heroic: characters displayed exceptional humanness, not so much despite but rather because of the adverse circumstances. At the same time, some filmmakers sought to represent certain aspects of Stalinism with an ironic distance. Together, these two trends successfully incorporated many vertiges of that era into present-day mass culture. An alternative attitude was taken by art-house cinema: instead of trying to reconstruct history it sought to create specific means of expression to portray the very act of remembering.

Truly, there is no universal historical or cultural memory. The sense of familiarity evoked by Stranger Things will be different for everyone - for those who lived through the 80s, for those who only know the decade through its cultural artifacts, for those who know some and not others, and so on. So how should we understand and approach each other’s different experiences of the same decade, and of the same culture?

Pre-nostalgia exists at the intersection of identity, memory, and temporality. The core difference between what is understood to be a nostalgic feeling versus a pre-nostalgic feeling comes from the individual’s motivation to act due to an instantaneous awareness of, or concern with, missing something at the exact moment of loss and prior to the creation of a recallable memory. The degree, scope, and nature of the motivation and the thing being missed are specific to the individual at that moment in time, and the catalyst for this awareness and its subsequent behavior is primarily due to an engagement with a cultural object. The types of cultural objects in question are almost infinite – music, film, cars, art, or another individual, among many others. This immediate connection with the object triggers a response from the individual that causes what I have described as a conscious or subconscious temporal compression and a newfound awareness of the perceived distance and proportion between this experience/awareness and the individual’s past, present, and future, and their understanding of their sense of self.

This thesis seeks to explore and demonstrate the existence of this virtually undocumented phenomenon via two analytical and interrelated processes. First, I draw on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and nostalgia theory as foundational disciplines to document an academic structure of pre-nostalgia. Second, using the medium of film as a cultural object, I apply my research to identified characters, scenes, and soundtracks from several films from the 1980s to objectively demonstrate the manifestation of this phenomenon. The purpose of this dual analytical approach is to provide both spectators and evaluators of this theory an environment in which to objectively observe and understand what I believe is an intrinsic phenomenon, and my overarching goal is to advance the academic and practical discussion of memory and nostalgia theories.

RESUMO O presente trabalho tem por objetivo destacar a composição temática e formal da Comédia O jardim das cerejeiras de Antón Tchekhov. Inicialmente, são apresentados alguns pontos relacionados ao contexto histórico da Rússia no final do século XIX, momento social de transformações, marcado por um deslocamento abrupto do indivíduo, que não mais reconhece o lugar onde está social e psicologicamente, mantendo-se em completa inação e distante das relações intersubjetivas, isto é, entregue num estado de renúncia e nostalgia. Logo após, propõe-se a identificação do tipo de realismo que permeia a construção dramática da obra, compreendendo o jogo irônico de Tchekhov para a representação do contexto sócio-histórico vigente em sua época, que assinala sua produção e contribui para a crise formal do drama moderno. O trabalho analisa como o sentimento nostálgico de uma família aristocrática em decadência que, funciona como temática da peça, precipita-se e determina a forma desta comédia: a renúncia ao diálogo e ao presente, bem como a inação predominante na construção das personagens. Deste modo, por se caracterizar como uma pesquisa bibliográfica se baseia nos pressupostos teóricos de Szondi ABSTRACT This paper aims to highlight the thematic and formal composition of the Comedy The Cherry Garden by Chekhov. Initially we stand on the Russian historical context in the late nineteenth century; a social moment of transformation and marked by an abrupt displacement of the subject,

Brand characters are ubiquitous in marketing. Previous studies establish their relevance in advertising. Surprisingly, little research exists on how to build and sustain brand characters. Adopting a case-study approach, this paper explores the brand management strategies of Sanrio's iconic character Hello Kitty, a cat epitomising cuteness and innocence. Findings indicate that eight tactics help to build and sustain the Hello Kitty brand: keep it simple, character licensing, third-party collaboration, capitalising on nostalgia, product-line extensions, brand extensions, sustaining consumer interests, and harnessing technology. The paper also identifies some challenges facing Hello Kitty