Книги 2016–2017
Selected bibliography in the field of Bulgarian Studies published in the current year
More...We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Selected bibliography in the field of Bulgarian Studies published in the current year
More...
The Balkan Wars (1912–1913) triggered in Bulgaria and Greece unseen enthusiasm and hope for prosperity, as well as for the ‘liberation of our brothers living under yoke”. In the Bulgarian society the Balkan Wars have left a deep emotional trauma. But how does the Greek society evaluate these events? How durable are the Greek military victories and do they nurture new internal or external problems? How do the people in Greece evaluate their own contribution to the success in the Wars and how do they see themselves and their neighbors? What is the relationship between tradition and modernity and what is the place of humanism in this military clash? Is the image of the war undergoing a process of democratization?Seeking for the answers of these and other questions, we decided to present a Greek album from the period. The album is dedicated to the Balkan Wars and remains poorly known. We hope that the analysis of the illustrations in it will enable us to trace the attempt of the authors of the album to influence the audience and will thus allow to see the Balkan Wars through the eyes of the Greeks from the beginning of the 20th century.
More...
The family and the relations in it have always been in the focus of the social sciences and humanities. They attract particular interest in cases of mixed marriages between individuals from different confessional communities. The present study will pay attention to mixed marriages between Orthodox Christians and Jews. It is based on the history of a family from the city of Sofia, the attitude of the spouses towards religion and the impact of these relations on the children in the family in the 20th century.
More...
The introductory article of the first issue of 'Medialog' journal presents the new academic journal, part of a new media culture portal. 'Medialog' is a journey into the media worlds. 'Medialog' is an invitation to dialogue addressed to academic researchers and university lecturers, PhD students and students; to all who are curious to understand something more and different about media, communications and culture.
More...
A review of Ivaylo Dichev’s book „Cultural scenes of the political”
More...
The article’s goal is to imagine a productive form of teaching creative writing as part of a Master's program in fields only remotely connected to literature and literary studies, such as digital media and videogames research. The text begins with a discussion on talent as the ability to perceive and submit to adequate and working models of writing. The topic is then further developed by analyzing talent within the framework of specific creative tools such as close reading and worldbuilding. Finally, the idea of creative writing as a model oriented and model guided activity is connected to the nature of the computer game as a space inhabited by a variety of new discourses, which the player - like a careful and attentive reader – has to learn to read and work with, thus making them part of her personal experience.
More...
A review of the collection “The Soft power of popular music in media (by examples from Bulgaria and the Balkans”, comp. Lozanka Peicheva. Sofia: “St. Kliment Ohridski” University Press, 2020 (160 p.). The collection is part of research collective’s work on the eponymous scientific project “The soft power of popular music in media (by examples from Bulgaria and the Balkans”, financed by the Bulgarian national science fund.
More...
At the end of each year, the Cultural Centre of the ‘Brancovan Palaces’ (Centrul cultural ‘Palatele Brâncovenești’)in Mogoșoaia organizes a call for projects. In the application form, artists present their projects and the scientific council of the institution makes the plan for the following year’s exhibitions, selecting the best proposals. Such was the case of the exhibition ‘Time Rush’, proposed by Eugen Berlo, a Romanian-American artist who lives and works in New York City and Bucharest. ‘Time Rush’ was approved for the year 2020
More...
The current anthropological study focuses on memes as a cultural phenomenon dating back to the end of the last century. Given that this is a relatively new cultural practice and the small number of humanitarian studies devoted to the subject, the concept is often vague, and its characteristics are immersed in the vast pool, which includes all sorts of 'viral' content. The common belief about memes is that they are a digital form of jokes and are often commented on as retrograde art, in the logic of the frivolous and funny. Due to the fact that they are a picture (collage, photo, comic, etc.) with text, which takes a few seconds to review (as opposed to reading an entire article or watching a news program), they are becoming more and more more influential media of all kinds. The meme genre is becoming an inspiration for marketing strategies, and advertising memes are multiplying rapidly. The text will consider the way in which the phenomenon is described by well-known Bulgarian online news media, and based on interviews with meme activists - the activity will be considered in its potential to be understood as a profitable business and in itself - information media.
More...
This article examines commercial gramophone records and focuses on their functioning as a medium in the first half of the twentieth century. During the first stage of the development of the shellac gramophone record (from the 1900s to the late 1920s), the gramophone record became the main medium of the music industry, had global distribution and sales, and competed with the leading media and forms of music and art reproduction: cinema and radio. The article focuses on several highlights. It asks how old commercial gramophone records should be studied today: as historical object, sound document, or media? Some methodological problems and directions for future research are pointed out. Examples are given of the history of the Bulgarian music industry and media music in the first half of the twentieth century.
More...
National identity in Bulgarian socialist cinema and especially in the films of the program 1300 years of Bulgaria is understood mainly as a plot – to reflect events from our native history and way of life. Very cleverly, they glided over only those events that, even in their drama, are positive for our self-esteem. But the constructive direction was in the films about migration and guilds as a native modification of the results of industrialization and modernization. In the time of transition, national identity appeared as a problematization – ethnic minorities, ideological, religious, and other repressions came into focus. I define the third stage of identity as confusion. There is no magnetic energy, innovative ideas, deep truth, and sincerity – the screen is 18 percent gray.
More...
The text presents results of research carried out by students of European studies (Simon Weil graduation, academic year 2021/2022), centered on the image of Ukrainian refugees and the ways in which it is constructed in the Bulgarian media. The results of the study refer to the first two and a half months of the war in Ukraine. 35 online and Internet-based media were tracked. Basic aspects of media representation are summarized in concluding text
More...
The text examines the narrative of the video game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice through Jean-Noël Thon’s three-part perspectivist model, focusing on its third dimension - the ideological perspective. It states that the elements of the gameplay, usually defined as purely ludic, in fact play a prominent narrative role. The game manages to trick the player without lying to them by relying on classic video game relations such as believing in what is seen and told, the self-identification of the player with the avatar, and uncritically accepting the game’s instructions/information as relating to their own actions, not to those of the avatar. The ideological perspective of the characters combined with the thus created ‘misleading’ gameplay question the game-player relationship, while at the same time succeeding in an original way to distance the player from the avatar and ultimately succeeding to make the player feel towards the game as the character feels within in his own world. Accordingly, if the gameplay has a message, i.e., allows itself to be semanticized independently of and in conflict with the cinematic cuts in the game, it functions narratively and creates a dissonance resulting from two different and parallel forms of storytelling.
More...
The edited volume “Journalism, Values, World. A Jubilee Collection in Honour of Prof. Dr. Maria Neykova” (University Press “St. Kliment Ohridski”, 2022) contains 20 articles united by 5 common themes that contribute to the understanding of a wide range of issues of journalistic practice and to professional debates in the field
More...
The unconscious (das Unbewusste; etymologically, that which is unknown) is a relatively modern concept that naturalized areas of the unknown previously explored by literature, mythology, and metaphysics. Each in their own domain, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, the three ‘masters of suspicion’ (according to Paul Ricoeur), debunked the hubristic claims of modern rational consciousness, exposing its social, existential and psychological grey zones. 1 Inspired by, yet critiquing humanity’s confidence in the power of reason, their acknowledgement of the limits of the Enlightenment is emblematized in Freud’s charting of the conflictual relations between the orderly ego and the unruly id.
More...
The Bulgarian photographer and researcher, Petar Boev, was appointed as the leader of the first journalistic delegation that visited Vardarska Macedonia from June 8th to June 16th, 1942. The delegation visited dozens of towns, capturing moments of the lives of Bulgarians in Vardarska Macedonia. He took over 100 photographs, which are diligently arranged in an album from Petar Boev’s personal archive. The album was entirely designed by Petar Boev, with beautifully written texts. In addition to the texts, a detailed map of the visited places during the journey was drawn. These photographs, besides being exquisite photographic specimens, hold historical and ethnographic significance. They serve as evidence of the authentic way of life of Bulgarians from the Macedonian folklore region, which remained characteristic until the middle of the 20th century. Petar Boev was a prominent figure active in various spheres of Bulgarian cultural life in the 20th century.
More...
The article explores contemporary tendencies in the art world that incorporate elements from various spiritual practices and customs to reinterpret cultural identity and community. This analysis focuses on the methods by which filmmakers and theatrical creators embed mythological and ritualistic elements into their narrative structures to reach deeper levels of perception and stimulate the audience’s imagination for reconsidering existence in a new context.
More...
Mobile Journalism is often the subject of debate - is every journalistic assignment outside a studio or newsroom Mobile Journalism and whether the mobility of devices makes journalism mobile? This study presents another angle to the topic of Mobile Journalism, namely focusing on Smartphone Journalism. Why does one particular device stand out among the many technological innovations? The revolution in the field of journalism comes precisely from smartphones due to a specific reason – the liberalization of content distribution channels. These are the first devices in such a wide-scale use, where traditional media systems no longer control the channels for content to reach audiences. The article presents data, collected as part of the International Project: “Mobile Journalism Practice and Education in Central-East European Countries”
More...
The text explores laughter in the Horizont za vas show on the Bulgarian National Radio during two election campaigns for parliament. It analyses the dialogues with listeners and the documents that regulate what is legally acceptable to discuss during a campaign and what is not. The rare instances of on-air humor are not sought by journalists in purpose, and in most cases, are not intended by the audience either. The topics discussed, including the elections, are not approached through humor. The attempts to control communication on both sides are notable. Political satire is not present in the studio, domesticated by the contenders vying for power.
More...
The book “Kicked a Building Lately? Architectural Criticism after the Digital Revolution” by Aneta Vasileva also becomes a history of writing about architecture in the first decades of the digital revolution. But it is also a history of the parallel lives of paper newspapers and online blogs. The tension between digital/analog is very well sketched in her text. This allows her to describe the transition of architectural criticism from the media to social networks. The author introduces us to the history of criticism, which tries to make visible the processes in an increasingly invisible architectural history.
More...