Download or read book Figurations of Modernity written by V. J. H. Houben and published by Campus Verlag. This book was released on 2008 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional wisdom holds that globalization has made the world more modern, not less. But how has modernity been conceived of in colonial, postcolonial, and post-revolutionary worlds? In Figurations of Modernity, an international team of scholars probe how non-European worlds have become modern ones, from the perspective of a broad range of societies around the globe. From vocational education in Argentina to secular morality in Tibet, from the construction of heroes in Central Asia to historical memory in Nigeria, this comprehensive volume reckons with the legacy of empire in a globalizing world. Enhanced by the perspectives of historians, anthropologists, and scholars of comparative education, Figurations of Modernity will be an essential book for those studying post-colonial nations across disciplines.
Download or read book Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity written by Peter Button and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tracing the formation of the modern concept of literature in 20th century China, this book examines the emergence of the Chinese socialist realist novel in relation to the literary and philosophical currents globalized in the wake of capitalist modernity"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Modernism written by Ástráður Eysteinsson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-volume work Modernism has been awarded the prestigious 2008 MSA Book Prize! Modernism has constituted one of the most prominent fields of literary studies for decades. While it was perhaps temporarily overshadowed by postmodernism, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. These volumes respond to a need for a collective and multifarious view of literary modernism in various genres, locations, and languages. Asking and responding to a wealth of theoretical, aesthetic, and historical questions, 65 scholars from several countries test the usefulness of the concept of modernism as they probe a variety of contexts, from individual texts to national literatures, from specific critical issues to broad cross-cultural concerns. While the chief emphasis of these volumes is on literary modernism, literature is seen as entering into diverse cultural and social contexts. These range from inter-art conjunctions to philosophical, environmental, urban, and political domains, including issues of race and space, gender and fashion, popular culture and trauma, science and exile, all of which have an urgent bearing on the poetics of modernity.
Download or read book Configurations of Modernity written by Edward S. Cutler and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity written by Joshua Barker and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world populated not just by individuals but by figures, those larger-than-life people who in some way express and challenge our conventional understandings of social types. This innovative and collaborative work takes up the wide range of figures that populate the social and cultural imaginaries of contemporary Southeast Asia—some familiar only in specific places, others recognizable across the region and even globally. It puts forward a series of ethnographic portraits of figures that represent and give voice to something larger than themselves, offering a view into social life that is at once highly particular and general. They include the Muslim Television Preacher in Indonesia, Miss Beer Lao, the Rural DJ in Thailand, the Korean Soap Opera Junkie in Burma, the Filipino Seaman, and the Photo Retoucher in Vietnam. Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity brings together the fieldwork of over eighty scholars and covers the nine major countries of the region: Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. An introduction outlines important social transformations in Southeast Asia and key theoretical and methodological innovations that result from ethnographic attention to the study of key figures. Each section begins with an introduction by a country editor followed by short essays offering vivid and intimate portraits set against the background of contemporary Southeast Asia. The result is a volume that combines scholarly rigor with a meaningful, up-to-date portrayal of a region of the world undergoing rapid change. A reference bibliography offers suggestions for further reading. Figures of Southeast Asia Modernity is an ideal teaching tool for introductory classes to Southeast Asia studies, anthropology, and geography.
Download or read book Power in Modernity written by Isaac Ariail Reed and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination. Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money. He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity. Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?
Download or read book Genres of Modernity written by Dirk Wiemann and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genres of Modernity maps the conjunctures of critical theory and literary production in contemporary India. The volume situates a sample of representative novels in the discursive environment of the ongoing critical debate on modernity in India, and offers for the first time a rigorous attempt to hold together the stimulating impulses of postcolonial theory, subaltern studies and the boom of Indian fiction in English. In opposition to the entrenched narrative of modernity as a single, universally valid formation originating in the West, the theoretical and literary texts under discussion engage in a shared project of refiguring the present as a site of heterogeneous genres of modernity. The book traces these figurative efforts with particular attention to the treatment of two privileged metonymies of modernity: the issues of time and home in Indian fiction. Combining close readings of literary texts from Salman Rushdie to Kiran Nagarkar with a wide range of philosophical, sociological and historiographic reflections, Genres of Modernity is of interest not only for students of postcolonial literatures but for academics in the fields of Cultural Studies at large.
Download or read book Figurations in Indian Film written by Meheli Sen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-10-21 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a series of essays that interrogate the notion of figuration in Indian cinemas. The essays collectively argue that the figures which exhibit maximum tenacity in Indian cinema often emerge in the interface of recognizable binaries: self/other, Indian/foreign, good/bad, virtue/vice, myth/reality and urban/rural.
Download or read book Salome s Modernity written by Petra Dierkes-Thrun and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedy Salom has had a rich afterlife in literature, opera, dance, film, and popular culture. Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression is the first comprehensive scholarly exploration of that extraordinary resonance that persists to the present. Petra Dierkes-Thrun positions Wilde as a founding figure of modernism and Salom as a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde's Salom marks a major turning point from a dominant traditional cultural, moral, and religious outlook to a utopian aesthetic of erotic and artistic transgression. Wilde and Salom are seen to represent a bridge linking the philosophical and artistic projects of writers such as Mallarm , Pater, and Nietzsche to modernist and postmodernist literature and philosophy and our contemporary culture. Dierkes-Thrun addresses subsequent representations of Salome in a wide range of artistic productions of both high and popular culture through the works of Richard Strauss, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, Ken Russell, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Altman, Tom Robbins, and Nick Cave, among others.
Download or read book Modernity Theory written by John Jervis and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-29 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernity theory approaches modern experience as it incorporates a sense of itself as ‘modern’ (modernity), along with the possibilities and limitations of representing this in the arts and culture generally (modernism). The book interrogates modernity in the name of a fluid, unsettled, unsettling modernism. As the offspring of the Enlightenment and the Age of Sensibility, modernity is framed here through a cultural aesthetics that highlights not just an instrumental, exploitative approach to the world but the distinctive configuration of embodiment, feeling, and imagination, that we refer to as ‘civilization’, in turn both explored and subverted through modernist experimentalism and reflexive thinking in culture and the arts. This discloses the rationalizing pretensions that underlie the modern project and have resulted in the sensationalist, melodramatic conflicts of good and evil that traverse our contemporary world of politics and popular culture alike. This innovative approach permits modernity theory to link otherwise fragmented insights of separate humanities disciplines, aspects of sociology, and cultural studies, by identifying and contributing to a central strand of modern thought running from Kant through Benjamin to the present. One aspect of modernity theory that results is that it cannot escape the paradoxes inherent in reflexive involvement in its own history.
Download or read book Civilisations Civilising Processes and Modernity A Debate written by Artur Bogner and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-02-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1984, the celebrated sociologist and historian Norbert Elias convened a major conference on ‘Civilisations and civilising processes’ at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (University of Bielefeld). Participants included the most distinguished and influential scholars in historical sociology and world history. This book will make available, for the first time in one place, the papers presented by the speakers and, even more interestingly, the transcripts of discussions at the symposium. This conference brought together eminent and internationally reputed scholars of macro-history and historical sociology including Johann P. Arnason, Elias, Hans-Dieter Evers, Johan Goudsblom, Keith Hopkins, William H. McNeill, and Immanuel Wallerstein. This highly informative encounter between various leading scholars of humanity’s global social history has never before been published, although it was completely recorded on paper and in tape recordings. Its publication in one volume should be an important event for all students of the long-term structural transformations of humanity.
Download or read book Configurations of the Individual in Modern Chinese Literature written by Qin Wang and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to demonstrate the multiplicity of configurations of the individual in modern Chinese literature through analyzing several classic texts written by Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun, Lao She, and Mu Shiying. It attempts to refresh our understanding of the history of modern Chinese literature and indirectly responds to the controversial issue of “individual rights” (or “human rights”) in present-day China, showing that in modern Chinese literature, various configurations of the individual imply political possibilities that are not only irreconcilable with each other, but irreducible to the determination of the modern discourse of “individualism” introduced by the West. A groundbreaking work, it will give valuable context to political scientists and other scholars seeking to understand what "China" means in the 21st century.
Download or read book Dis figurations written by Ian H. Angus and published by Verso. This book was released on 2000 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been, over the last decades, a deep crisis in the models which, for a long time, have been central metaphors governing thought and research in the social sciences. The main symptom in this paradigmatic shift has been the increasing centrality of the 'discourse' approach in social theory. The philosophical implications of this shift have not, until now, been thoroughly explored. Ranging over the work of Heidegger and Gramsci, this philosophical exploration is not carried out by Angus as a purely analytical enterprise, but as a comprehensive attempt at rethinking the whole project of a critical philosophy.
Download or read book Eugenic Feminism written by Asha Nadkarni and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asha Nadkarni contends that whenever feminists lay claim to citizenship based on women’s biological ability to “reproduce the nation” they are participating in a eugenic project—sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others. Employing a wide range of sources from the United States and India, Nadkarni shows how the exclusionary impulse of eugenics is embedded within the terms of nationalist feminism. Nadkarni reveals connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, demonstrating that both call for feminist citizenship centered on the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She juxtaposes U.S. and Indian feminists (and antifeminists) in provocative and productive ways: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novels regard eugenic reproduction as a vital form of national production; Sarojini Naidu’s political speeches and poetry posit liberated Indian women as active agents of a nationalist and feminist modernity predating that of the West; and Katherine Mayo’s 1927 Mother India warns white U.S. women that Indian reproduction is a “world menace.” In addition, Nadkarni traces the refashioning of the icon Mother India, first in Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film Mother India and Kamala Markandaya’s 1954 novel Nectar in a Sieve, and later in Indira Gandhi’s self-fashioning as Mother India during the Emergency from 1975 to 1977. By uncovering an understudied history of feminist interactivity between the United States and India, Eugenic Feminism brings new depth both to our understanding of the complicated relationship between the two nations and to contemporary feminism.
Download or read book Arguing About Sex written by Joseph Monti and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1995-07-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about sexual morality, the Christian Church, and moral argument in late modernity. Arguing about Sex offers a critical evaluation of the intellectual and cultural contexts in which the practical moral discourse of institutions takes place. After analyzing the challenges and possibilities of the Christian moral rhetoric of sex, the book builds a constructive ethical argument about sexual morality in a Christian context. The book is intended for audiences who are interested in and articulate about issues of sexual morality. Students in university and seminary courses in religion and ethics will find this book helpful as will moral theorists interested in examining new relations between ethical norms and moral rules.
Download or read book Figurations written by Claudia Castañeda and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-29 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Always in the process of becoming, inherently incomplete, the child is a remarkably malleable figure. In Figurations, Claudia Castañeda shows how this malleability is itself generated—how the child is "made" by different constituencies and how the resulting historically, geographically, and culturally specific figures are put to widely divergent uses, often to very powerful effect. Situated at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, cultural, and science and technology studies, this book provides a remarkable map of the child's meaning and movement across transnational circuits of exchange. Castañeda investigates the construction of the child as both a natural and cultural body, the character of its embodiment, and its imaginative appeal in various settings. The sites through which she tracks the bodily production and deployment of the child include nineteenth-century developmental science; cognitive neuroscience in the late twentieth century; international adoption; rumors and media coverage of child-organ stealing; and poststructuralist theory. Her work reveals the extent to which the child's cultural significance and value lie in its status as a body whose incompleteness makes it "available" for such varied uses. Figurations establishes the child as a key figure for understanding and rethinking the politics of nature, culture, bodies, and subjects in changing "global" worlds.
Download or read book Uncanny Modernity written by Jo Collins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the sense in which the uncanny may be a distinctively modern experience, the way these unnerving feelings and unsettling encounters disturb the rational presumptions of the modern world view and the security of modern self-identity, just as the latter may themselves be implicated in the production of these experiences as uncanny.