Download or read book The Crisis of Contemporary Culture written by Terry Eagleton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Eagleton ranges widely over a number of topics of relevance to contemporary culture: the loss of a sense of corporate cultural identity in the contemporary crisis of `nationhood', and the factors responsible for this erosion; the conflict between a traditionalist conception of culture and a `postmodern' one; the assumed decline in cultural standards; the teaching of English in schools, and so on. He sets something of the history and current situation of Oxford English within this wider context, and outlines a programme of desirable reforms. He concludes his lecture with some reflections on poetry and philosophy, literary theory, multinational capitalism, the historical concepts of Walter Benjamin and one or two other topics.
Download or read book Elsewhere in America written by David Trend and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans think of their country as a welcoming place where everyone has equal opportunity. Yet historical baggage and anxious times can restrain these possibilities. Newcomers often find that civic belonging comes with strings attached––riddled with limitations or legally punitive rites of passage. For those already here, new challenges to civic belonging emerge on the basis of belief, behavior, or heritage. This book uses the term "elsewhere" in describing conditions that exile so many citizens to "some other place" through prejudice, competition, or discordant belief. Yet, in another way, "elsewhere" evokes an undefined "not yet" ripe with potential. In the face of America’s daunting challenges, can "elsewhere" point to optimism, hope, and common purpose? Through 12 detailed chapters, the book applies critical theory in the humanities and social sciences to examine recurring crises of social inclusion in the U.S. After two centuries of incremental "progress" in securing human dignity, today the U.S. finds itself torn by new conflicts over reproductive rights, immigration, health care, religious extremism, sexual orientation, mental illness, and fear of terrorists. Is there a way of explaining this recurring tendency of Americans to turn against each other? Elsewhere in America engages these questions, charting the ever-changing faces of difference (manifest in contested landscapes of sex and race to such areas as disability and mental health), their spectral and intersectional character (recent discourses on performativity, normativity, and queer theory), and the grounds on which categories are manifest in ideation and movement politics (metapolitics, cosmopolitanism, dismodernism).
Download or read book The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture written by Miller, Vincent Alward Miller and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture written by Vincent Miller and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Discussions about the contemporary online world are often in a one-dimensional manner shaped by moral panics about online trolling, cyberbullying, cybercrime, terrorists online, etc. The associated right-wing extremist agenda for Internet politics is about control, surveillance and censorship. Vince Miller’s book questions this agenda and is an excellent work for understanding how to use philosophical thought for the analysis of ethics, privacy and disclosure in this turbulent world of the Internet in the information society. It shows how to come to grips with the contested relationship between online freedom and control." - Christian Fuchs, University of Westminster, Author of Social Media: A Critical Introduction By investigating three issues which have captured the public imagination as ′problems′ emerging directly from the contemporary use of communications technology (anti-social behaviour, privacy and free speech online), Vincent Miller explores how the digital revolution is challenging our notion of ′self′ and ′presence′. Through a critical and philosophical examination of each of these cases, he argues that they have at their root the same phenomena: ‘a crisis of presence’. Focussing on the concept of presence, and the challenges that our changing presence poses to our ethics, privacy and public discourse, Miller illustrates how ubiquitous communication technologies have created a disjuncture between how we think we exist in the world and how we actually do exist through our use of such devices. The solution, he claims, is not to focus exclusively on ‘content’ and its regulation as much as it is to examine, understand and resist the alienating aspects of the media itself, such as the technological ordering, metaphysical abstraction and mediation which increasingly define our social encounters and presences. He suggests that such resistance involves several ambitious revisions in our ethical, legal and technological regimes.
Download or read book The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture written by Vincent Miller and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Discussions about the contemporary online world are often in a one-dimensional manner shaped by moral panics about online trolling, cyberbullying, cybercrime, terrorists online, etc. The associated right-wing extremist agenda for Internet politics is about control, surveillance and censorship. Vince Miller’s book questions this agenda and is an excellent work for understanding how to use philosophical thought for the analysis of ethics, privacy and disclosure in this turbulent world of the Internet in the information society. It shows how to come to grips with the contested relationship between online freedom and control." - Christian Fuchs, University of Westminster, Author of Social Media: A Critical Introduction By investigating three issues which have captured the public imagination as ′problems′ emerging directly from the contemporary use of communications technology (anti-social behaviour, privacy and free speech online), Vincent Miller explores how the digital revolution is challenging our notion of ′self′ and ′presence′. Through a critical and philosophical examination of each of these cases, he argues that they have at their root the same phenomena: ‘a crisis of presence’. Focussing on the concept of presence, and the challenges that our changing presence poses to our ethics, privacy and public discourse, Miller illustrates how ubiquitous communication technologies have created a disjuncture between how we think we exist in the world and how we actually do exist through our use of such devices. The solution, he claims, is not to focus exclusively on ‘content’ and its regulation as much as it is to examine, understand and resist the alienating aspects of the media itself, such as the technological ordering, metaphysical abstraction and mediation which increasingly define our social encounters and presences. He suggests that such resistance involves several ambitious revisions in our ethical, legal and technological regimes.
Download or read book Zombies in Western Culture written by John Vervaeke and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.
Download or read book Crisis Cultures written by Brian Whitener and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a mix of political, economic, literary, and filmic texts, Crisis Cultures challenges current cultural histories of the neoliberal period by arguing that financialization, and not just neoliberalism, has been at the center of the dramatic transformations in Latin American societies in the last thirty years. Starting from political economic figures such as crisis, hyperinflation, credit, and circulation and exemplary cultural texts, Whitener traces the interactions between culture, finance, surplus populations, and racialized state violence after 1982 in Mexico and Brazil. Crisis Cultures makes sense of the emergence of new forms of exploitation and terrifying police and militarized violence by tracking the cultural and discursive forms, including real abstraction and the favela and immaterial cadavers and voided collectivities, that have emerged in the complicated aftermath of the long downturn and global turn to finance.
Download or read book The Crisis of Values in Contemporary Culture written by and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Culture and Crisis written by Nina Witoszek and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often argued that Germany and Scandinavia stand at two opposite ends of a spectrum with regard to their response to social-economic disruptions and cultural challenges. Though, in many respects, they have a shared cultural inheritance, it is nevertheless the case that they mobilize different mythologies and different modes of coping when faced with breakdown and disorder. The authors argue that it is at these "critical junctures," points of crisis and innovation in the life of communities, that the tradition and identity of national and local communities are formed, polarized, and revalued; it is here that social change takes a particular direction.
Download or read book The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins written by Manussos Marangudakis and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original analysis of modern Greece’s political culture attempts to present a “total social fact”—a coherent and complex representation of Greek socio-political culture—to identify the cultural causes of Greece’s recent disastrous economic crisis. Using a culturalist frame inspired by the Yale Strong Program, Marangudakis argues that the core cultural orientations of Greece have determined its politics—Greek secular culture flows out of the religion of Eastern Orthodoxy with its mysticism, icons, and general “ortherworldly-nesses.” This theoretical discussion, bringing together Eisenstadt, Michael Mann, Banfield, and Taylor, is complemented by an innovative use of survey data, processed by political scientist and statistician Theodore Chadjipadelis. The carefully deployed quantitative data demonstrate that the culture previously described is actually shared by people living in Greece today. In his sweeping conclusion to this thorough cultural analysis, Marangudakis reflects on the prospects of Greek cultural recovery through the construction of a non-populist civil religion.
Download or read book On Edge written by George Yúdice and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Crisis of Our Age written by Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin and published by Element Books, Limited. This book was released on 1942 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the crisis of modern society as it effects art and science, philosophy and religion, ethics and law.
Download or read book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures written by Joseph Ratzinger and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreword by Marcello Pera Written by Joseph Ratzinger shortly before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures looks at the growing conflict of cultures evident in the Western world. The West faces a deadly contradiction of its own making, he contends. Terrorism is on the rise. Technological advances of the West, employed by people who have cut themselves off from the moral wisdom of the past, threaten to abolish man (as C.S. Lewis put it)whether through genetic manipulation or physical annihilation. In short, the West is at war-with itself. Its scientific outlook has brought material progress. The Enlightenment's appeal to reason has achieved a measure of freedom. But contrary to what many people suppose, both of these accomplishments depend on Judeo-Christian foundations, including the moral worldview that created Western culture. More than anything else, argues Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the important contributions of the West are threatened today by an exaggerated scientific outlook and by moral relativism-what Benedict XVI calls "the dictatorship of relativism"-in the name of freedom. Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is no mere tirade against the moral decline of the West. Razinger challenges the West to return to its roots by finding a place for God in modern culture. He argues that both Christian culture and the Enlightenment formed the West, and that both hold the keys to human life and freedom as well as to domination and destruction. Ratzinger challenges non-believer and believer alike. "Both parties," he writes, "must reflect on their own selves and be ready to accept correction." He challenges secularized, unbelieving people to open themselves to God as the ground of true rationality and freedom. He calls on believers to "make God credible in this world by means of the enlightened faith they live." Topics include: Reflections on the Cultures in Conflict Today The Significance and Limits of Today's Rationalistic Culture The Permanent Significance of the Christian Faith Why We Must Not Give Up the Fight The Law of the Jungle, the Rule of Law We Must Use Our Eyes! Faith and Everyday Life Can Agnosticism Be a Solution? The Natural Knowledge of God "Supernatural" Faith and Its Origins
Download or read book Critical Reasoning in Contemporary Culture written by Richard A. Talaska and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here we have, for the first time in a single volume, diverse perspectives on the meaning, conditions, and goals of critical reasoning in contemporary culture. Part One emphasizes critical reasoning and education, engaging the debate over the connection between critical reasoning skills and the learning of the content. Part Two offers analyses of the theoretical, methodological, and historical debates concerning critical reasoning abilities. The authors represent a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches which lend the book valuable intellectual pluralism. The book evaluates other aspects of critical thinking such as creativity, insight, questioning, learning, practical thought, interpretation, intellectual prejudice, and the historical and temporary aspects of thought.
Download or read book Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism written by Heiko Feldner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reassesses the nature of the current global economic crisis and its implication for the 21st century, through the unique lens of Marx's theory of the value-form as the unconscious matrix of modern society. Going beyond orthodox Marxist and postmodernist accounts, the author offers fresh new readings of Marx, Benjamin, Foucault, and Žižek. Here he argues that capitalism has not only entered its greatest crisis since WWII, but has in fact reached its historical limit and is in terminal decline. In this light, the book seeks to answer how a rerun of Keynesian regulations could possibly resolve the crisis. It also inquires as to whether a Green New Deal might succeed when the gap between work to be had and work to be done widens, and what alternatives neo-Marxian approaches offer considering the failure of Marxism in the 20th century. This far-reaching, critical examination of the crisis not only builds on critical theory, but also offers new readings of key theorists that will appeal to anyone interested in political theory, critical theory, and political economy.
Download or read book The Quest for the Pearl written by Jeremy Naydler and published by . This book was released on 2009-06 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No further information has been provided for this title.
Download or read book The Crisis Of Modernity written by Gunter H. Lenz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The crisis~ of the "project of modernity" (Habermas) is, at the same time, a crisis of critical theories of society and culture that have radically questioned bourgeois culture and capitalist society and economy from the perspective of a utopia of enlightened rationality. A number of parallel recent social and political problems, developments, and
