Download or read book The Democratic Sublime written by Jason Frank and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transition from royal to popular sovereignty during the age of democratic revolutions--from 1776 to 1848--entailed not only the reorganization of institutions of governance and norms of political legitimacy, but also a dramatic transformation in the iconography and symbolism of political power. The personal and external rule of the king, whose body was the physical locus of political authority, was replaced with the impersonal and immanent self-rule of the people, whose power could not be incontestably embodied. This posed representational difficulties that went beyond questions of institutionalization and law, extending into the aesthetic realm of visualization, composition, and form. How to make the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment was, and is, a crucial problem of democratic political aesthetics. The Democratic Sublime offers an interdisciplinary exploration of how the revolutionary proliferation of popular assemblies--crowds, demonstrations, gatherings of the "people out of doors"--came to be central to the political aesthetics of democracy during the age of democratic revolutions. Jason Frank argues that popular assemblies allowed the people to manifest as a collective actor capable of enacting dramatic political reforms and change. Moreover, Frank asserts that popular assemblies became privileged sites of democratic representation as they claimed to support the voice of the people while also signaling the material plenitude beyond any single representational claim. Popular assemblies continue to retain this power, in part, because they embody that which escapes representational capture: they disrupt the representational space of appearance and draw their power from the ineffability and resistant materiality of the people's will. Engaging with a wide range of sources, from canonical political theorists (Rousseau, Burke, and Tocqueville) to the novels of Hugo, the visual culture of the barricades, and the memoirs of popular insurgents, The Democratic Sublime demonstrates how making the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment became a central dilemma of modern democracy, and how it remains so today.
Download or read book The Democratic Sublime written by Jason A Frank and published by . This book was released on 2021-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a series of articles written for the Neue Rhenische Zeitung in 1850, later published by Friedrich Engels as The Class Struggles in France, Karl Marx looked back on the failed French revolution of 1848 and attempted to explain how the democratic aspirations that inspired the February assault on the July Monarchy-and promised to fulfill the dashed hopes of 1789, 1792, and 1830-also led to its termination in the reactionary popular dictatorship of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Popular sovereignty, which had so often defined the emancipatory visions of two generations of radical activists and thinkers was now not only an obstacle to genuine emancipation, but a plebiscitary source of power for newly emergent forms of political domination. Bonapartism became, for Marx, an important way of understanding the complex internal dynamics of popular-and later "populist"-authoritarianism. It is an analysis that continues to resonate powerfully today. The national enthusiasm that propelled the revolution forward, and which overturned the hated regime of Louis Phillippe in three glorious days, had successfully established for the first time in history a parliamentary republic based in universal male suffrage. The Second Republic's provisional government was immediately thrown into a legitimation crisis, however, by the underlying sectional, parliamentary, and class conflicts lurking beneath its illusory foundation in the people's unitary will. When the popular classes of Paris returned to the barricades in June to protest the conservative government's closure of the National Workshops-and to convert the political revolution into a social revolution based in the "right to work"-they were abandoned by their fellow citizens and thousands were massacred in the streets by Cavaignac's National Guard. The "fantastic republic" built around the pretensions of national unity, Marx proclaimed, quickly "dissolved in powder and smoke." Tocqueville described the June days as a "slave's war," and in its aftermath the Party of Order quickly consolidated its power against any furthering of revolutionary aspiration"--
Download or read book The Sublime of the Political written by Dean Caivano and published by Transcript Verlag, Roswitha Gost, Sigrid Nokel u. Dr. Karin Werner. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dean Caivano and Sarah Naumes argue that storytelling in the form of narrative and autoethnography creates an emancipatory potential through its ability to theorize from below, welcoming marginalized and excluded voices. They offer a new assessment of political texts to challenge who can write and disseminate political ideas--and how.
Download or read book Melville s Art of Democracy written by Nancy Fredricks and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This challenging and timely study demonstrates that the problems Melville faced as a writer - the relationship between politics and aesthetics and the representation of the marginalized without appropriation - are similar to issues faced in the academy today.
Download or read book Sublime Desire written by Amy J. Elias and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-winner of the Perkins Prize from the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature Has twentieth-century political violence destroyed faith in historical knowledge? What happens to historical fiction when history is seen as either a form of Western imperialism or a form of postmodern simulation? In Sublime Desire, Amy Elias examines our changing relationship to history and how fiction since 1960 reflects that change. She contends that postmodernism is a post-traumatic imagination that is pulled between two desires: the political desire to acknowledge the physical violence of twentieth-century history, and the yearning for an escape from that history into a ravishing realm of historical certainty. Torn between these desires, both historical fiction and historiography after 1960 redefine history as the "sublime," a territory beyond lived experience that is both unknowable and seductive. In the face of a failure of Enlightenment ideals about knowledge and the West's own history of violence, post-World War II history becomes a desire for the "secular sacred" sublime—for awe, certainty, and belief. Sublime Desire is an eloquent melding of theory and practice. Mixing the canonical with the unexpected, Elias analyzes developments in the historical romance genre from Walter Scott's novels to novels written today. She correlates developments in the historical romance to similar changes in historiography and philosophy. Sublime Desire draws engagingly on more than thirty relevant texts, from Tolstoy's War and Peace to Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, Charles Johnson's Dreamer, and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. But the book also examines theories of postmodern space and time and defines the difference between postmodern and postcolonial historical perspectives. The final chapter draws from trauma theory in Holocaust studies to define how fiction can pose an ethical alternative to aestheticized history while remaining open to pluralism and democratic values. In its range and sophistication, Sublime Desire is a valuable addition to postmodernist studies as well as to studies of the historical romance novel.
Download or read book The Democratic Sublime written by Jason Frank and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a series of articles written for the Neue Rhenische Zeitung in 1850, later published by Friedrich Engels as The Class Struggles in France, Karl Marx looked back on the failed French revolution of 1848 and attempted to explain how the democratic aspirations that inspired the February assault on the July Monarchy-and promised to fulfill the dashed hopes of 1789, 1792, and 1830-also led to its termination in the reactionary popular dictatorship of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Popular sovereignty, which had so often defined the emancipatory visions of two generations of radical activists and thinkers was now not only an obstacle to genuine emancipation, but a plebiscitary source of power for newly emergent forms of political domination. Bonapartism became, for Marx, an important way of understanding the complex internal dynamics of popular-and later "populist"-authoritarianism. It is an analysis that continues to resonate powerfully today. The national enthusiasm that propelled the revolution forward, and which overturned the hated regime of Louis Phillippe in three glorious days, had successfully established for the first time in history a parliamentary republic based in universal male suffrage. The Second Republic's provisional government was immediately thrown into a legitimation crisis, however, by the underlying sectional, parliamentary, and class conflicts lurking beneath its illusory foundation in the people's unitary will. When the popular classes of Paris returned to the barricades in June to protest the conservative government's closure of the National Workshops-and to convert the political revolution into a social revolution based in the "right to work"-they were abandoned by their fellow citizens and thousands were massacred in the streets by Cavaignac's National Guard. The "fantastic republic" built around the pretensions of national unity, Marx proclaimed, quickly "dissolved in powder and smoke." Tocqueville described the June days as a "slave's war," and in its aftermath the Party of Order quickly consolidated its power against any furthering of revolutionary aspiration"--
Download or read book Vocations of Political Theory written by Jason A. Frank and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Content Description pt. 1. Invoking political theory. Political theory : from vocation to invocation / Sheldon S. Wolin -- pt. 2. Theorizing loss. Specters and angels at the end of history / Wendy Brown -- The politics of nostalgia and theories of loss / J. Peter Euben -- pt. 3. Thinking in time. Can theorists make time for belief? / Russell Arben Fox -- The history of political thought as a vocation : a pragmatist defense / David Paul Mandell -- pt. 4. The politics of ordinary life. Political theory for losers / Thomas L. Dumm -- Feminism's flight from the ordinary / Linda M.B. Zerilli -- pt. 5. Political knowledge. Conceptions of science in political theory : a tale of cloaks and daggers / Mark B. Brown -- Political theory as a provocation : an ethos of political theory / Lon Troyer -- Gramsci, organic intellectuals, and cultural studies : lessons for political theorists? / Shane Gunster -- pt. 6. Practicing political theory. Reading the body : hobbes, body politics, and the task of political theory / Samantha Frost -- Work, shame, and the chain gang : the new civic education / Jill Locke -- The nobility of democracy / William E. Connolly.
Download or read book Constituent Moments written by Jason Frank and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-04 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the American Revolution, there has been broad cultural consensus that “the people” are the only legitimate ground of public authority in the United States. For just as long, there has been disagreement over who the people are and how they should be represented or institutionally embodied. In Constituent Moments, Jason Frank explores this dilemma of authorization: the grounding of democratic legitimacy in an elusive notion of the people. Frank argues that the people are not a coherent or sanctioned collective. Instead, the people exist as an effect of successful claims to speak on their behalf; the power to speak in their name can be vindicated only retrospectively. The people, and democratic politics more broadly, emerge from the dynamic tension between popular politics and representation. They spring from what Frank calls “constituent moments,” moments when claims to speak in the people’s name are politically felicitous, even though those making such claims break from established rules and procedures for representing popular voice. Elaborating his theory of constituent moments, Frank focuses on specific historical instances when under-authorized individuals or associations seized the mantle of authority, and, by doing so, changed the inherited rules of authorization and produced new spaces and conditions for political representation. He looks at crowd actions such as parades, riots, and protests; the Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s; and the writings of Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass. Frank demonstrates that the revolutionary establishment of the people is not a solitary event, but rather a series of micropolitical enactments, small dramas of self-authorization that take place in the informal contexts of crowd actions, political oratory, and literature as well as in the more formal settings of constitutional conventions and political associations.
Download or read book The Sublime written by Timothy M. Costelloe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of different theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on 'the sublime'.
Download or read book The Digital Sublime written by Vincent Mosco and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005-09-23 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpreting the myths of the digital age: why we believed in the power of cyberspace to open up a new world. The digital era promises, as did many other technological developments before it, the transformation of society: with the computer, we can transcend time, space, and politics-as-usual. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco goes beyond the usual stories of technological breakthrough and economic meltdown to explore the myths constructed around the new digital technology and why we feel compelled to believe in them. He tells us that what kept enthusiastic investors in the dotcom era bidding up stocks even after the crash had begun was not willful ignorance of the laws of economics but belief in the myth that cyberspace was opening up a new world. Myths are not just falsehoods that can be disproved, Mosco points out, but stories that lift us out of the banality of everyday life into the possibility of the sublime. He argues that if we take what we know about cyberspace and situate it within what we know about culture—specifically the central post-Cold War myths of the end of history, geography, and politics—we will add to our knowledge about the digital world; we need to see it "with both eyes"—that is, to understand it both culturally and materially.After examining the myths of cyberspace and going back in history to look at the similar mythic pronouncements prompted by past technological advances—the telephone, the radio, and television, among others—Mosco takes us to Ground Zero. In the final chapter he considers the twin towers of the World Trade Center—our icons of communication, information, and trade—and their part in the politics, economics, and myths of cyberspace.
Download or read book Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime written by Robert Zaller and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-25 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers' focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers' Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers' poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works.
Download or read book Four Crises of American Democracy written by Alasdair Scott Roberts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "crisis of representation" occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was centered on the question of whether the people really controlled their government. This period was dominated by fears of plutocracy and debates about the rights of African Americans, women and immigrants. The "crisis of mastery" spanned the years 1917-1948, and was preoccupied with building administrative capabilities so that government could improve its control of economic and international affairs. The "crisis of discipline," beginning in the 1970s, was triggered by the perception that voters and special interests were overloading governments with unreasonable demands. In the final part of his analysis, Roberts asks whether the United States is entering a "crisis of anticipation," in which the question is whether democracies can handle long-term problems like global warming effectively.
Download or read book Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture 1680 1880 written by Sarah Hibberd and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English language collection on the musical sublime. Reveals music's place at the forefront of this interdisciplinary aesthetic category.
Download or read book The Bad Side of Books written by D.H. Lawrence and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism, odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, perhaps, only by Virginia Woolf. Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence’s published essays to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers for whom the essay has become an important genre. We get Lawrence the book reviewer, writing about Death in Venice and welcoming Ernest Hemingway; Lawrence the travel writer, in Mexico and New Mexico and Italy; Lawrence the memoirist, depicting his strange sometime-friend Maurice Magnus; Lawrence the restless inquirer into the possibilities of the novel, writing about the novel and morality and addressing the question of why the novel matters; and, finally, the Lawrence who meditates on birdsong or the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains. Dyer’s selection of Lawrence’s essays is a wonderful introduction to a fundamental, dazzling writer.
Download or read book Democracy and Education written by John Dewey and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 1916 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
Download or read book The Eyes of the People written by Jeffrey Edward Green and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2010 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. In this book, Green argues that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say.
Download or read book Ranci re s Sentiments written by Davide Panagia and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.
