Download or read book The Myth of Disenchantment written by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
Download or read book The Invention of Religion in Japan written by Jason Ānanda Josephson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-03 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.
Download or read book Land of Disenchantment written by Michael L. Trujillo and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2010-03-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Mexico's Española Valley is situated in the northern part of the state between the fabled Sangre de Cristo and Jemez Mountains. Many of the Valley’s communities have roots in the Spanish and Mexican periods of colonization, while the Native American Pueblos of Ohkay Owingeh and Santa Clara are far older. The Valley's residents include a large Native American population, an influential "Anglo" or "non-Hispanic white" minority, and a growing Mexican immigrant community. In spite of the varied populace, native New Mexican Latinos, or Nuevomexicanos, remain the majority and retain control of area politics. In this experimental ethnography, Michael Trujillo presents a vision of Española that addresses its denigration by neighbors--and some of its residents--because it represents the antithesis of the positive narrative of New Mexico. Contradicting the popular notion of New Mexico as the "Land of Enchantment," a fusion of race, landscape, architecture, and food into a romanticized commodity, Trujillo probes beneath the surface to reveal the causes of social dysfunction brought about by colonization and te transition from a pastoral to an urban economy.
Download or read book Under the Red White and Blue written by Greil Marcus and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deep dive into how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of the American Dream has been understood, portrayed, distorted, misused, and kept alive Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald’s story has become a key to American culture and American life itself. Marcus follows the arc of The Great Gatsby from 1925 into the ways it has insinuated itself into works by writers such as Philip Roth and Raymond Chandler; found echoes in the work of performers from Jelly Roll Morton to Lana Del Rey; and continued to rewrite both its own story and that of the country at large in the hands of dramatists and filmmakers from the 1920s to John Collins’s 2006 Gatz and Baz Luhrmann’s critically reviled (here celebrated) 2013 movie version—the fourth, so far.
Download or read book Hunting Magic Eels written by Richard Beck and published by Broadleaf Books . This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a secular age, a world dominated by science and technology. Increasing numbers of us don't believe in God anymore. We don't expect miracles. We've grown up and left those fairy tales behind, culturally and personally. Yet five hundred years ago the world was very much enchanted. It was a world where God existed and the devil was real. It was a world full of angels and demons. It was a world of holy wells and magical eels. But since the Protestant Reformation and the beginning of the Enlightenment, the world--in the West, at least--has become increasingly disenchanted. While this might be taken as evidence of a crisis of belief, Richard Beck argues that it's actually a crisis of attention. God hasn't gone anywhere, but we've lost our capacity to see God. The rising tide of disenchantment has profoundly changed our religious imaginations and led to a loss of the holy expectation that we can be interrupted by the sacred and divine. But it doesn't have to be this way. Hunting Magic Eels shows us that with attention and an intentional, cultivated capacity to experience God as a living, vital presence in our lives, we can cultivate an enchanted faith in a skeptical age. This new paperback edition includes a foreword from Sean Palmer as well as four new, additional chapters, including "Why Good People Need God," "Live Your Beautiful Life," and "The Primacy of the Invisible."
Download or read book The Language of Disenchantment written by Robert A. Yelle and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Language of Disenchantment explores how Protestant ideas about language inspired British colonial critiques of Hindu mythological, ritual, linguistic, and legal traditions.
Download or read book The Re enchantment of the World written by Joshua Landy and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"--or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.
Download or read book The Enchantments of Mammon written by Eugene McCarraher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century
Download or read book Science and Religion in India written by Renny Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists’ religious life and practices, and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of ‘conflict’ and ‘complementarity’. By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories.
Download or read book Making Magic written by Randall Styers and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Randall Styers seeks to account for the vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that it can best be explained in light of the European and Euro-American drive to establish and secure their own identity as normative.
Download or read book Enchantment and Disenchantment written by Wai-yee Li and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a famous episode of the eighteenth-century masterpiece The Dream of the Red Chamber, the goddess Disenchantment introduces the hero, Pao-yü, to the splendors and dangers of the Illusory Realm of Great Void. The goddess, one of the divine women in Chinese literature who inspire contradictory impulses of attachment and detachment, tells Pao-yü that the purpose of his dream visit is "disenchantment through enchantment," or "enlightenment through love." Examining a range of genres from different periods, Wai-yee Li reveals the persistence of the dialectic embodied by the goddess: while illusion originates in love and desire, it is only through love and desire that illusion can be transcended. Li begins by defining the context of these issues through the study of an entire poetic tradition, placing special emphasis on the role of language and of the feminine element. Then, focusing on the "dream plays" by T'ang Hsien-tsu, she turns to the late Ming, an age which discovers radical subjectivity, and goes on to explore a seventeenth-century collection of classical tales, Records of the Strange from the Liao-chai Studio by P'u Sung-ling. The latter half of the book is devoted to a thorough analysis of The Dream of the Red Chamber, the most profound treatment of the dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment, love and enlightenment, illusion and reality. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Subject of Modernity written by Anthony J. Cascardi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-03-19 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Anthony J. Cascardi offers an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject of self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth.
Download or read book Sea Monsters written by Chloe Aridjis and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this intoxicating story of a teenage girl who trades her a middle–class upbringing for a quest for meaning in 1980s Mexico is “a surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments” (Los Angeles Review of Books). One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen–year–old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking―recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa’s surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will “promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery.” It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the “Beach of the Dead.” Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Set to a pulsing soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us. "Aridjis is deft at conjuring the teenage swooniness that apprehends meaning below every surface. Like Sebald’s or Cusk’s, her haunted writing patrols its own omissions . . . The figure of the shipwreck looms large for Aridjis. It becomes a useful lens through which to see this book, which is self–contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea." ―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
Download or read book The Philosophy of Disenchantment written by Edgar Saltus and published by . This book was released on 1885 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Magic s Reason written by Graham M. Jones and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Magic’s Reason, Graham M. Jones tells the entwined stories of anthropology and entertainment magic. The two pursuits are not as separate as they may seem at first. As Jones shows, they not only matured around the same time, but they also shared mutually reinforcing stances toward modernity and rationality. It is no historical accident, for example, that colonial ethnographers drew analogies between Western magicians and native ritual performers, who, in their view, hoodwinked gullible people into believing their sleight of hand was divine. Using French magicians’ engagements with North African ritual performers as a case study, Jones shows how magic became enshrined in anthropological reasoning. Acknowledging the residue of magic’s colonial origins doesn’t require us to dispense with it. Rather, through this radical reassessment of classic anthropological ideas, Magic’s Reason develops a new perspective on the promise and peril of cross-cultural comparison.
Download or read book Urban Awakenings written by Samuel Alexander and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-21 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a series of urban investigations undertaken in the metropolis of Melbourne. It is based on the idea that ‘enchantment’ as an affective state is important to ethical and political engagement. Alexander and Gleeson argue that a sense of enchantment can give people the impulse to care and engage in an increasingly troubled world, whereas disenchantment can lead to resignation. Applying and extending this theory to the urban landscape, the authors walk their home city with eyes open to the possibility of seeing and experiencing the industrial city in different ways. This unique methodology, described as ‘urban tramping’, positions the authors as freethinking freewalkers of the city, encumbered only with the duty to look through the delusions of industrial capitalism towards its troubled, contradictory soul. These urban investigations were disrupted midway by COVID-19, a plague that ended up confirming the book’s central thesis of a fractured modernity vulnerable to various internal contradictions.
Download or read book Anti Tales written by David Calvin and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The anti-(fairy) tale has long existed in the shadow of the traditional fairy tale as its flipside or evil twin. According to André Jolles in Einfache Formen (1930), such Antimärchen are contemporaneous with some of the earliest known oral variants of familiar tales. While fairy tales are generally characterised by a “spirit of optimism” (Tolkien) the anti-tale offers us no such assurances; for every “happily ever after,” there is a dissenting “they all died horribly.” The anti-tale is, however, rarely an outright opposition to the traditional form itself. Inasmuch as the anti-hero is not a villain, but may possess attributes of the hero, the anti-tale appropriates aspects of the fairy tale form, (and its equivalent genres) and re-imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirises elements of these to present an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality. In this collection, Little Red Riding Hood retaliates against the wolf, Cinderella’s stepmother provides her own account of events, and “Snow White” evolves into a postmodern vampire tale. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, revealing the underlying structures, dynamics, fractures and contradictions within the borrowed tales. Over the last half century, this dissident tradition has become increasingly popular, inspiring numerous writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers. Although anti-tales abound in contemporary art and popular culture, the term has been used sporadically in scholarship without being developed or defined. While it is clear that the aesthetics of postmodernism have provided fertile creative grounds for this tradition, the anti-tale is not just a postmodern phenomenon; rather, the “postmodern fairy tale” is only part of the picture. Broadly interdisciplinary in scope, this collection of twenty-two essays and artwork explores various manifestations of the anti-tale, from the ancient to the modern including romanticism, realism and surrealism along the way.
