Download or read book Democracy Law and the Modernist Avant Gardes written by Sascha Bru and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to look at the ties between European modernism and democracy in a cross-cultural manner. Focusing on the continental avant-gardes of the nineteen-tens and twenties, Sascha Bru's original and provocative book fundamentally revises our understanding of modernism's cultural and political history. Bru brings together a wide range of European experimental writers and provides detailed analyses of Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck and Belgian expressionist Paul van Ostaijen. Bru locates these writers within their exceptional democratic context and demonstrates how the modernist avant-garde, during the First World War and the upheavals that followed, found itself caught up in a series of 'states of exception'. In such states legal democratic institutions were bracketed and set aside, and 'literature' as an autonomous realm was temporarily suspended. Faced with extreme forms of politicisation, avant-gardists throughout Europe tried to safeguard literature's autonomy in a variety of ways. These included turning politics and law into genuinely artistic materials and producing a repertoire of alternatives to existent frameworks of democracy.Against assertions that anti-art avant-garde gestures were meant to overcome art's autonomy and approximate the condition of politics, Bru shows that European avant-gardists may well have been one of the staunchest defenders of art's sovereignty in modern times.Key Features* Facilitates dialogue between Anglo-American and European modernist studies* Presents new interpretations of Berlin Dada, futurism and expressionism, and brings an innovative historical framework with which to analyse continental modernism* Provides an original perspective on modernist writing and theory during the first decades of the foregoing century* Offers, in the introductory chapter, a survey of ways in which to relate experimental writing to politics

Download or read book Modernism and Democracy written by Rachel Potter and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-07-20 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anglo-American modernist writing and modern mass democratic states emerged at the same time, during the period of 1900-1930. Yet writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford were notoriously hostile to modern democracies. They often defended, in contrast, anti-democratic forms of cultural authority. Since the late 1970s, however, our understanding of modernist culture has altered as previously marginalised writers, in particular women such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Mina Loy, have been reassessed. Not only has the picture of Anglo-American modernist culture changed significantly, but the understanding of the relationship between modernist writing and politics has also shifted. Rachel Potter here reassess the relationship between modernism and democracy by analysing the wide range of different reactions by modernist writers to the new democracies. She charts the changes in the ideas of democracy as a result of the shift from liberal to mass democracies after the First World War and of women's entrance into the political and cultural spheres. By uncovering hitherto-unanalysed essays by a number of feminist writers she argues that in fact there was a widespread scepticism about the consequences of mass democracy for women's liberation, and that this scepticism was central to the work of women modernist writers.

Download or read book The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era written by Ralph Ketcham and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2021-10-08 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the last half of the twentieth century has been called the Age of Democracy, the twenty-first has already demonstrated the fragility of its apparent triumph as the dominant form of government throughout the world. Reassessing the fate of democracy for our time, distinguished political theorist Ralph Ketcham traces the evolution of this idea over the course of four hundred years. He traces democracy's bumpy ride in a book that is both an exercise in the history of ideas and an explication of democratic theory. Ketcham examines the rationales for democratic government, identifies the fault lines that separate democracy from good government, and suggests ways to strengthen it in order to meet future challenges. Drawing on an encyclopedic command of history and politics, he examines the rationales that have been offered for democratic government over the course of four manifestations of modernity that he identifies in the Western and East Asian world since 1600. Ketcham first considers the fundamental axioms established by theorists of the Enlightenment—Bacon, Locke, Jefferson—and reflected in America's founding, then moves on to the mostly post-Darwinian critiques by Bentham, Veblen, Dewey, and others that produced theories of the liberal corporate state. He explains late-nineteenth-century Asian responses to democracy as the third manifestation, grounded in Confucian respect for communal and hierarchical norms, followed by late-twentieth-century postmodernist thought that views democratic states as oppressive and seeks to empower marginalized groups. Ketcham critiques the first, second, and fourth modernity rationales for democracy and suggests that the Asian approach may represent a reconciliation of ancient wisdom and modern science better suited to today's world. He advocates a reorientation of democracy that de-emphasizes group or identity politics and restores the wholeness of the civic community, proposing a return to the Jeffersonian universalism—that which informed the founding of the United States—if democracy is to flourish in a fifth manifestation. The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era is an erudite, interdisciplinary work of great breadth and complexity that looks to the past in order to reframe the future. With its global overview and comparative insights, it will stimulate discussion of how democracy can survive-and thrive-in the coming era.

Download or read book Liberal Modernism and Democratic Individuality written by Austin Sarat and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over thirty years, George Kateb--along with John Rawls, the late Judith Shklar, and Sir Isaiah Berlin--has been one of liberal political theory's most distinctive voices. An eloquent spokesman for the moral dimensions of individual rights and constitutional democracy, he is a fierce critic of statism and communitarianism and a staunch advocate of individualism in the struggle against all forms of paternalism, conformity, and group-think. Kateb's broad concern as a political theorist has been to unveil the cultural, moral, and existential dimensions of constitutionalism in America. The essays in this book are assembled in his honor, but they are not only celebratory; they pay him homage through their authors' effort to understand the fate of democratic individuality in the modern age. John Hollander and Cornel West contribute reflections on Kateb as a person and a political theorist. Dana Villa, Judith Shklar, and Thomas Dumm write on political theory and the claims of democratic individuality. Democratic individuality and the politics of identity are discussed by Tracy Strong, William Connolly, Benjamin Barber, and Leslie Theile; culture, sensibility, and the self, by David Bromwich, Helene Keyssar, Kim Townsend, and George Shulman. Democratic individuality and civic action are the subjects of essays by Amy Gutmann, Jeffrey Abramson, and Austin Sarat.

Download or read book Islam Democracy and Religious Modernism in Iran 1953 2000 written by Forough Jahanbakhsh and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the general problematic of Islam and democracy and the ideas of certain Iranian religious modernists on the issue. Examining the development of religious intellectualism in post-revolutionary Iran, it presents Abdolkarim Soroush's novel approach to this pertinent topic.

Download or read book Modernism and Democracy written by Rachel Potter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anglo-American modernist writing and the modern mass democratic state emerged at the same time, during the period of 1900-1930. Rachel Potter charts the changes in the ideas of democracy and discusses the wide range of reactions to these changes. She argues that modernist poems were shaped by rapidly evolving and complicated ideas of democracy.

Download or read book Common Law History and Democracy in America 1790 1900 written by Kunal M. Parker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-14 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for a change in our understanding of the relationships among law, politics, and history. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, a certain anti-foundational conception of history has served to undermine law's foundations, such that we tend to think of law as nothing other than a species of politics. Thus viewed, the activity of unelected, common law judges appears to be an encroachment on the space of democracy. However, Kunal M. Parker shows that the world of the nineteenth century looked rather different. Democracy was itself constrained by a sense that history possessed a logic, meaning, and direction that democracy could not contravene. In such a world, far from law being seen in opposition to democracy, it was possible to argue that law - specifically, the common law - did a better job than democracy of guiding America along history's path.

Download or read book Madness and Democracy written by Marcel Gauchet and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the insane asylum became a laboratory of democracy is revealed in this provocative look at the treatment of the mentally ill in nineteenth-century France. Political thinkers reasoned that if government was to rest in the hands of individuals, then measures should be taken to understand the deepest reaches of the self, including the state of madness. Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain maintain that the asylum originally embodied the revolutionary hope of curing all the insane by saving the glimmer of sanity left in them. Their analysis of why this utopian vision failed ultimately constitutes both a powerful argument for liberalism and a direct challenge to Michel Foucault's indictment of liberal institutions. The creation of an artificial environment was meant to encourage the mentally ill to live as social beings, in conditions that resembled as much as possible those prevailing in real life. The asylum was therefore the first instance of a modern utopian community in which a scientifically designed environment was supposed to achieve complete control over the minds of a whole category of human beings. Gauchet and Swain argue that the social domination of the inner self, far from being the hidden truth of emancipation, represented the failure of its overly optimistic beginnings. Madness and Democracy combines rich details of nineteenth-century asylum life with reflections on the crucial role of subjectivity and difference within modernism. Its final achievement is to show that the lessons learned from the failure of the asylum led to the rise of psychoanalysis, an endeavor focused on individual care and on the cooperation between psychiatrist and patient. By linking the rise of liberalism to a chapter in the history of psychiatry, Gauchet and Swain offer a fascinating reassessment of political modernity.

Download or read book Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism written by Ewa Płonowska Ziarek and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.

Download or read book A Companion to Adorno written by Peter E. Gordon and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive contribution to scholarship on Adorno, bringing together the foremost experts in the field As one of the leading continental philosophers of the last century, and one of the pioneering members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno is the author of numerous influential—and at times quite radical—works on diverse topics in aesthetics, social theory, moral philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy, all of which concern the contradictions of modern society and its relation to human suffering and the human condition. Having authored substantial contributions to critical theory which contain searching critiques of the ‘culture industry’ and the ‘identity thinking’ of modern Western society, Adorno helped establish an interdisciplinary but philosophically rigorous study of culture and provided some of the most startling and revolutionary critiques of Western society to date. The Blackwell Companion to Adorno is the largest collection of essays by Adorno specialists ever gathered in a single volume. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, this important contribution to the field explores Adorno’s lasting impact on many sub-fields of philosophy. Seven sections, encompassing a diverse range of topics and perspectives, explore Adorno’s intellectual foundations, his critiques of culture, his views on ethics and politics, and his analyses of history and domination. Provides new research and fresh perspectives on Adorno’s views and writings Offers an authoritative, single-volume resource for Adorno scholarship Addresses renewed interest in Adorno’s significance to contemporary questions in philosophy Presents over 40 essays written by international-recognized experts in the field A singular advancement in Adorno scholarship, the Companion to Adorno is an indispensable resource for Adorno specialists and anyone working in modern European philosophy, contemporary cultural criticism, social theory, German history, and aesthetics.

Download or read book Critical Theory and Political Modernity written by José Maurício Domingues and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws together philosophy, jurisprudence, political science, and international relations to study the main categories of political modernity and its development trends. Grounded in critical theory—from Marx to later currents such as the Frankfurt School—Critical Theory and Political Modernity circulates around state power and oligarchy as well as emancipatory possibilities from their foundations to the present, such as radical democracy. Domingues analyzes the main categories of political modernity, including the juridical dimension, to conceptually articulate its long-term processes of development. In so doing, he examines rights, law and citizenship, state and domination abstract and concrete, the political system, state power, freedom and autonomy, scalar configurations, political regimes, oligarchy and democracy.

Download or read book Authoritarian Modernism in East Asia written by Mark R. Thompson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following Barrington Moore Jr., this book raises doubts about modernization theory’s claim that an advanced economy with extensive social differentiation is incompatible with authoritarian rule. Authoritarian modernism in East Asia (Northeast and Southeast Asia) has been characterized by economically reformist but politically conservative leaders who have attempted to learn the “secrets” of authoritarian rule in modern society. They demobilize civil society while endeavoring to establish an “ethical” form of rule and claim reactionary culturalist legitimation. With China, East Asia is home to the most important country in the world today that is rapidly modernizing while attempting to remain authoritarian.

Download or read book Modernism and the Middle East written by Sandy Isenstadt and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative collection of essays is the first book-length treatment of the development of modern architecture in the Middle East. Ranging from Jerusalem at the turn of the twentieth century to Libya under Italian colonial rule, postwar Turkey, and on to present-day Iraq, the essays cohere around the historical encounter between the politics of nation-building and architectural modernism's new materials, methods, and motives. Architecture, as physical infrastructure and as symbolic expression, provides an exceptional window onto the powerful forces that shaped the modern Middle East and that continue to dominate it today. Experts in this volume demonstrate the political dimensions of both creating the built environment and, subsequently, inhabiting it. In revealing the tensions between achieving both international relevance and regional meaning, Modernism in the Middle East affords a dynamic view of the ongoing confrontations of deep traditions with rapid modernization. Political and cultural historians, as well as architects and urban planners, will find fresh material here on a range of diverse practices.

Download or read book Shaping American Democracy written by Scott M. Roulier and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the design of built spaces influences civic attitudes, including prospects for social equality and integration, in America. Key American architects and planners—including Frederick Law Olmsted, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Moses, and the New Urbanists—not only articulated unique visions of democracy in their extensive writings, but also instantiated those ideas in physical form. Using criteria such as the formation of social capital, support for human capabilities, and environmental sustainability, the book argues that the designs most closely associated with a communally-inflected version of democracy, such as Olmsted's public parks or various New Urbanist projects, create conditions more favorable to human flourishing and more consistent with a democratic society than those that are individualistic in their orientation, such as urban modernism or most suburban forms.

Download or read book Crowds and Democracy written by Stefan Jonsson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling modernist movements in art, literature, architecture, theater, and cinema, as well as the rise of communism and fascism and experiments in radical democracy. Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as "the mass" during a critical period in European history. It follows its evolution into the preferred conceptual tool for social scientists, the ideal slogan for politicians, and the chosen image for artists and writers trying to capture a society in flux and a people in upheaval. This volume is the second installment in Stefan Jonsson's epic study of the crowd and the mass in modern Europe, building on his work in A Brief History of the Masses, which focused on monumental artworks produced in 1789, 1889, and 1989.

Download or read book Art and Democracy in Post Communist Europe written by Piotr Piotrowski and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, Eastern Europe saw a new era begin, and the widespread changes that followed extended into the world of art. Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe examines the art created in light of the profound political, social, economic, and cultural transformations that occurred in the former Eastern Bloc after the Cold War ended. Assessing the function of art in post-communist Europe, Piotr Piotrowski describes the changing nature of art as it went from being molded by the cultural imperatives of the communist state and a tool of political propaganda to autonomous work protesting against the ruling powers. Piotrowski discusses communist memory, the critique of nationalism, issues of gender, and the representation of historic trauma in contemporary museology, particularly in the recent founding of contemporary art museums in Bucharest, Tallinn, and Warsaw. He reveals the anarchistic motifs that had a rich tradition in Eastern European art and the recent emergence of a utopian vision and provides close readings of many artists—including Ilya Kavakov and Krzysztof Wodiczko—as well as Marina Abramovic’s work that responded to the atrocities of the Balkans. A cogent investigation of the artistic reorientation of Eastern Europe, this book fills a major gap in contemporary artistic and political discourse.

Download or read book Modernism written by Melba Cuddy-Keane and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-05 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guided by the historical semantics developed in Raymond Williams' pioneering study of cultural vocabulary, Modernism: Keywords presents a series of short entries on words used with frequency and urgency in “written modernism,” tracking cultural and literary debates and transformative moments of change. Short-listed for The Modernist Studies Association 2015 Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection Highlights and exposes the salient controversies and changing cultural thought at the heart of modernism Goes beyond constructions of “plural modernisms” to reveal all modernist writing as overlapping and interactive in a simultaneous and interlocking mix Draws from a vast compilation of more than a thousand sources, ranging from vernacular prose to experimental literary forms Spans the “long” modernist period, from its incipient beginnings c.1880 to its post-WWII aftermath Approaches English written modernism in its own terms, tempering explanations of modernism often derived from European poets and painters Models research techniques based on digital databases and collaborative work in the humanities