Download or read book Modernity and Ambivalence written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern civilization, Bauman argues, promised to make our lives understandable and open to our control. This has not happened and today we no longer believe it ever will. In this book, now available in paperback, Bauman argues that our postmodern age is the time for reconciliation with ambivalence, we must learn how to live in an incurably ambiguous world.
Download or read book Maturity and Modernity written by David Owen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maturity and Modernity is the first book to analyze Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault as a tradition of theorising and to chart the development of genealogy as a mode of critique. It provides clear accounts of the main ideas of Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault (as well as a useful Glossary) and illustrates the relations between these thinkers at methodological, substantive and politcal levels.
Download or read book On Ambivalence written by Kenneth Weisbrode and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-02-24 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise guide to ambivalence, from Adam and Eve (to eat the apple or not?) to Hamlet (to be or not?) to globalization (e pluribus unum or not?). Why is it so hard to make up our minds? Adam and Eve set the template: Do we or don't we eat the apple? They chose, half-heartedly, and nothing was ever the same again. With this book, Kenneth Weisbrode offers a crisp, literate, and provocative introduction to the age-old struggle with ambivalence. Ambivalence results from a basic desire to have it both ways. This is only natural—although insisting upon it against all reason often results not in "both" but in the disappointing "neither." Ambivalence has insinuated itself into our culture as a kind of obligatory reflex, or default position, before practically every choice we make. It affects not only individuals; organizations, societies, and cultures can also be ambivalent. How often have we asked the scornful question, "Are we the Hamlet of nations"? How often have we demanded that our leaders appear decisive, judicious, and stalwart? And how eager have we been to censure them when they hesitate or waver? Weisbrode traces the concept of ambivalence, from the Garden of Eden to Freud and beyond. The Obama era, he says, may be America's own era of ambivalence: neither red nor blue but a multicolored kaleidoscope. Ambivalence, he argues, need not be destructive. We must learn to distinguish it from its symptoms—selfishness, ambiguity, and indecision—and accept that frustration, guilt, and paralysis felt by individuals need not lead automatically to a collective pathology. Drawing upon examples from philosophy, history, literature, and the social sciences, On Ambivalence is a pocket-sized portrait of a complex human condition. It should be read by anyone who has ever grappled with making the right choice.
Download or read book Modernity and ambivalence in Jewish national ideology written by Alexandra Samoleit and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2008-02-13 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Jewish Studies, grade: 1,0, University of Erfurt, language: English, abstract: Zygmunt Bauman's theory explains how modern nation states categorise and define their population, as well as "friends" and "enemies" based on ethnical, cultural and historical homogeneity. In this process ambivalent elements, especially minority groups. are eliminated from the nation. For Bauman this structural inheritent development is the main reason for the failed assimilatory aspirations of the German Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century. Zionism as reaction to denied national identity in the host countries shows in itself the same structural elements which caused the exclusion of the Jews from the German society. Jewish nationalists applied similar strategies and methods of stigmatisation and displacement during the Jewish nation-building process on the native population of Palestine and the oriental Jews to construct national order and identity.
Download or read book Facing Modernity written by Barry Smart and published by SAGE Publications Limited. This book was released on 1999-02-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barry Smart offers a wide-ranging and critical discussion of how issues of reflexivity, ethics and moral responsibility inform social and political thought. Through a critical discussion of the `ambivalent fruits' of social analysis, exemplified in particular by the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo, Beck, Bourdieu, Goffman, Giddens, Levinas and Bauman, this book submits that an important responsibility of social enquiry today is to engage critically with the moral difficulties and ethical dilemmas which have arisen in relation to modernity.
Download or read book Mortality Immortality and Other Life Strategies written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zygmunt Bauman's new book is a brilliant exploration, from a sociological point of view, of the 'taboo' subject in modern societies: death and dying. The book develops a new theory of the ways in which human mortality is reacted to, and dealt with, in social institutions and culture. The hypothesis explored in the book is that the necessity of human beings to live with the constant awareness of death accounts for crucial aspects of the social organization of all known societies. Two different 'life strategies' are distinguished in respect of reactions to mortality. One, 'the modern strategy', deconstructs mortality by translating the insoluble issue of death into many specific problems of health and disease which are 'soluble in principle'. The 'post-modern strategy' is one of deconstructing immortality: life is transformed into a constant rehearsal of 'reversible death', a substitution of 'temporary disappearance' for the irrevocable termination of life. This profound and provocative book will appeal to a wide audience. It will also be of particular interest to students and professionals in the areas of sociology, anthropology, theology and philosophy.
Download or read book Ambivalence Modernity Power written by Nuala Finnegan and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By incorporating a variety of critical approaches within a feminist framework, the author here argues that Mexican women writers participate in a crucial project of unsettling dominant discourses as they strive for new ways of capturing the ambivalent position of the Mexican women in their texts.
Download or read book Surpassing Modernity written by Andrew McNamara and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain the surpassing of modernity. Discussion is stranded in an impasse between those who view the term modernity with automatic disdain-as deterministic, Eurocentric or imperialistic-and a booming interest that is renewing the study of modernism. Another dilemma is that the urge to move away from, or beyond, modernity arises because it is viewed as difficult, even unsavoury. Yet, there has always been a view of modernity as somehow difficult to live with, and that has been said by figures we regard today as typical modernists. McNamara argues in this book that it is time to forget the quest to surpass modernity. Instead, we should re-examine a legacy that continues to inform our artistic conceptions, our political debates, our critical justifications, even if that legacy is baffling and contradictory. We may find it difficult to live with, but without recourse to this legacy, our critical-cultural ambitions would remain seriously diminished. How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.
Download or read book Maturity and Modernity written by David Owen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maturity and Modernity is the first book to analyze Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault as a tradition of theorising and to chart the development of genealogy as a mode of critique. It provides clear accounts of the main ideas of Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault (as well as a useful Glossary) and illustrates the relations between these thinkers at methodological, substantive and politcal levels.
Download or read book Navigating Modernity written by Albert J. Paolini and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Paolini is concerned with the connections among postcolonialism, globalization, and modernity, and he offers one of the first detailed statements of those connections to be undertaken in the field of IR. Focusing on the Third World, and particularly sub-Saharan Africa, he questions dominant notions of identity and subjectivity in the social sciences."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer written by Wendy Larson and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the twentieth century, Chinese writers have confronted the problem of creating a new literary tradition that both maintains the culturally unique aspects of a rich heritage and succeeds in promoting a new modernity. In the first book-length treatment of the topic, Wendy Larson examines the contradictory forms of authority at work in the autobiographical texts of modern Chinese writers and scholars and the way these conflicts helped to shape and determine the manner in which writers viewed themselves, their texts, and their work. Larson focuses on the most famous writers associated with the May Fourth Movement, a group most active in the 1920s and 1930s, and their fundamental ambivalence about writing. She analyzes how their writing paradoxically characterized textual labor as passive, negative, and inferior to material labor and the more physical political work of social progress, and she describes the ways they used textual means to devalue literary labor. The impact of China's increasing contact with the West--particularly the ways in which Western notions of "individualism" and "democracy" influenced Chinese ideologies of self and work--is considered. Larson also studies the changes in China's social structure, notably those linked to the abolition in 1905 of the educational exam system, which subsequently broke the link between the mastery of certain texts and the attainment of political power, further denigrating the cultural role of the writer.
Download or read book Modernity and the Holocaust written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sociology is concerned with modern society, but has never come to terms with one of the most distinctive and horrific aspects of modernity - the Holocaust. The book examines what sociology can teach us about the Holocaust, but more particularly concentrates upon the lessons which the Holocaust has for sociology. Bauman's work demonstrates that the Holocaust has to be understood as deeply involved with the nature of modernity. There is nothing comparable to this work available in the sociological literature.
Download or read book Liquid Modernity written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-07-10 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.
Download or read book Zygmunt Bauman written by Peter Beilharz and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2000-01-11 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This measured and thoughtful book provides a comprehensive critical commentary on Bauman′s social theory. It explores the roots of his ideas in questions of capital and labour, and explains how these ideas flourished in Bauman′s later writings on culture, intellectuals, utopia, the holocaust, modernity and postmodernism. Bauman′s work has been wide-ranging and ambitious. This book fulfils the objective of providing an authoritative critical guide to this essential thinker.
Download or read book Strangers Ambivalence and Social Theory written by Bülent Diken and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1998, this volume dwells upon the socio-political problem of "under-representation" at great length within the context of immigration through analysis of Turkish immigrants within the "cosy" country of Denmark on the European Periphery. The main purpose has been to show the fictitious and constructed character of the identities that are normally presupposed and taken for granted. Bülent Diken attempts to "defamiliarize" the familiar notions of the "immigrant" and what is taken for granted in the field of immigration. To counter this, Diken allows the "immigrant" to speak throughout interviews. In addition, the study dwells on local and central state policies and planning. This requires a merger of social theory with research on immigration as well as (social and physical) planning, in this case in a Danish context with an examination on how the application of planning and urban politics are oriented toward immigrants. Together with an interest in political and discursive "strategies", the "tactics" used by immigrants in coping with these strategies are focused on at length.
Download or read book Liquid Times written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The passage from ‘solid’ to ‘liquid’ modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives. They have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don’t add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like ‘career’ and ‘progress’ could meaningfully be applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable – to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty. Zygmunt Bauman’s brilliant writings on liquid modernity have altered the way we think about the contemporary world. In this short book he explores the sources of the endemic uncertainty which shapes our lives today and, in so doing, he provides the reader with a brief and accessible introduction to his highly original account, developed at greater length in his previous books, of life in our liquid modern times.
Download or read book The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman written by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most inspirational and controversial thinkers on the scene of contemporary sociology. For several decades he has provided compelling analyses and diagnoses of a vast variety of aspects of modern and liquid modern living. This book considers the theoretical significance of his contribution to sociology, but also discusses and adopts a critical stance towards his work. The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman introduces and critically appraises some of the most significant as well as some of the lesser known of Bauman's contributions to contemporary sociology. An international team of scholars delineates and discusses how Bauman's treatment of these themes challenges conventional wisdom in sociology, thereby revising and revitalizing sociological theory. As a special feature, the book concludes with Bauman's intriguing reflections and contemplations on his own life and intellectual trajectory, published here for the first time in English. In this postscript aptly entitled 'Pro Domo Sua' ('About Myself'), he describes the pushes and pulls that throughout the years have shaped his thinking.
