Download or read book Nostalgia for the Absolute written by George Steiner and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 1997 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The decline of formal religious systems has left a moral and emotional emptiness in Western culture. George Steiner, internationally renowned thinker and scholar, pursues this and examines the alternative "mythologies" of Marxism, Freudian psychology, L vi-Straussian anthropology, and fads of irrationality.
Download or read book Nostalgia for the Absolute 1997 written by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Promise of Nostalgia written by Nicola Sayers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-08 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Promise of Nostalgia analyses a range of texts – including The Virgin Suicides, both the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides’ and Sofia Coppola’s screen adaptation, photography of Detroit’s ‘abandoned spaces’, and blogger Tavi Gevinson's media output – to explore nostalgia as a prominent affect in contemporary American cultural production. Counter to the prevalent caricature of nostalgia as anti-future, the book proposes a more nuanced reading of its stakes and meanings. Instead of understanding it as evidence of the absence of utopia it contends that there is a masked utopian impulse in this nostalgia ‘mode’ and critical potential in what has typically been dismissed as ideological. This book will be of interest to scholars, graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students interested in contemporary culture, cultural theory, media studies, the Frankfurt School, utopian studies and American literature and culture.
Download or read book Nostalgia and Political Theory written by Lawrence Quill and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Nostalgia and Political Theory, Lawrence Quill advocates the central importance of nostalgia as a theoretical response to the ‘historic’ past and a vertiginous present. He does so by offering detailed analyses of diverse theoretical approaches, from the ancient world to the modern day, in order to reassess the relation between nostalgia and politics. Quill proposes nostalgia as an organizing concept, silently (and not so silently) influencing theorists as they construct critiques of the present or visions of the political future. Nostalgia and Political Theory surveys key contributions to nostalgic and antinostalgic thinking from across the political spectrum. Assessing the influence of photography, radio, television, and personal computing on changing conceptions of the past, Quill also considers the relation between populism, nationalism, and nostalgia. By challenging those who would dismiss nostalgia as irrational or a symptom of cultural malaise, Quill concludes by advancing the case for a liberal theory of nostalgia. Nostalgia and Political Theory will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of political theory, social theory, sociology, philosophy, political science, memory studies, and nostalgia studies.
Download or read book Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu written by Xu Xu and published by Stone Bridge Press, Inc.. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing the works of a major Chinese writer—liberal, cosmopolitan, and lyrically exotic—once banned but now embraced, and newly "discovered" in the West. Xu Xu 徐訏 (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of nostalgia and melancholy offer today’s readers an unusual glimpse into China’s turbulent twentieth century. These translations--spanning a period of some thirty years, from 1937 until 1965--bring to life some of Xu Xu’s most representative short fictions from prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Afterword illustrates that Xu Xu’s idealistic tendencies in defiance of the politicization of art exemplify his affinity with European romanticism and link his work to a global literary modernity.
Download or read book Watching Nostalgia written by Stefanie Armbruster and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is nostalgia in television? How far does a nostalgic text trigger nostalgic emotions? And how are nostalgic series received by different audience groups? Stefanie Armbruster uses an interdisciplinary approach as analytical and theoretical basis. Her detailed analyses identify nostalgia in reruns, remakes and period dramas such as "Knight Rider" or "Mad Men". Focus group discussions with German and Spanish viewers give new insights into its reception. The in-depth study helps to understand the interrelation of nostalgic texts and nostalgic reception better and explores a decisive part of a phenomenon that is omnipresent in our current TV landscape.
Download or read book Postcolonial Nostalgias written by Dennis Walder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread yet often misunderstood condition — nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national and historical as well as personal boundaries. Often seen as merely escapist, nostalgia also offers solace and self-understanding for those displaced by the larger movements of our time. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world — and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of ‘Bushman’ song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.
Download or read book On Vulnerability written by Miquel Seguró Mendlewicz and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-01-26 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We tend to understand vulnerability in one of two ways: (1) the measure of everything that happens to us, or (2) that it legitimizes the current discourses and the halo of authority that fashion grants. However, we should think of vulnerability as being affectable both to and by others. In On Vulnerability: A Philosophical Anthropology Miquel Seguró Mendlewicz projects vulnerability as a condition of human life and the central concept to understand our existential position in the world. The philosophical journey is structured around two fundamental areas: the existential reality of vulnerability (its pathos) and the decision to integrate it and live it as an ethical and political reality (its ethos). Using the work of René Descartes, whose philosophy the author presents as conducive to meditating on vulnerability, Seguró Mendlewicz proposes a philosophical reflection that projects vulnerability as a condition of human life in all its magnitudes. Therefore, this book explores all facets of vulnerability, the real impact of what being vulnerable means, and the dangers implied when something becomes trendy.
Download or read book The Future of Nostalgia written by Svetlana Boym and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his troops, buried a soldier alive as a deterrent to nostalgia. In her new book, Svetlana Boym develops a comprehensive approach to this elusive ailment. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities -- St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, from love letters on Kafka's grave to conversations with Hitler's impersonator, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.
Download or read book Yearning for Yesterday written by Fred Davis and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Slavoj i ek and Christianity written by Sotiris Mitralexis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-18 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavoj Žižek’s critical engagement with Christian theology goes much further than his seminal The Fragile Absolute (2000), or his The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), or even his discussion with noted theologian John Milbank in The Monstrosity of Christ (2009). His reading of Christianity, utilising his signature elements of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy with modern philosophical currents, can be seen as a genuinely original contribution to the philosophy of religion. This book focuses on these aspects of Žižek’s thought with either philosophy and cultural theory, or Christian theology, serving as starting points of enquiry. Written by a panel of international contributors, each chapter teases out various strands of Žižek’s thought concerning Christianity and religion and brings them into a wider conversation about the nature of faith. These essays show that far from being an outright rejection of Christian thought and intellectual heritage, Žižek’s work could be seen as a perverse affirmation thereof. Thus, what he has to say should be of direct interest to Christian theology itself. Touching on thinkers such as Badiou, Lacan, Chesterton and Schelling, this collection is a dynamic reading and re-reading of Žižek’s relationship to Christianity. As such, scholars of theology, the philosophy of religion and Žižek more generally will all find this book to be of great interest.
Download or read book Canadian Books in Print Author and Title Index written by and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1975 with total page 1610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Lure of the Edge written by Brenda Denzler and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-11-07 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: UFO phenomena entered American consciousness at the beginning of the Cold War, when reports from astonished witnesses of encounters with unknown aerial objects captured the attention of the United States military and the imagination of the press and the public. But when UFOs appeared not to be hostile, and when some scientists pronounced the sightings to be of natural meteorological phenomena misidentified due to "Cold War jitters," military interest declined sharply and, with it, further overt scientific interest. Yet sighting reports didn't stop and UFOs entered the public imagination as a cultural myth of the twentieth century. Brenda Denzler's comprehensive, clearly written, and compelling narrative provides the first sustained overview and valuation of the UFO/alien abduction movement as a social phenomenon positioned between scientific and religious perspectives. Demonstrating the unique place ufology occupies in the twentieth-century nexus between science and religion, Denzler surveys the sociological contours of its community, assesses its persistent attempt to achieve scientific legitimacy, and concludes with an examination of the movement's metaphysical or spiritual outlook. Her book is a substantial contribution to our understanding of American popular culture and the boundaries of American religion and to the debate about the nature of science and religion. Denzler presents a thorough and fascinating history of the UFO/abduction movement and traces the tensions between those who are deeply ambivalent about abduction narratives that seemingly erode their quest for scientific credibility, and the growing cultural power of those who claim to have been abducted. She locates the phenomenon within the context of American religious history and, using data gathered in surveys, sheds new light on the social profile of these UFO communities. The Lure of the Edge succeeds brilliantly in repositioning a cultural phenomenon considered by many to be bizarre and marginal into a central debate about the nature of science, technology, and the production of a modern myth.
Download or read book Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism written by Helen Dell and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-30 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the period between the Second World War and the present, there has been an extraordinary rise in the production of medievalist fantasy literature and film. This has been accompanied by the revival, performance and invention of medieval music. In this enterprise modern fantasies of the Middle Ages have exercised great influence. Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism shows how music, medievalism and nostalgia have been woven together in the fantasies of writers and readers, musicians, musicologists, directors and listeners, film-makers and film-goers. This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval – musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception – have worked together to produce and sustain, for some, the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.
Download or read book After Babel written by George Steiner and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A brilliant work . . . A dazzling meditation on the very nature of language itself” from the world-renowned scholar and author of The Poetry of Thought (Kirkus Reviews). In his classic work, literary critic and scholar George Steiner tackles what he considers the Babel “problem”: Why, over the course of history, have humans developed thousands of different languages when the social, material, and economic advantages of a single tongue are obvious? Steiner argues that different cultures’ desires for privacy and exclusivity led to each developing its own language. Translation, he believes, is at the very heart of human communication, and thus at the heart of human nature. From our everyday perception of the world around us, to creativity and the uninhibited imagination, to the often inexplicable poignancy of poetry, we are constantly translating—even from our native language.
Download or read book Re reading the Monstrous Feminine written by Nicholas Chare and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical reappraisal of Barbara Creed’s ground-breaking work of feminist psychoanalytic film scholarship, The Monstrous-Feminine, which was first published in 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine married psychoanalytic thinking with film analysis in radically new ways to provide an invaluable corrective to conventional approaches to the study of women in horror films, with their narrow emphasis on woman’s victimhood. This volume, which will mark 25 years since the publication of The Monstrous-Feminine, brings together essays by international scholars working across a variety of disciplines who take up Creed’s ideas in new ways and fresh contexts or, more broadly, explore possible futures for feminist and/or psychoanalytically informed art history and film theory.
Download or read book Post communist Nostalgia written by Maria Todorova and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.
