The Five Paradoxes Of Modernity

Author : Antoine Compagnon
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231075770
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Five Paradoxes of Modernity written by Antoine Compagnon and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this elegant, highly readable book, Compagnon confronts the postmodern's co-optation of the modern by tracing paradoxical elements in the aesthetic of the new - particularly the aesthetic and moral contradictions built into the enthusiasm for the new - in the "five paradoxes of modernity": the superstition of the new, the religion of the future, the mania for theory, the appeal to mass culture, and the passion for repudiation.

Author : Matei Călinescu
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822307679
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Five Faces of Modernity written by Matei Călinescu and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity--the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours--is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.

Author : Christian Berg
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 9783110140187
Total Pages : 676 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Turn of the Century written by Christian Berg and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 1995 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rewritten versions of contributions to an international conference held at the University of Antwerp in May 1992. Starting point for the conference was the vagueness of the very terms 'modernism' and 'modernity'. In the first section a group of comparatists address the theoretical and terminological problems of modernism. Practical readings of modernist writers; discussions of different modernist movements; and, the work of critics who have contributed to debates about modernism make up the second section. The third section looks at the problem of modernism from an interartistic and interdisciplinary perspective.

Author : Zachary Simpson
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030990567
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Paradoxes of Modernity written by Zachary Simpson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A paradox lies at the heart of modernity: the simultaneous demand to create ideas to make us better humans and communities, along with the contrary imperative that we criticize all ideals, especially the ones we have created. In philosophy we see this paradox most acutely in figures like Immanuel Kant, who states that we cannot know the essence of things and yet we must retain old ideas – God, freedom, and the soul – in order to become better and more ethical humans. Or in Friedrich Nietzsche, whose eternal recurrence, a self-created myth whose sole purpose is to get us to see the value in the everyday. This basic scheme – belief and un-belief – is one of the fundamental elements of modernity, manifesting itself in the philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault, along with the theologies of Blaise Pascal, C.S. Lewis, William James, Sallie McFague, and Philip Clayton. How do we live out the values we know to be constructions? This question holds captive our ability to solve public goods problems and make our lives more meaningful. Instead of seeing this paradox of modernity as self-deception or bad faith, Zachary Simpson employs cognitive and social scientific research to explain how best to realize values that we know to be false: through art, community, and ritual. In Simpson's account, the values we construct must conform to narrative, be reinforced through community, and habituated through ritual. And yet modernity has also undermined collectivity and ritual. Thus arises the second paradox of modernity: the best tools we have for realizing values are those which devalue the individual modern subject.The last part of the book attempts to make three normative points regarding modernity. First, the modern, individualist subject is insufficient to realize the very values and aspirations of modernity. We must recognize that humans are collective and communal. Second, we cannot simply create values – they must arise in communities and be realized through narrative and ritual. And, third, if we are to live meaningful lives as contemporary meta-ethicists and positive psychologists argue, then such lives must include art, community, and ritual as a way to affirm and reinforce one’s values.Let’s Pretend is a statement about one of the dilemmas of the contemporary western world and how that dilemma is, and might be, resolved. How do we believe in the values that we know will make a better world, even if they are of our own making? We must do so, in part, by becoming less modern, by engaging with one another and imagining more.The book should serve as both an essay in the history of Western thought as well as a constructive argument about the nature of the modern epoch and what resources we have to realize the central aspirations of modernity. It aims to fill a critical lacuna in theoretical and philosophical approaches to modernity. While most texts focus on either the need for created values or the need to remedy modern subjectivity, few, if any, link the two problems together. Moreover, they do not ground their analyses in the social sciences and contemporary findings regarding the efficacy of narrative, communal action, and rituals.The book is unique, then, because it asks a central question – how do we believe in what we know to be false? – and because it answers this question using interdisciplinary methods that allow us to see the faultlines and paradoxes of our age.

Author : William Rasch
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780804739924
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Niklas Luhmann's Modernity written by William Rasch and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the nature of modernity as envisioned by Germany's leading social theorist of the late-20th century, Niklas Luhmann. The book injects concepts derived from Luhmann's influential systems theory into debates about modernity and postmodernity, constructivist and foundationalist epistemologies, the relationship between politics and ethics, and the possibilities of interdisciplinary work that spans the great divide between science and the humanities. The book stages challenging engagements with suchthinkers as Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Drucilla Cornell, Judith Butler, Michel Serres, N. Katherine Hayles, and such political theorists as Chantal Mouffe and Carl Schmitt. The book closes with two interviews: one a discussion with Luhmann and Hayles on epistemology, the other with Luhmann on the functional differentiation of modern society.

Author : Erik S. Roraback
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 900433985X
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Philosophical Baroque written by Erik S. Roraback and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Philosophical Baroque, Erik Roraback brings a fresh, interdisciplinary eye to a selection of texts from across modernity’s four hundred years—from the explosive energy of the early seventeenth century to the spectacle society of the present.

Author : Francesco Casetti
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231139942
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Eye of the Century written by Francesco Casetti and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed film scholar Francesco Casetti situates the cinematic experience within discourses of 20th century modernity. He suggests that film defined a unique gaze not only because it recorded many of the centuries most important events, but also because it determined the manner in which they were received.

Author : Jessica Berman
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231520395
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modernist Commitments written by Jessica Berman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jessica Berman demonstrates how modernist narrative connects ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges divisions between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation. In addition to making the case for a transnational model of modernism, Berman shows how modernism's play with formal matters, its challenge to the boundaries between fact and fiction, its incorporation of vernacular and folkways, and its engagement with embodied experience and intimacy offer not only an expanded account of modernist texts and commitments but a new way of thinking about what modernism is and can do.

Author : Michael T. Saler
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195349067
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Avant-Garde in Interwar England written by Michael T. Saler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Avant-Garde in Interwar England addresses modernism's ties to tradition, commerce, nationalism, and spirituality through an analysis of the assimilation of visual modernism in England between 1910 and 1939. During this period, a debate raged across the nation concerning the purpose of art in society. On one side were the aesthetic formalists, led by members of London's Bloomsbury Group, who thought art was autonomous from everyday life. On the other were England's so-called medieval modernists, many of them from the provincial North, who maintained that art had direct social functions and moral consequences. As Michael T. Saler demonstrates in this fascinating volume, the heated exchange between these two camps would ultimately set the terms for how modern art was perceived by the British public. Histories of English modernism have usually emphasized the seminal role played by the Bloomsbury Group in introducing, celebrating, and defining modernism, but Saler's study instead argues that, during the watershed years between the World Wars, modern art was most often understood in the terms laid out by the medieval modernists. As the name implies, these artists and intellectuals closely associated modernism with the art of the Middle Ages, building on the ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris, and other nineteenth-century romantic medievalists. In their view, modernism was a spiritual, national, and economic movement, a new and different artistic sensibility that was destined to revitalize England's culture as well as its commercial exports when applied to advertising and industrial design. This book, then, concerns the busy intersection of art, trade, and national identity in the early decades of twentieth-century England. Specifically, it explores the life and work of Frank Pick, managing director of the London Underground, whose famous patronage of modern artists, architects, and designers was guided by a desire to unite nineteenth-century arts and crafts with twentieth-century industry and mass culture. As one of the foremost adherents of medieval modernism, Pick converted London's primary public transportation system into the culminating project of the arts and crafts movement. But how should today's readers regard Pick's achievement? What can we say of the legacy of this visionary patron who sought to transform the whole of sprawling London into a post-impressionist work of art? And was medieval modernism itself a movement of pioneers or dreamers? In its bold engagement with such questions, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England will surely appeal to students of modernism, twentieth-century art, the cultural history of England, and urban history.

Author : Aleš Debeljak
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780847685837
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reluctant Modernity written by Aleš Debeljak and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Aleš Debeljak offers a refreshing alternative to postmodernists such as Baudrillard who declare the death of art conceived as yet another source of rootless circulating fictions. Inspired by the melancholy critical theory of Adorno and Bejamin, Debeljak shows that with the dawning of modernity, art was made autonomous - art production was effectively emancipated from the exigencies of everyday life and its guiding ideal of purposive rationality. The deterioration of bourgeois liberal individualism into the narcissism of modern mass society accompanied the decomposition of art into simplified mass art and commercialized kitsch. Today, argues Debeljak, postmodern art is subjected to infinite reproducibility, total integration into mass society, and political resignation - it no longer represents an alternative reality. The postmodern institution of art thus cannot be simply cured of modern structures and assumptions, but is, instead, fated to a continuous and painful relationship with modernity. -- from back cover.