Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo PDF full book. Access full book title Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo by Clare Virginia Eby. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Clare Virginia Eby
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826260381
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
The works of Dreiser and Veblen make up a neglected chapter in the history of United States cultural criticism. Their central subjects (such as the myriad effects of consumer capitalism and the invidious status system) still preoccupy cultural critics, and with good reason. Veblen and Dreiser also pioneered strategies for positioning themselves as confrontational intellectuals (such as by attacking foundationalism and claims of epistemological certainty) that continue to inform the practice of many cultural critics. Thus, in both subject matter and rhetorical strategy, Dreiser’s and Veblen’s writings provide prototypes for the work that many United States scholars want to do now, work which often turns to European or postmodern theory for inspiration. In making this claim about the usefulness of Dreiser and Veblen for current intellectual work, my argument parallels recent rehabilitations of American thinkers.
Author: Clare Virginia Eby
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826260381
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
The works of Dreiser and Veblen make up a neglected chapter in the history of United States cultural criticism. Their central subjects (such as the myriad effects of consumer capitalism and the invidious status system) still preoccupy cultural critics, and with good reason. Veblen and Dreiser also pioneered strategies for positioning themselves as confrontational intellectuals (such as by attacking foundationalism and claims of epistemological certainty) that continue to inform the practice of many cultural critics. Thus, in both subject matter and rhetorical strategy, Dreiser’s and Veblen’s writings provide prototypes for the work that many United States scholars want to do now, work which often turns to European or postmodern theory for inspiration. In making this claim about the usefulness of Dreiser and Veblen for current intellectual work, my argument parallels recent rehabilitations of American thinkers.
Author: Michael Spindler
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745309590
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Get Book Here
Book Description
EvaluatesVeblen not just as an economist or a sociologist but as a seminal critic of modern American culture.
Author: Charles Camic
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674659724
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 505
Get Book Here
Book Description
A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women. Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider. In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to centers of scholarship at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, where he studied with leading philosophers, historians, and economists. Afterward, he joined the nation’s academic elite as a professional economist, producing his seminal books The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Until late in his career, Veblen was, Charles Camic argues, the consummate academic insider, engaged in debates about wealth distribution raging in the field of economics. Veblen demonstrates how Veblen’s education and subsequent involvement in those debates gave rise to his original ideas about the social institutions that enable wealthy Americans—a swarm of economically unproductive “parasites”—to amass vast fortunes on the backs of productive men and women. Today, when great wealth inequalities again command national attention, Camic helps us understand the historical roots and continuing reach of Veblen’s searing analysis of this “sclerosis of the American soul.”
Author: Robert E. Kirsch
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555458
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 151
Get Book Here
Book Description
Doomsday prepping has gone mainstream. Survivalists star in reality TV shows; celebrities hawk emergency gear; and ordinary people stockpile essentials in the hope that they can outlast a slew of threats, real and imagined. The ideology behind prepping, however, is no passing fad but a persistent feature of American life. Be Prepared reveals the surprising ways prepping is woven into the fabric of American institutions—and shows its significance for understanding the fault lines of liberal democracy. Robert E. Kirsch and Emily Ray trace the beliefs and practices that underlie survivalism, from the rise of the Boy Scouts of America to Cold War fears of nuclear devastation through present-day Silicon Valley dreams of space colonization. They argue that prepping is rooted in long-standing anxieties over industrialization, urbanization, and immigration and steeped in the histories of colonial expansion and militarization. To grasp its political implications, Kirsch and Ray develop the concept of “bunkerization”: not simply building physical bunkers but building a society symbolized by the bunker. In such a society, individual vigilance and survival become the organizing principles of everyday life. People opt out of collective projects and retreat into personal responsibility for preparedness, expressed through acts of consumption. Shedding new light on the persistence of antidemocratic politics, from white supremacy to neoliberalism, Be Prepared also considers how to escape the solitary fate of life in the bunker and instead meet collective problems together.
Author: Oliver Steinert-Lieschied
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640562038
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 69
Get Book Here
Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,2, University of Göttingen, language: English, abstract: With his "Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899), which is nowadays considered one of his most popular works, Veblen made himself a social outsider because his criticism of society was harsh and provoking. Although he accepted utilitarianism and praised the industrial efficiency of the engineering professions, he rejected what Mills calls the American value of the "heraldry of the greenback" and the "pecuniary fanatism of the business chieftain". Still his work was widely read and many of the problems which he saw in contemporary American society are even nowadays still quite relevant. Dreiser's first successful novel "Sister Carrie" was written in 1900, only one year after Veblen's main work had been published. This fact, as well as the widespread interest in Veblen's theories throughout America may have influenced Dreiser at least indirectly. More important though, is whether there is some textual evidence to prove their agreements and disagreements concerning their critique of society. In contrast to Veblen, Dreiser did not have a solid educational background and was in fact "almost a generation behind the sweep of American intellectual life" (Noble, "Dreiser and Veblen and the Literature of Cultural Change"), so many of his explanations of human hehaviour were made in terms of "chemisms" (Noble 149). Dreiser at times tended to believe Spencer's theories of social-Darwinism and that man was not much more than a "machine" and mainly controlled by physical laws, while Veblen had rather moved beyond such notions (Noble 149). On a deeper level though, Noble considers the supposedly post-Spencerian Veblen to have unconsciously clinged to Spencer's belief in optimistic progressivism, while Dreiser had in fact transcended such notions and raised some doubts about the belief in inevitable and controlled progress in his works (Nobl
Author: Leonard Cassuto
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826824
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Get Book Here
Book Description
Theodore Dreiser is one of the most penetrating observers of the greatest period of social change the United States ever saw. Writing as America emerged as the world's wealthiest nation, Dreiser chronicled industrial and economic transformation and the birth of consumerism with an unmatched combination of detail, sympathy, and power. The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume are written by a leading team of scholars of American literature and culture. They establish parameters for both scholarly and classroom discussion of Dreiser. This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classics, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Dreiser's representation of the city and his prose style. The volume investigates topics such as his representation of masculinity and femininity, and his treatment of ethnicity. It is the most comprehensive introduction to Dreiser's work available.
Author: Erik S. Reinert
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783083204
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Get Book Here
Book Description
After his death Thorstein Veblen was hailed as ‘America’s Darwin and Marx’ and is normally portrayed as the perennial iconoclast. He severely criticised traditional economics and attempted to create an alternative approach based on a much more complex view of human beings. He is one of the most celebrated economists of our age and has been the inspiration for many books; the predatory version of capitalism we now again experience, the phenomenon of studying cultures of consumption and the darker sides of gilded ages can be traced back to Veblen. A conference in Veblen’s ancestral Norway marked the 150th anniversary of his birth. The aim of the conference was to consolidate Veblen scholarship and evaluate his relevance for the problems of today. This collection offers the results of that endeavour; it is a milestone of Vebleniana which assesses all the most salient aspects of his life and influence. Many of its contributors also push into uncharted territory, examining the man and his work from new and necessary perspectives hitherto ignored by scholarship.
Author: Stephen Edgell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317453646
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Get Book Here
Book Description
This work discusses the impact and contemporary relevance of the work of Thorstein Veblen, as well as the source of his ideas. It suggests that he was one of the first modern sociologists of consumption whose analysis of contemporary display and fashion anticipated later theories and research.
Author: Keith Newlin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313093571
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 456
Get Book Here
Book Description
For a century, Theodore Dreiser has represented for many readers a rebellious modernism whose novels both critiqued the American dream and embodied a bleakly deterministic perception of life. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), was reluctantly published and then ignored by its publisher, who thought the book immoral. Another publisher withdrew his fifth novel, The Genius (1915), rather than face prosecution on obscenity charges. Dreiser did not enjoy widespread popularity and critical acclaim until his masterpiece, An American Tragedy, appeared in 1925. This reference is an authoritative guide to his life and works. Included are several hundred entries on each of Dreiser's books and short stories, as well as magazine and newspaper pieces he collected during his life. Noteworthy uncollected and posthumously collected works are given separate entries, as are major characters in the novels, family members, friends, and other persons important to understanding his writings. There are also entries on Dreiser's publishers, his major influences, the places and events important to his life, and the literary and social contexts of his works. Expert contributors wrote each of the entries, many of which cite works for further reading. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of works by and about Dreiser.
Author: Mark S. Ferrara
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498590233
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Get Book Here
Book Description
When Captain Christopher Newport and his crew landed on the muddy banks of the James River in 1607, after four months at sea, they aimed to establish a new colony not for God, or the greater good of humanity—but for the sake of profit. The Pilgrims who settled in Cape Cod in 1620 as agents of Plymouth Company found evidence of divine election in the fortunes they accumulated from a lucrative system of town-founding in the New World. The innovative and often ruthless entrepreneurs who followed these colonists carved out the immense North American frontier wilderness from the Atlantic Ocean to the golden sands of the California coast, and they forged industrial and technological revolutions that shook the world. New Seeds of Profit examines the role of business leaders, from George Washington to Donald Trump, in shaping the United States into a business nation unlike any other in world history. By tracing the influence of industry and commerce on American society through portraits of successful entrepreneurs, this book sheds light on the esteemed place Americans reserve for their wealthiest business leaders—and it measures the true cost of that adulation by demonstrating how enterprise driven solely by the bottom line imperils people and the environment. In a story teeming with the heroes and villains of enterprise, New Seeds of Profit offers an innovative business model that provides meaningful work to employees and socially responsible returns to investors, while encouraging sustainable stewardship of the earth and advancing the common good.
