Facets of Modernity

Facets of Modernity PDF Author: Dmitri Nikulin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786615061
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
What does it mean to be human in modernity? This book examines being human, in its theoretical, practical, and productive aspects, not in abstraction from historical, social, and political settings, but rather as set in concrete historical and material circumstances. Through the analysis and close reading of a number of texts of the modern thinkers, which include those of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kracauer, Heidegger, Benjamin, Hans Jonas and Agnes Heller, it demonstrates that the complexity and variety of the human experience is grounded in the modern subjectivity, which establishes itself as universal, rational, autonomous, and necessary. Such a subjectivity is characterised as self-legislating or establishing the universal moral law and is further defined by historicity, or the interpretation of its actions as conditioned by the previous and current social and political circumstances. The book then shows that the multiple facets of modernity make the experience of being human fascinating, complicated and ultimately unique.

Facets of Modernity

Facets of Modernity PDF Author: Dmitri Nikulin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786615061
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
What does it mean to be human in modernity? This book examines being human, in its theoretical, practical, and productive aspects, not in abstraction from historical, social, and political settings, but rather as set in concrete historical and material circumstances. Through the analysis and close reading of a number of texts of the modern thinkers, which include those of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kracauer, Heidegger, Benjamin, Hans Jonas and Agnes Heller, it demonstrates that the complexity and variety of the human experience is grounded in the modern subjectivity, which establishes itself as universal, rational, autonomous, and necessary. Such a subjectivity is characterised as self-legislating or establishing the universal moral law and is further defined by historicity, or the interpretation of its actions as conditioned by the previous and current social and political circumstances. The book then shows that the multiple facets of modernity make the experience of being human fascinating, complicated and ultimately unique.

Five Faces of Modernity

Five Faces of Modernity PDF Author: Matei Călinescu
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822307679
Category : Avant-Garde (Aesthetics)
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
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.

Facets of the Second Modernity

Facets of the Second Modernity PDF Author: Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Avant-garde (Music)
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


Modernity and Self-Identity

Modernity and Self-Identity PDF Author: Anthony Giddens
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745666485
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This major study develops a new account of modernity and its relation to the self. Building upon the ideas set out in The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that 'high' or 'late' modernity is a post traditional order characterised by a developed institutional reflexivity. In the current period, the globalising tendencies of modern institutions are accompanied by a transformation of day-to-day social life having profound implications for personal activities. The self becomes a 'reflexive project', sustained through a revisable narrative of self identity. The reflexive project of the self, the author seeks to show, is a form of control or mastery which parallels the overall orientation of modern institutions towards 'colonising the future'. Yet it also helps promote tendencies which place that orientation radically in question - and which provide the substance of a new political agenda for late modernity. In this book Giddens concerns himself with themes he has often been accused of unduly neglecting, including especially the psychology of self and self-identity. The volumes are a decisive step in the development of his thinking, and will be essential reading for students and professionals in the areas of social and political theory, sociology, human geography and social psychology.

Melodrama and Modernity

Melodrama and Modernity PDF Author: Ben Singer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231505079
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking investigation into the nature and meanings of melodrama in American culture between 1880 and 1920, Ben Singer offers a challenging new reevaluation of early American cinema and the era that spawned it. Singer looks back to the sensational or "blood and thunder" melodramas (e.g., The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, etc.) and uncovers a fundamentally modern cultural expression, one reflecting spectacular transformations in the sensory environment of the metropolis, in the experience of capitalism, in the popular imagination of gender, and in the exploitation of the thrill in popular amusement. Written with verve and panache, and illustrated with 100 striking photos and drawings, Singer's study provides an invaluable historical and conceptual map both of melodrama as a genre on stage and screen and of modernity as a pivotal idea in social theory.

NowHere

NowHere PDF Author: Roger Friedland
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520080188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
This sociological study explores the temporal and spatial facets of modern social life. Grounded in the premise that all major world events are affected fundamentally by modern technology, the contributors attempt to make sense of the "here" and the "now" that define the modern age.

Cold Modernism

Cold Modernism PDF Author: Jessica Burstein
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271053763
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
"Explores a significant but overlooked aspect of early twentieth-century modernism, one that focuses on surface appearance rather than interiority or psychological depth. Looks at the writers Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy, the artists Balthus and Hans Bellmer, and the fashion designer Coco Chanel"--Provided by publisher.

In the Shadow of Empire

In the Shadow of Empire PDF Author: Malcolm Spencer
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571133878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Spencer then considers Roth's more negative reaction, showing the post-imperial novel Radetzkymarsch to be a nostalgic response to the collapse of Habsburg Austria and the rise of fascism. The final chapter looks again at the end of empire, not in the work of writers who lived through it, but through that of one who experienced it as a historical and cultural legacy: Ingeborg Bachmann."--BOOK JACKET.

Social Acceleration

Social Acceleration PDF Author: Hartmut Rosa
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231148348
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies in particular three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match future results and events. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

The Fabric of Space

The Fabric of Space PDF Author: Matthew Gandy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028255
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
A study of water at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure in Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Water lies at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure, crossing between visible and invisible domains of urban space, in the tanks and buckets of the global South and the vast subterranean technological networks of the global North. In this book, Matthew Gandy considers the cultural and material significance of water through the experiences of six cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Tracing the evolving relationships among modernity, nature, and the urban imagination, from different vantage points and through different periods, Gandy uses water as a lens through which to observe both the ambiguities and the limits of nature as conventionally understood. Gandy begins with the Parisian sewers of the nineteenth century, captured in the photographs of Nadar, and the reconstruction of subterranean Paris. He moves on to Weimar-era Berlin and its protection of public access to lakes for swimming, the culmination of efforts to reconnect the city with nature. He considers the threat of malaria in Lagos, where changing geopolitical circumstances led to large-scale swamp drainage in the 1940s. He shows how the dysfunctional water infrastructure of Mumbai offers a vivid expression of persistent social inequality in a postcolonial city. He explores the incongruous concrete landscapes of the Los Angeles River. Finally, Gandy uses the fictional scenario of a partially submerged London as the starting point for an investigation of the actual hydrological threats facing that city.