Modernity and Subjectivity

Modernity and Subjectivity PDF Author: Harvie Ferguson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813919669
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Few concepts have come to dominate the human sciences as much as modernity, yet there is very little agreement over what the term actually means. Every aspect of contemporary human reality--modern society, modern life, modern times, modern art, modern science, modern music, the modern world--has been cited as a part of modernity's distinctive and all-embracing presence. But what is the exact nature of the reality to which the term modern refers? Has not such a promiscuous, ill-defined concept come to obscure and confuse rather than clarify a genuine understanding of our experience? Harvie Ferguson proposes a new view of modernity, arguing that, although it may variously be associated with the Renaissance, the European discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and many other significant ruptures with primitive or premodern society, modernity fails as an idea if it only defines itself against what it replaced. Instead, he writes, modernity finds its clearest definition through an exploration of subjectivity. For the modern world there is no higher authority than experience. No longer is the human world subordinate to a divine reality beyond the capacity of its own senses. This idea finds its greatest expression in the philosophy of doubt originated by Descartes. Doubt seemed the radical starting point from which to found a wholly modern philosophy that makes the distinction between subject and object, but those who came after Descartes soon reached the limits of self-discovery and became trapped in deepening levels of despair. This despair in turn found expression in the concepts of self and other, and eventually in a dialectic of ego and world, which distinguishes and links together the most important social, cultural, and psychological aspects of modernity. Moving beyond these dualities of subject and object, mind and body, ego and world, and replacing them with the triad of body, soul, and spirit, Ferguson redraws the map of contemporary experience, finding links with the premodern world that modernity's self-founding concealed.

Modernity and Subjectivity

Modernity and Subjectivity PDF Author: Harvie Ferguson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813919669
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Few concepts have come to dominate the human sciences as much as modernity, yet there is very little agreement over what the term actually means. Every aspect of contemporary human reality--modern society, modern life, modern times, modern art, modern science, modern music, the modern world--has been cited as a part of modernity's distinctive and all-embracing presence. But what is the exact nature of the reality to which the term modern refers? Has not such a promiscuous, ill-defined concept come to obscure and confuse rather than clarify a genuine understanding of our experience? Harvie Ferguson proposes a new view of modernity, arguing that, although it may variously be associated with the Renaissance, the European discovery of the New World, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and many other significant ruptures with primitive or premodern society, modernity fails as an idea if it only defines itself against what it replaced. Instead, he writes, modernity finds its clearest definition through an exploration of subjectivity. For the modern world there is no higher authority than experience. No longer is the human world subordinate to a divine reality beyond the capacity of its own senses. This idea finds its greatest expression in the philosophy of doubt originated by Descartes. Doubt seemed the radical starting point from which to found a wholly modern philosophy that makes the distinction between subject and object, but those who came after Descartes soon reached the limits of self-discovery and became trapped in deepening levels of despair. This despair in turn found expression in the concepts of self and other, and eventually in a dialectic of ego and world, which distinguishes and links together the most important social, cultural, and psychological aspects of modernity. Moving beyond these dualities of subject and object, mind and body, ego and world, and replacing them with the triad of body, soul, and spirit, Ferguson redraws the map of contemporary experience, finding links with the premodern world that modernity's self-founding concealed.

Modernism and Subjectivity

Modernism and Subjectivity PDF Author: Adam Meehan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
In Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject, Adam Meehan argues that theories of subjectivity coming out of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and adjacent late-twentieth-century intellectual traditions had already been articulated in modernist fiction before 1945. Offering a bold new genealogy for literary modernism, Meehan finds versions of a postmodern subject embodied in works by authors who intently undermine attempts to stabilize conceptions of identity and who draw attention to the role of language in shaping conceptions of the self. Focusing on the philosophical registers of literary texts, Meehan traces the development of modernist attitudes toward subjectivity, particularly in relation to issues of ideology, spatiality, and violence. His analysis explores a selection of works published between 1904 and 1941, beginning with Joseph Conrad’s prescient portrait of the subject interpolated by ideology and culminating with Samuel Beckett’s categorical disavowal of the subjective “I.” Additional close readings of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Nathanael West, and Virginia Woolf establish that modernist texts conceptualize subjectivity as an ideological and linguistic construction that reverberates across understandings of consciousness, race, place, and identity. By reconsidering the movement’s function and scope, Modernism and Subjectivity charts how profoundly modernist literature shaped the intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

The Senses of Modernism

The Senses of Modernism PDF Author: Sara Danius
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150172116X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author closely analyzes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture in the age of technological reproduction. In her discussion of the years from 1880 to 1930, Danius proposes that the high-modernist aesthetic is inseparable from a technologically mediated crisis of the senses. She reveals the ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are realigned when technological devices are capable of reproducing sense data. Sparked by innovations such as chronophotography, phonography, radiography, cinematography, and technologies of speed, this sudden shift in perceptual abilities had an effect on all arts of the time.Danius explores how perception, notably sight and hearing, is staged in the three most significant modern novels in German, French, and British literature. The Senses of Modernism connects technological change and formal innovation to transform the study of modernist aesthetics. Danius questions the longstanding acceptance of a binary relationship between high and low culture and describes the complicated relationship between modernism and technology, challenging the conceptual divide between a technological culture and a more properly aesthetic one.

Subjectivity and Identity

Subjectivity and Identity PDF Author: Peter V. Zima
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780938276
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Subjectivity and Identity is a philosophical and interdisciplinary study that critically evaluates critically the most important philosophical, sociological, psychological and literary debates on subjectivity and the subject. Starting from a history of the concept of the subject from modernity to postmodernity - from Descartes and Kant to Adorno and Lyotard - Peter V. Zima distinguishes between individual, collective, mythical and other subjects. Most texts on subjectivity and the subject present the topic from the point of view of a single discipline: philosophy, sociology, psychology or theory of literature. In Subjectivity and Identity Zima links philosophical approaches to those of sociology, psychology and literary criticism. The link between philosophy and sociology is social philosophy (e.g. Althusser, Marcuse, Habermas), the link between philosophy and literary criticism is aesthetics (e.g. Adorno, Lyotard, Vattimo). Philosophy and psychology can be related thanks to the psychological implications of several philosophical concepts of subjectivity (Hobbes, Stirner, Sartre).

Modernism the Lure of Heresy

Modernism the Lure of Heresy PDF Author: Peter Gay
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393052053
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 664

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Book Description
This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.

Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes

Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes PDF Author: Dalia Judovitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521326483
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Modernism and Mimesis

Modernism and Mimesis PDF Author: Stephen D. Dowden
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030531341
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book offers a bold new view of the way in which modernist fiction, painting, music, and poetry are interlinked. Dowden shows that modernism, contrary to a longstanding view, did not turn away from mimesis. Rather, modernism operates according to a deepened understanding of what mimesis is and how it works, which in turn occasions a fresh look at other related dimensions of the modernist achievement. Modernism is neither “difficult” nor elitist. Instead, it trends toward simplicity, directness, and common culture. Dowden argues that naïveté rather than highbrow sophistication was for the modernists a key artistic principle. He demonstrates that modernism, far from glorifying subjective creativity, directs itself toward healing the split between subject and object. Mimesis closes this gap by resolving representation into play and festivity.

Modernism: A Very Short Introduction

Modernism: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Christopher Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192804413
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
A compact introduction to modernism--why it began, what it is, and how it hasshaped virtually all aspects of 20th and 21st century life

Optical Impersonality

Optical Impersonality PDF Author: Christina Walter
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421413639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
"Christina Walter brings the next offering to the Hopkins Studies in Modernism series. Her work looks at the influence of the modern science of visual perception a variety of modernist writers. Walter focuses in particular on the way in which writers like H.D., Virgina Woolf, Walter Pater, and T.S. Eliot developed an alternative conception of the self in light of the developing neuro-scientific account of our inner workings. Critics have long seen modernist writers as being concerned with an 'impersonal' form of writing that rejects the earlier Romantic notion that literature was a direct expression of an author's subjective personality. Walter argues that the charge of impersonality has been overblown and that the modernists did not want to entirely evacuate the self from writing. Rather, she argues, modernist writers embraced the kind of material and embodied notion of the self that resulted from the then-emerging physiological sciences. This work will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modernist literature, as well as scholars interested in the influence of science on literature."--Provided by publisher.

Adventures in Modernism

Adventures in Modernism PDF Author: Jennifer Corby
Publisher: UR (Urban Research)
ISBN: 9780996004169
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Marshall Berman was a political theorist, urbanist, and public intellectual that gave a generation a way to think about what it means to be modern. He offered a vision of Marx as a preeminent modernist and humanist, which served as a touchstone for his exploration into the complexity of our modern world and lives. Marshall was singularly capable of seamlessly weaving together the ideas of Dostoevsky and Kurtis Blow, the experiences of St. Petersburg and the South Bronx. In so doing, he helped make sense of the maelstrom of modern life into which we are born, and helped buttress a sense of optimism in the midst of a chaos in which all that is solid melts into air.Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman is a testament to just how deeply and broadly his influence can be felt, as its contributors consist of theorists, architects, media critics, urbanists, and historians from across the globe. Some essays demonstrate the potential for applying Marshall?s methods of analysis into new locales such as Iran or Scotland. Others return to familiar places like the South Bronx or Times Square in order to stretchor update Marshall?s analyses. Some essays engage Marshall as a theorist, and analyze his ideas of public, urban life, and of modernism and modernity. Another explores the impact Marshall?s work has in the classroom, as well as his own role as a teacher. Collectively, the essays that comprise this volume reflect deeply on Marshall?s work, and speak to its continued relevance in helping to not only decipher, but to find meaning in our modern world.