The Bourgeois Interior

The Bourgeois Interior PDF Author: j Brown
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813934281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
From Robinson Crusoe’s cave to Henry Selwyn’s hermitage, the domestic interior tells a story about "things" and their relation to character and identity. Beginning with a description of a typical middle-class interior in America today—noting how its contents echo interiors described in literatures of the past—Julia Prewitt Brown asks why certain features persist, despite radical changes in domestic life over the past three hundred years. The answer lies, Brown argues, in the way the bourgeois interior functions as a medium, a many-layered fabric across which different energies travel, be they psychological, political, or aesthetic. In this way, objects are not symbols but rather the materials out of which symbols are made--symbols that constitute the very soul of the bourgeois. In a wide-ranging analysis, moving from works by Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Henry James to those by Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman, John Updike, and W. G. Sebald, Brown shows that what is at issue is less the economic basis of class than the bourgeoisie’s imagination of itself. The themes explored include the middle class’s ever-increasing desire for more wealth, as well as Victorian women’s identification with the domestic interior and the changes that took place when they began working outside the home. Brown also examines the ambivalence of economically determined objects both as repositories of memory and dreams and as fetishized commodities that become detached from everyday reality. Does the bourgeois possess the interior and its objects, or do the interior and its objects possess the bourgeois?

The Bourgeois Interior

The Bourgeois Interior PDF Author: j Brown
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813934281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Robinson Crusoe’s cave to Henry Selwyn’s hermitage, the domestic interior tells a story about "things" and their relation to character and identity. Beginning with a description of a typical middle-class interior in America today—noting how its contents echo interiors described in literatures of the past—Julia Prewitt Brown asks why certain features persist, despite radical changes in domestic life over the past three hundred years. The answer lies, Brown argues, in the way the bourgeois interior functions as a medium, a many-layered fabric across which different energies travel, be they psychological, political, or aesthetic. In this way, objects are not symbols but rather the materials out of which symbols are made--symbols that constitute the very soul of the bourgeois. In a wide-ranging analysis, moving from works by Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Henry James to those by Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman, John Updike, and W. G. Sebald, Brown shows that what is at issue is less the economic basis of class than the bourgeoisie’s imagination of itself. The themes explored include the middle class’s ever-increasing desire for more wealth, as well as Victorian women’s identification with the domestic interior and the changes that took place when they began working outside the home. Brown also examines the ambivalence of economically determined objects both as repositories of memory and dreams and as fetishized commodities that become detached from everyday reality. Does the bourgeois possess the interior and its objects, or do the interior and its objects possess the bourgeois?

Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity

Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity PDF Author: Andrew Benjamin
Publisher: re.press
ISBN: 0980544092
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Walter Benjamin is universally recognised as one of the key thinkers of modernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theology and law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet the problem of architecture in and for Benjamin's work remains relatively underexamined. Does Benjamin's project have an architecture and, if so, how does this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us? In what ways are Benjamin's writings centrally caught up with architectural concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How can Benjamin's theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of our own present.

Designing the French Interior

Designing the French Interior PDF Author: Anca I. Lasc
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857857835
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Designing the French Interior traces France's central role in the development of the modern domestic interior, from the pre-revolutionary period to the 1970s, and addresses the importance of various media, including drawings, prints, pattern books, illustrated magazines, department store catalogs, photographs, guidebooks, and films, in representing and promoting French interior design to a wider audience. Contributors to this original volume identify and historicize the singularity of the modern French domestic interior as a generator of reproducible images, a site for display of both highly crafted and mass-produced objects, and the direct result of widely-circulated imagery in its own right. This important volume enables an invaluable new understanding of the relationship between architecture, interior spaces, material cultures, mass media and modernity.

iSpy

iSpy PDF Author: Mark Andrejevic
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700616861
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Whether you're purchasing groceries with your Safeway "club card" or casting a vote on American Idol, that data is being collected. From Amazon to iTunes, cell phones to GPS devices, Google to TiVo-all of these products and services give us an expansive sense of choice, access, and participation. But, in an era now marked by large-scale NSA operations that secretly monitor our email exchanges and internet surfing, Mark Andrejevic shows how these new technologies are increasingly employed as modes of surveillance and control. Many contend that our proliferating interactive media empower individuals and democratize society. But, Andrejevic asks, at what cost? In iSpy, he reveals that these and other highly touted benefits are accompanied by hidden risks and potential threats that tend to be ignored by mainstream society. His book offers the first sustained critique of a concept that has been a talking point for twenty years, an up-to-the-minute survey of interactivity across multiple media platforms. It debunks the false promises of the digital revolution still touted by the popular media while seeking to rehabilitate, rather than simply write off, the potentially democratic uses of interactive media. Andrejevic opens up the world of digital rights management and the data trail each of us leaves-data about our locations, preferences, or life events that are already put to use in various economic, political, and social contexts. He notes that, while citizens are becoming increasingly transparent to private and public monitoring agencies, they themselves are unable to access the information gathered about them-or know whether it's even correct. (The watchmen, it seems, don't want to be watched.) He also considers the appropriation of consumer marketing for political campaigns in targeting voters, and also examines the implications of the Internet for the so-called War on Terror. In iSpy, Andrejevic poses real challenges for our digital future. Amazingly detailed, compellingly readable, it warns that we need to temper our enthusiasm for these technologies with a better understanding of the threats they pose-to be able to distinguish between interactivity as centralized control and as collaborative participation.

American Flaneur

American Flaneur PDF Author: James Werner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135879850
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
American Flaneur investigates the connections between Edgar A. Poe and the nineteenth-century flaneur - or strolling urban observer - suggested in Walter Benjamin's discussion of Baudelaire. This study illustrates the centrality of the flaneur to Poe's literary aims, and uses the flaneur to illuminate Poe's intimate yet ambivalent relationship to his surrounding culture. While James V. Werner concentrates on Poe's fiction, this book treats many areas of nineteenth-century intellectual and popular culture, including science and pseudo-science, the American magazine marketplace, urban topology, the grotesque, labyrinths, narratives of exploration and discovery, and cosmological treatises. Werner draws on Marxist, reader response and periodical theories while reconstructing Poe through examinations of ephemeral texts of the time.

Visual Delights Two

Visual Delights Two PDF Author: Vanessa Toulmin
Publisher: John Libbey Eurotext
ISBN: 9780861966578
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"Papers taken from the ... second Visual Delights conference held at the University of Sheffield in 2002"--P. [4] of cover.

Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction PDF Author: Pamela Caughie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135650861
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This collection of ten original essays is the first to read Virginia Woolf through the prism of our technological present. Expanding on the work of feminist and cultural critics of the past two decades, this volume offers a sustained reflection on the relationship between Walter Benjamin's analyses of mass culture and technology and Woolf's cultural productions of the 1920s and 1930s. It also brings out the extent to which Woolf was beginning to image the technological society then taking shape. This book takes part in contemporary efforts to rethink modernism as a more globalized and technologized phenomenon

The Wrong House

The Wrong House PDF Author: Steven Jacobs
Publisher: 010 Publishers
ISBN: 906450637X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Architecture plays an important role In the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Steven Jacobs devotes lengthy discussion to a series of domestic buildings with the help of a number of reconstructed floor plans made specially for this book.

I Speak of the City

I Speak of the City PDF Author: Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226792730
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
In this dazzling multidisciplinary tour of Mexico City, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo focuses on the period 1880 to 1940, the decisive decades that shaped the city into what it is today. Through a kaleidoscope of expository forms, I Speak of the City connects the realms of literature, architecture, music, popular language, art, and public health to investigate the city in a variety of contexts: as a living history textbook, as an expression of the state, as a modernist capital, as a laboratory, and as language. Tenorio’s formal imagination allows the reader to revel in the free-flowing richness of his narratives, opening startling new vistas onto the urban experience. From art to city planning, from epidemiology to poetry, this book challenges the conventional wisdom about both Mexico City and the turn-of-the-century world to which it belonged. And by engaging directly with the rise of modernism and the cultural experiences of such personalities as Hart Crane, Mina Loy, and Diego Rivera, I Speak of the City will find an enthusiastic audience across the disciplines.

Appropriating Theory

Appropriating Theory PDF Author: José Eduardo González
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822982846
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Angel Rama (1926-1983) is a major figure in Latin American literary and cultural studies, but little has been published on his critical work. In this study, Jose Eduardo Gonzalez focuses on Rama's response to and appropriation of European critics like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukacs. Gonzalez argues that Rama realized the inapplicability of many of their theories and descriptions of cultural modernization to Latin America, and thus reworked them to produce his own discourse that challenged prevailing notions of social and cultural modernization.