The Mechanical Smile

The Mechanical Smile PDF Author: Caroline Evans
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300189537
Category : Fashion shows
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A superlative study of the roots of the modern fashion show In the early 20th century, the desire to see clothing in motion flourished on both sides of the Atlantic: models tangoed, slithered, swaggered, and undulated before customers in couture houses and department stores. The Mechanical Smile traces the history of the earliest fashion shows in France and the United States from their origins in the 1880s to 1929, situating them in the context of modernism and the rationalization of the body. Fashion shows came into being concurrently with film, and this book explores the connections between fashion and early cinema, which arguably functioned as what Walter Benjamin called "new velocities"--forces that altered the rhythms of modern life. Using significant new archival evidence, The Mechanical Smile shows how so-called "mannequin parades" employed the visual language of modernism to translate business and management methods into visual seduction. Caroline Evans, a leading fashion historian, argues for an expanded definition of modernism as both gestural and performative, drawing on literary and performance theory rather than relying on art and design history. The fashion show, Evans posits, is a singular nodal point where the disparate histories of commerce, modernism, gender, and the body converge.

The Mechanical Smile

The Mechanical Smile PDF Author: Caroline Evans
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300189537
Category : Fashion shows
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
A superlative study of the roots of the modern fashion show In the early 20th century, the desire to see clothing in motion flourished on both sides of the Atlantic: models tangoed, slithered, swaggered, and undulated before customers in couture houses and department stores. The Mechanical Smile traces the history of the earliest fashion shows in France and the United States from their origins in the 1880s to 1929, situating them in the context of modernism and the rationalization of the body. Fashion shows came into being concurrently with film, and this book explores the connections between fashion and early cinema, which arguably functioned as what Walter Benjamin called "new velocities"--forces that altered the rhythms of modern life. Using significant new archival evidence, The Mechanical Smile shows how so-called "mannequin parades" employed the visual language of modernism to translate business and management methods into visual seduction. Caroline Evans, a leading fashion historian, argues for an expanded definition of modernism as both gestural and performative, drawing on literary and performance theory rather than relying on art and design history. The fashion show, Evans posits, is a singular nodal point where the disparate histories of commerce, modernism, gender, and the body converge.

The Smile of Tragedy: Nietzsche and the Art of Virtue

The Smile of Tragedy: Nietzsche and the Art of Virtue PDF Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271059516
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description


Properties of Modernity

Properties of Modernity PDF Author: Michael P. Iarocci
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826515223
Category : National characteristics, Spanish, in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Spanish Romantic discourse that highlights ways in which the mythic story of Western modernity was shaped by transnational European power-politics.

Moving Modernisms

Moving Modernisms PDF Author: David Bradshaw
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191023604
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The essays in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, written by renowned international scholars, open up the many dimensions and arenas of modernist movement and movements: spatial, geographical and political: affective and physiological; temporal and epochal; technological, locomotive and metropolitan; aesthetic and representational. Individual essays explore modernism's complex geographies, focusing on Anglo-European modernisms while also engaging with the debates engendered by recent models of world literatures and global modernisms. From questions of space and place, the volume moves to a focus on movement and motion, with topics ranging from modernity and bodily energies to issues of scale and quantity. The final chapters in the volume examine modernist film and the moving image, and travel and transport in the modern metropolis. 'Movement is reality itself', the philosopher Henri Bergson wrote: the original and illuminating essays in Moving Modernisms point in new ways to the realities, and the fantasies, of movement in modernist culture.

The Smile of Tragedy

The Smile of Tragedy PDF Author: Daniel R. Ahern
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271058900
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
In The Smile of Tragedy, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche’s attitude toward what he called “the tragic age of the Greeks,” showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of “Dionysian pessimism,” Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotle’s medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of “selflessness,” as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide.

Hasidism Beyond Modernity

Hasidism Beyond Modernity PDF Author: Naftali Loewenthal
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1789628202
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
The Habad school of hasidism is distinguished today from other hasidic groups by its famous emphasis on outreach, on messianism, and on empowering women. Hasidism Beyond Modernity provides a critical, thematic study of the movement from its beginnings, showing how its unusual qualities evolved. Topics investigated include the theoretical underpinning of the outreach ethos; the turn towards women in the twentieth century; new attitudes to non-Jews; the role of the individual in the hasidic collective; spiritual contemplation in the context of modernity; the quest for inclusivism in the face of prevailing schismatic processes; messianism in both spiritual and political forms; and the direction of the movement after the passing of its seventh rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in 1994. Attention is given to many contrasts: pre-modern, modern, and postmodern conceptions of Judaism; the clash between maintaining an enclave and outreach models of Jewish society; particularist and universalist trends; and the subtle interplay of mystical faith and rationality. Some of the chapters are new; others, published in an earlier form, have been updated to take account of recent scholarship. This book presents an in-depth study of an intriguing movement which takes traditional hasidism beyond modernity.

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.

Walter Benjamin: Modernity

Walter Benjamin: Modernity PDF Author: Peter Osborne
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415325356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
No other single author has so commanding a critical presence across so many disciplines within the arts and humanities, in so many national contexts, as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The belated reception of his work as a literary critic (dating from the late 1950s) has been followed by a rapid series of critical receptions in different contexts: Frankfurt Critical Theory and Marxism, Judaism, Film Theory, Post-structuralism, Philosophical Romanticism, and Cultural Studies.This collection brings together a selection of the most critically important items in the literature, across the full range of Benjamin's cultural-theoretical interests, from all periods of the reception of his writings, but focusing upon the most recent, to produce a comprehensive overview of the best critical literature.

Overcoming Tradition And Modernity

Overcoming Tradition And Modernity PDF Author: Robert D. Lee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429967071
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
“Authenticity” has begun to rival “development” as a key to understanding the political aspirations of the Islamic world. Almost everywhere modernity has laid waste to tradition, those habits and practices deemed to be timeless and true. Imperialism carried European notions of progress into Muslim-dominated parts of the globe, and subsequently Muslims themselves espoused Western practices, techniques, and philosophies. Regimes calling themselves liberal, socialist, and Arab nationalist all embraced modernity as their principal objective. Most of these regimes failed to create the promised better lives their citizens desired. Moreover, ordinary Muslims felt despair as modernity ripped apart families, exposed youngsters to the materialism and hedonism of Western entertainments, heightened social expectations, and undermined religious belief. Even though tradition has proved itself incapable of staving off modernity, the promises and premises of modern development literature have been called into question. Where is the truth around which Muslims can rally? Does modernity require a rejection of tradition? Does the embrace of Islamic ideas necessitate turning away from modernity? Robert D. Lee explores these compelling questions by presenting four contemporary Muslim writers—Muhammad Iqbal, Sayyid Qutb, ‘Ali Shari’ati, and Mohammed Arkoun—all of whom have refused to bow to such a dichotomy of modernity and tradition. This study examines their efforts, deeply influenced by European thinking, to find a truth beyond tradition and modernity—an “authentic” understanding of Islam upon which Muslims can build a future. All four thinkers believe such an authentic understanding can serve as the foundation for a new politics. Lee argues, however, that each of these versions of authenticity suffers shortcomings and falters in its efforts to move from the particularity of culture onto a grander scale of political organization appropriate for the modern world.

The Highroad Around Modernism

The Highroad Around Modernism PDF Author: Robert C. Neville
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791411513
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Discussions of modernism and postmodernism in philosophy and the arts are usually based on a narrow reading of the Western tradition and are not conscious of the narrowness. The modern period, beginning with the European Renaissance, spawned many developments, not just the modernist one in terms of which the tradition has been read. From the standpoint of the highroad around modernism, both modernism and post-modernism look like nothing more than two late modern movements, perhaps too preoccupied with themselves and their historical place to engage a swiftly changing world containing more than the Western tradition. The Highroad Around Modernism develops and defends an explicitly non-modernist and non-postmodernist extension of modernity applicable to the problems of world-wide cultural interactions.