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Author: Michael Bell
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042005839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
The contributors to this collection of essays on the literary use of myth in the early twentieth century and its literary and philosophical precedents from romanticism onwards draw on a range of disciplines, from anthropology, comparative literature, and literary criticism, to philosophy and religious studies. The underlying assumption is that modernist myth-making does not retreat from modernity, but projects a mode of being for the future which the past could serve to define. Modernist myth is not an attempted recovery of an archaic form of life so much as a sophisticated self-conscious equivalent. Far from seeking a return to an earlier romantic valorizing of myth, these essays show how the true interest of early twentieth-century myth-making lies in the consciousness, affirmative as well as tragic, of living in a human world which, in so far as it must embody value, can have no ultimate grounding. Although myth may initially appear to be the archaic counterterm to modernity, it is thus also the paradigm on which modernity has repeatedly reconstructed, or come to understand, its own life forms. The very term myth, by combining, in its modern usage, the rival meanings of a grounding narrative and a falsehood, encapsulates a central problem of modernity: how to live, given what we know.
Author: Michael Bell
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042005839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
The contributors to this collection of essays on the literary use of myth in the early twentieth century and its literary and philosophical precedents from romanticism onwards draw on a range of disciplines, from anthropology, comparative literature, and literary criticism, to philosophy and religious studies. The underlying assumption is that modernist myth-making does not retreat from modernity, but projects a mode of being for the future which the past could serve to define. Modernist myth is not an attempted recovery of an archaic form of life so much as a sophisticated self-conscious equivalent. Far from seeking a return to an earlier romantic valorizing of myth, these essays show how the true interest of early twentieth-century myth-making lies in the consciousness, affirmative as well as tragic, of living in a human world which, in so far as it must embody value, can have no ultimate grounding. Although myth may initially appear to be the archaic counterterm to modernity, it is thus also the paradigm on which modernity has repeatedly reconstructed, or come to understand, its own life forms. The very term myth, by combining, in its modern usage, the rival meanings of a grounding narrative and a falsehood, encapsulates a central problem of modernity: how to live, given what we know.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004458514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
The contributors to this collection of essays on the literary use of myth in the early twentieth century and its literary and philosophical precedents from romanticism onwards draw on a range of disciplines, from anthropology, comparative literature, and literary criticism, to philosophy and religious studies. The underlying assumption is that modernist myth-making does not retreat from modernity, but projects a mode of being for the future which the past could serve to define. Modernist myth is not an attempted recovery of an archaic form of life so much as a sophisticated self-conscious equivalent. Far from seeking a return to an earlier romantic valorizing of myth, these essays show how the true interest of early twentieth-century myth-making lies in the consciousness, affirmative as well as tragic, of living in a human world which, in so far as it must embody value, can have no ultimate grounding. Although myth may initially appear to be the archaic counterterm to modernity, it is thus also the paradigm on which modernity has repeatedly reconstructed, or come to understand, its own life forms. The very term myth, by combining, in its modern usage, the rival meanings of a grounding narrative and a falsehood, encapsulates a central problem of modernity: how to live, given what we know.
Author: Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022640336X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
Author: Kenneth E. Silver
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0262194589
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The French Riviera as Eden and muse for modern artists. The French Riviera has been a fabled resort for more than a century. As an enclave for the rich and famous, as well as a scenic tourist spot, it represents all that is beautiful and amusing. But for many of the twentieth century's finest painters, sculptors, photographers, and architects it has been much more: a place of potent myth and extraordinary creativity. Picasso, Matisse, Beckmann, Brancusi, Lartigue, Le Corbusier, and Eileen Gray, among many others, were inspired to create some of their greatest work on the Cote d'Azur. This study examines the impact of modernity and the artistic imagination on an idyllic landscape. Touching on the issues of pleasure and escape, work and leisure, and desire and ecstasy, Making Paradise offers a fresh look at the Cote d'Azur and its historical significance as a site for modernist innovation from 1890 to the present. Beginning with the neoimpressionists, moving to the Fauves, and ending with such contemporary artists as David Hockney and Faith Ringgold, the book examines the splendid light and terrain of the southeastern coast of France and the region's influence on the artists who worked and played there. Like the book, the exhibition it accompanies features unexpected juxtapostitions: masterworks by Bonnard and Picasso with the photographs of Lartigue and Model; the villas of Le Corbusier, Gray, and Mallet-Stevens with designs for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo; and ceramics of Picasso with the found-object constructions of the Ecole de Nice of the early 1960s. Copublished with the AXA Gallery, New York. Exhibition information AXA Gallery New York, New York April 26-July 14, 2001
Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226823849
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 437
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Book Description
With The Modern Myths, brilliant science communicator Philip Ball spins a new yarn. From novels and comic books to B-movies, it is an epic exploration of literature, new media and technology, the nature of storytelling, and the making and meaning of our most important tales. Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.
Author: Benno Teschke
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789605075
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 490
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Book Description
Winner of the 2003 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize This book rejects a commonplace of European history: that the treaties of Westphalia not only closed the Thirty Years' War but also inaugurated a new international order driven by the interaction of territorial sovereign states. Benno Teschke, through this thorough and incisive critique, argues that this is not the case. Domestic 'social property relations' shaped international relations in continental Europe down to 1789 and even beyond. The dynastic monarchies that ruled during this time differed from their medieval predecessors in degree and form of personalization, but not in underlying dynamic. 1648, therefore, is a false caesura in the history of international relations. For real change we must wait until relatively recent times and the development of modern states and true capitalism. In effect, it's not until governments are run impersonally, with no function other than the exercise of its monopoly on violence, that modern international relations are born.
Author: Joseph Mali
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226502627
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Ever since Herodotus declared in Histories that to preserve the memories of the great achievements of the Greeks and other nations he would count on their own stories, historians have debated whether and how they should deal with myth. Most have sided with Thucydides, who denounced myth as "unscientific" and banished it from historiography. In Mythistory, Joseph Mali revives this oldest controversy in historiography. Contesting the conventional opposition between myth and history, Mali advocates instead for a historiography that reconciles the two and recognizes the crucial role that myth plays in the construction of personal and communal identities. The task of historiography, he argues, is to illuminate, not eliminate, these fictions by showing how they have passed into and shaped historical reality. Drawing on the works of modern theorists and artists of myth such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Joyce and Eliot, Mali redefines modern historiography and relates it to the older notion and tradition of "mythistory." Tracing the origins and transformations of this historiographical tradition from the ancient world to the modern, Mali shows how Livy and Machiavelli sought to recover true history from uncertain myth-and how Vico and Michelet then reversed this pattern of inquiry, seeking instead to recover a deeper and truer myth from uncertain history. In the heart of Mythistory, Mali turns his attention to four thinkers who rediscovered myth in and for modern cultural history: Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Walter Benjamin. His elaboration of the different biographical and historiographical routes by which all four sought to account for the persistence and significance of myth in Western civilization opens up new perspectives for an alternative intellectual history of modernity-one that may better explain the proliferation of mythic imageries of redemption in our secular, all too secular, times.
Author: S. J. Barnett
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719067419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
This publication offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in 18th-century Europe. Focusing on the Enlightenment in Italy, France and England, the text illustrates how the canonical view of 18th-century religious change has in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption.
Author: Patrick Curry
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0544106563
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
A scholar explores the ideas within The Lord of the Rings and the world created by J. R. R. Tolkien: “A most valuable and timely book” (Ursula K. Le Guin, Los Angeles Times–bestselling author of Changing Planes). What are millions of readers all over the world getting out of reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Defending Middle-earth argues, in part, that the appeal for fans goes far deeper than just quests and magic rings and hobbits. In fact, through this epic, Tolkien found a way to provide something close to spirit in a secular age. This thoughtful book focuses on three main aspects of Tolkien’s fiction: the social and political structure of Middle-earth and how the varying cultures within it find common cause in the face of a shared threat; the nature and ecology of Middle-earth and how what we think of as the natural world joins the battle against mindless, mechanized destruction; and the spirituality and ethics of Middle-earth—for which the author provides a particularly insightful and resonant examination. Includes a new afterword
Author: Steven B. Smith
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300220987
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
Steven B. Smith examines the concept of modernity, not as the end product of historical developments but as a state of mind. He explores modernism as a source of both pride and anxiety, suggesting that its most distinctive characteristics are the self-criticisms and doubts that accompany social and political progress. Providing profiles of the modern project’s most powerful defenders and critics—from Machiavelli and Spinoza to Saul Bellow and Isaiah Berlin—this provocative work of philosophy and political science offers a novel perspective on what it means to be modern and why discontent and sometimes radical rejection are its inevitable by-products.
