Author: Lisi Schoenbach
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195389840
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernism influenced by pragmatist philosophy and characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and habit rather than spectacular events and radical rupture. Through original readings of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., this study rediscovers an overlooked cultural and social matrix and suggests an expanded range of responses to modernity.
Pragmatic Modernism
Author: Lisi Schoenbach
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195389840
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernism influenced by pragmatist philosophy and characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and habit rather than spectacular events and radical rupture. Through original readings of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., this study rediscovers an overlooked cultural and social matrix and suggests an expanded range of responses to modernity.
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195389840
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernism influenced by pragmatist philosophy and characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and habit rather than spectacular events and radical rupture. Through original readings of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., this study rediscovers an overlooked cultural and social matrix and suggests an expanded range of responses to modernity.
Pragmatic Modernism
Author: Lisi Schoenbach
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190207345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernism influenced by pragmatist philosophy and characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and habit rather than spectacular events and radical rupture. Through original readings of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., this study rediscovers an overlooked cultural and social matrix and suggests an expanded range of responses to modernity.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190207345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
Pragmatic Modernism traces an alternative strain of modernism influenced by pragmatist philosophy and characterized by its commitment to gradualism, continuity, and habit rather than spectacular events and radical rupture. Through original readings of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., this study rediscovers an overlooked cultural and social matrix and suggests an expanded range of responses to modernity.
Understanding James, Understanding Modernism
Author: David H. Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501302752
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 509
Book Description
Psychologist, philosopher, teacher, writer-William James stood closer than any other thinker to the center of the confluence of intellectual and artistic forces that defined the culture of modernism. The outstanding feature of this volume lies in its intent to investigate James's influence on both American and International Modernism. It provides, on the one hand, a multifaceted introduction to students of history, philosophy, and culture, and on the other, a compendium of some of the most up-to-date thinking on this central figure. James's first book, Principles of Psychology (1890) immediately established James as the leading psychologist of his time, at a moment in history when psychology seemed to offer the promise of finding some definitive answers to eternal philosophical conundra. James's innovations would register a clear effect on much modernist art, most evidently in the stylistic prose experiments of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and their imitators. James's tentative skepticism concerning the concept of consciousness as such, and the post-Cartesian ego that was its foundation, also anticipates the questioning of the subject that would be the theme of much modern, and indeed postmodern thought. The contributors to this volume explore James's most essential texts as well as his influence on contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers. The final section is a glossary of James's key terms, with entries written by leading experts.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501302752
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 509
Book Description
Psychologist, philosopher, teacher, writer-William James stood closer than any other thinker to the center of the confluence of intellectual and artistic forces that defined the culture of modernism. The outstanding feature of this volume lies in its intent to investigate James's influence on both American and International Modernism. It provides, on the one hand, a multifaceted introduction to students of history, philosophy, and culture, and on the other, a compendium of some of the most up-to-date thinking on this central figure. James's first book, Principles of Psychology (1890) immediately established James as the leading psychologist of his time, at a moment in history when psychology seemed to offer the promise of finding some definitive answers to eternal philosophical conundra. James's innovations would register a clear effect on much modernist art, most evidently in the stylistic prose experiments of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and their imitators. James's tentative skepticism concerning the concept of consciousness as such, and the post-Cartesian ego that was its foundation, also anticipates the questioning of the subject that would be the theme of much modern, and indeed postmodern thought. The contributors to this volume explore James's most essential texts as well as his influence on contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers. The final section is a glossary of James's key terms, with entries written by leading experts.
The Promise of Pragmatism
Author: John Patrick Diggins
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226148793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 534
Book Description
For much of our century, pragmatism has enjoyed a charmed life, holding the dominant point of view in American politics, law, education, and social thought in general. After suffering a brief eclipse in the post-World War II period, pragmatism has enjoyed a revival, especially in literary theory and such areas as poststructuralism and deconstruction. In this sweeping critique of pragmatism and neopragmatism, one of our leading intellectual historians traces the attempts of thinkers from William James to Richard Rorty to find a response to the crisis of modernism. John Patrick Diggins analyzes the limitations of pragmatism from a historical perspective and dares to ask whether America's one original contribution to the world of philosophy has actually fulfilled its promise. In the late nineteenth century, intellectuals felt themselves in the grips of a spiritual crisis. This confrontation with the "acids of modernity" eroded older faiths and led to a sense that life would continue in the awareness, of absences: knowledge without truth, power without authority, society without spirit, self without identity, politics without virtue, existence without purpose, history without meaning. In Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber faced a world in which God was "dead" and society was succumbing to structures of power and domination. In America, Henry Adams resigned from Harvard when he realized there were no truths to be taught and when he could only conclude: "Experience ceases to educate." To the American philosophers of pragmatism, it was experience that provided the basis on which new methods of knowing could replace older ideas of truth. Diggins examines how, in different ways, William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, George H. Mead, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., demonstrated that modernism posed no obstacle in fields such as science, education, religion, law, politics, and diplomacy. Diggins also examines the work of the neopragmatists Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty and their attempt to resolve the crisis of postmodernism. Using one author to interrogate another, Diggins brilliantly allows the ideas to speak to our conditions as well as theirs. Did the older philosophers succeed in fulfilling the promises of pragmatism? Can the neopragmatists write their way out of what they have thought themselves into? And does America need philosophers to tell us that we do not need foundational truths when the Founders already told us that the Constitution would be a "machine" that would depend more upon the "counterpoise" of power than on the claims of knowledge? Diggins addresses these and other essential questions in this magisterial account of twentieth-century intellectual life. It should be read by everyone concerned about the roots of postmodernism (and its links to pragmatism) and about the forms of thought and action available for confronting a world after postmodernism.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226148793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 534
Book Description
For much of our century, pragmatism has enjoyed a charmed life, holding the dominant point of view in American politics, law, education, and social thought in general. After suffering a brief eclipse in the post-World War II period, pragmatism has enjoyed a revival, especially in literary theory and such areas as poststructuralism and deconstruction. In this sweeping critique of pragmatism and neopragmatism, one of our leading intellectual historians traces the attempts of thinkers from William James to Richard Rorty to find a response to the crisis of modernism. John Patrick Diggins analyzes the limitations of pragmatism from a historical perspective and dares to ask whether America's one original contribution to the world of philosophy has actually fulfilled its promise. In the late nineteenth century, intellectuals felt themselves in the grips of a spiritual crisis. This confrontation with the "acids of modernity" eroded older faiths and led to a sense that life would continue in the awareness, of absences: knowledge without truth, power without authority, society without spirit, self without identity, politics without virtue, existence without purpose, history without meaning. In Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber faced a world in which God was "dead" and society was succumbing to structures of power and domination. In America, Henry Adams resigned from Harvard when he realized there were no truths to be taught and when he could only conclude: "Experience ceases to educate." To the American philosophers of pragmatism, it was experience that provided the basis on which new methods of knowing could replace older ideas of truth. Diggins examines how, in different ways, William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, George H. Mead, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., demonstrated that modernism posed no obstacle in fields such as science, education, religion, law, politics, and diplomacy. Diggins also examines the work of the neopragmatists Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty and their attempt to resolve the crisis of postmodernism. Using one author to interrogate another, Diggins brilliantly allows the ideas to speak to our conditions as well as theirs. Did the older philosophers succeed in fulfilling the promises of pragmatism? Can the neopragmatists write their way out of what they have thought themselves into? And does America need philosophers to tell us that we do not need foundational truths when the Founders already told us that the Constitution would be a "machine" that would depend more upon the "counterpoise" of power than on the claims of knowledge? Diggins addresses these and other essential questions in this magisterial account of twentieth-century intellectual life. It should be read by everyone concerned about the roots of postmodernism (and its links to pragmatism) and about the forms of thought and action available for confronting a world after postmodernism.
Modernism and the Ordinary
Author: Liesl Olson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199349789
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
Modernism and the Ordinary overturns conventional accounts of the modernist period as primarily drawn toward the new, the transcendent, and the extraordinary. Liesl Olson shows how modernist writers were preoccupied, instead, with the unselfconscious actions of everyday life, even in times of political crisis and war. Experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily activities presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which the period is often associated. With attentive and sensitive readings, Modernism and the Ordinary examines works by Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens, Proust, Beckett, and Auden alongside the ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James. In doing so, the book reveals the non-transformative power of the ordinary as one of modernism's most compelling attributes.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199349789
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
Modernism and the Ordinary overturns conventional accounts of the modernist period as primarily drawn toward the new, the transcendent, and the extraordinary. Liesl Olson shows how modernist writers were preoccupied, instead, with the unselfconscious actions of everyday life, even in times of political crisis and war. Experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily activities presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which the period is often associated. With attentive and sensitive readings, Modernism and the Ordinary examines works by Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Stevens, Proust, Beckett, and Auden alongside the ideas of philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James. In doing so, the book reveals the non-transformative power of the ordinary as one of modernism's most compelling attributes.
Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity
Author: Jonathan Goldman
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292723393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity. Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292723393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity. Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.
Modernism After the Death of God
Author: Stephen Kern
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351603175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444
Book Description
Modernism After the Death of God explores the work of seven influential modernists. Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger criticized the destructive impact that they believed Christian sexual morality had had or threatened to have on their love life. Although not a Christian, Freud criticized the negative effect that Christian sexual morality had on his clinical subjects and on Western civilization, while Virginia Woolf condemned how her society was sanctioned by a patriarchal Christian authority. All seven worked to replace the loss or absence of Christian unity with non-Christian unifying projects in their respective fields of philosophy, psychiatry, or literature. The basic structure of their main contributions to modernist culture was a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351603175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444
Book Description
Modernism After the Death of God explores the work of seven influential modernists. Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger criticized the destructive impact that they believed Christian sexual morality had had or threatened to have on their love life. Although not a Christian, Freud criticized the negative effect that Christian sexual morality had on his clinical subjects and on Western civilization, while Virginia Woolf condemned how her society was sanctioned by a patriarchal Christian authority. All seven worked to replace the loss or absence of Christian unity with non-Christian unifying projects in their respective fields of philosophy, psychiatry, or literature. The basic structure of their main contributions to modernist culture was a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.
Virtual Modernism
Author: Katherine Biers
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816687609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
In Virtual Modernism, Katherine Biers offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, she argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. Biers establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. Virtual Modernism contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism. Situated at the crossing points of literary criticism, philosophy, media studies, and history, Virtual Modernism provides an examination of Progressive Era preoccupations with the cognitive and corporeal effects of new media technologies that traces an important genealogy of present-day concerns with virtuality.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816687609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
In Virtual Modernism, Katherine Biers offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, she argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. Biers establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. Virtual Modernism contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism. Situated at the crossing points of literary criticism, philosophy, media studies, and history, Virtual Modernism provides an examination of Progressive Era preoccupations with the cognitive and corporeal effects of new media technologies that traces an important genealogy of present-day concerns with virtuality.
Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism
Author: Bénédicte Coste
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317265084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
Charting the period that extends from the 1860s to the 1940s, this volume offers fresh perspectives on Aestheticism and Modernism. By acknowledging that both movements had a passion for the ‘new’, it goes beyond the alleged divide between Modernism and its predecessors. Rather than reading the modernist credo, ‘Make it New!’, as a desire to break away from the past, the authors of this book suggest reading it as a continuation and a reappropriation of the spirit of the ‘New’ that characterizes Aestheticism. Basing their arguments on recent reassessments of Aestheticism and Modernism and their articulation, contributors take up the challenge of interrogating the connections, continuities, and intersections between the two movements, thus revealing the working processes of cultural and aesthetic change so as to reassess the value of the new for each. Attending to well-known writers such as Waugh, Woolf, Richardson, Eliot, Pound, Ford, Symons, Wilde, and Hopkins, as well as to hitherto neglected figures such as Lucas Malet, L.S. Gibbon, Leonard Woolf, or George Egerton, they revise assumptions about Aestheticism and Modernism and their very definitions. This collection brings together international scholars specializing in Aestheticism or Modernism who push their analyses beyond their strict period of expertise and take both movements into account through exciting approaches that borrow from aesthetics, philosophy, or economics. The volume proposes a corrective to the traditional narratives of the history of Aestheticism and Modernism, revitalizing definitions of these movements and revealing new directions in aestheticist and modernist studies.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317265084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
Charting the period that extends from the 1860s to the 1940s, this volume offers fresh perspectives on Aestheticism and Modernism. By acknowledging that both movements had a passion for the ‘new’, it goes beyond the alleged divide between Modernism and its predecessors. Rather than reading the modernist credo, ‘Make it New!’, as a desire to break away from the past, the authors of this book suggest reading it as a continuation and a reappropriation of the spirit of the ‘New’ that characterizes Aestheticism. Basing their arguments on recent reassessments of Aestheticism and Modernism and their articulation, contributors take up the challenge of interrogating the connections, continuities, and intersections between the two movements, thus revealing the working processes of cultural and aesthetic change so as to reassess the value of the new for each. Attending to well-known writers such as Waugh, Woolf, Richardson, Eliot, Pound, Ford, Symons, Wilde, and Hopkins, as well as to hitherto neglected figures such as Lucas Malet, L.S. Gibbon, Leonard Woolf, or George Egerton, they revise assumptions about Aestheticism and Modernism and their very definitions. This collection brings together international scholars specializing in Aestheticism or Modernism who push their analyses beyond their strict period of expertise and take both movements into account through exciting approaches that borrow from aesthetics, philosophy, or economics. The volume proposes a corrective to the traditional narratives of the history of Aestheticism and Modernism, revitalizing definitions of these movements and revealing new directions in aestheticist and modernist studies.
Modernism's Mythic Pose
Author: Carrie J. Preston
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199384584
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
Modernism's Mythic Pose recovers the tradition of Delsartism, a popular international movement that promoted bodily and vocal solo performances, particularly for women. This strain of classical-antimodernism shaped dance, film, and poetics. Its central figure, the mythic pose, expressed both skepticism and nostalgia and functioned as an ambivalent break from modernity.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199384584
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
Modernism's Mythic Pose recovers the tradition of Delsartism, a popular international movement that promoted bodily and vocal solo performances, particularly for women. This strain of classical-antimodernism shaped dance, film, and poetics. Its central figure, the mythic pose, expressed both skepticism and nostalgia and functioned as an ambivalent break from modernity.