Reactionary Modernism

Reactionary Modernism PDF Author: Jeffrey Herf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521338332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In a unique application of critical theory to the study of the role of ideology in politics, Jeffrey Herf explores the paradox inherent in the German fascists' rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment while fully embracing modern technology. He documents evidence of a cultural tradition he calls 'reactionary modernism' found in the writings of German engineers and of the major intellectuals of the. Weimar right: Ernst Juenger, Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Hans Freyer, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. The book shows how German nationalism and later National Socialism created what Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, called the 'steel-like romanticism of the twentieth century'. By associating technology with the Germans, rather than the Jews, with beautiful form rather than the formlessness of the market, and with a strong state rather than a predominance of economic values and institutions, these right-wing intellectuals reconciled Germany's strength with its romantic soul and national identity.

Reactionary Modernism

Reactionary Modernism PDF Author: Jeffrey Herf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521338332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a unique application of critical theory to the study of the role of ideology in politics, Jeffrey Herf explores the paradox inherent in the German fascists' rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment while fully embracing modern technology. He documents evidence of a cultural tradition he calls 'reactionary modernism' found in the writings of German engineers and of the major intellectuals of the. Weimar right: Ernst Juenger, Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Hans Freyer, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. The book shows how German nationalism and later National Socialism created what Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, called the 'steel-like romanticism of the twentieth century'. By associating technology with the Germans, rather than the Jews, with beautiful form rather than the formlessness of the market, and with a strong state rather than a predominance of economic values and institutions, these right-wing intellectuals reconciled Germany's strength with its romantic soul and national identity.

Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism

Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism PDF Author: Julian Young
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521644945
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book argues that despite Heidegger's involvement with Nazism his philosophy is not compromised.

Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics

Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics PDF Author: Charles Ferrall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521120821
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Charles Ferrall argues that the politics of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis was a response to the separation of art from an increasingly industrialized society. Fascism became attractive to these writers because it promised to reintegrate art into society while simultaneously guaranteeing its autonomy. Yet with the exception of Pound and Yeats, these writers all finally rejected fascism, preferring instead to see the aesthetic as a sphere in permanent opposition to liberal democracy, rather than the basis for a new social order.

Legacies of Modernism

Legacies of Modernism PDF Author: P. McBride
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230603181
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Between 1890 and 1950 modernist art and culture set out to challenge century-old notions of the individual and the community, culture and politics, morality and freedom, placing into question the very foundations of Western civilization. The essays in this volume present a novel assessment of various manifestations of modernism in Germany and Scandinavia by posing the question of its critical and political impact beyond traditional polarities such as right vs. left, illiberalism vs. Enlightenment, apolitical vs. engaged. In drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including literary studies, art history, film and visual studies, urban studies, musicology, political theory, and the history of science and technology, the essays in this volume reexamine modernism's bold inquiry into areas such as the relation of art to technology and mass politics, the limits of liberal democracy, the reconceptualization of urban spaces, and the realignment of traditional art forms following the rise of new media such as film. The volume's contributors share a belief in the timeliness of modernism's critical impulse for a contemporary age confronted with ethical and political dilemmas that the modernists first articulated and to which they attempted to respond.

Fascism

Fascism PDF Author: Mark Neocleous
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816630394
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
This clear accessible overview treats the subject of fascism thematically and provides a conclusion that brings the discussion up-to-date. Mark Neocleous situates fascism between the social and political contradictions of modernity and capitalism. In many ways a reaction to the principal political project of the Enlightenment, fascism focuses on three central concepts - war, nature, and nation - in order to crush violently movements of ideologies of social emancipation such as Marxism and liberalism. The destruction of reason that fascism represents shatters Enlightenment universalism and transforms the desire for social liberation into an aggressive nationalism, with devastating effects on human life.

Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization

Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization PDF Author: Ali Mirsepassi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521659970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
In this thought-provoking study, Ali Mirsepassi explores the concept of modernity, exposing the Eurocentric prejudices and hostility to non-Western culture that have characterized its development. Focusing on the Iranian experience of modernity, he charts its political and intellectual history and develops a new interpretation of Islamic Fundamentalism through the detailed analysis of the ideas of key Islamic intellectuals. The author argues that the Iranian Revolution was not a simple clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic identity, culture and historical experience. He concludes by assessing the future of secularism and democracy in the Middle East in general, and in Iran in particular. A significant contribution to the literature on modernity, social change and Islamic Studies, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of social theory and change, Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies and many related areas.

Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity

Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity PDF Author: Fernando Esposito
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137362995
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Flying and the pilot were significant metaphors of fascism's mythical modernity. Fernando Esposito traces the changing meanings of these highly charged symbols from the air show in Brescia, to the sky above the trenches of the First World War to the violent ideological clashes of the interwar period.

The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism

The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism PDF Author: Paul Haacke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198851448
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history. This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical ascension turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as direct indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of "high" and "low."

Myth and the Making of Modernity

Myth and the Making of Modernity PDF 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.

English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890-1950

English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890-1950 PDF Author: Petra Rau
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754656722
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This is the first systematic analysis of the relationship between representations of 'Germanness' in modernist British literature, the construction of English identity and the negotiation of modernity. Major figures such as Conrad, Woolf and Ford are examined alongside popular or less-familiar writers such as Saki and Stevie Smith. Rau's book will be invaluable to scholars and will serve undergraduates working in modernism, literary history, and European cultural relations.