Modernism and Morality

Modernism and Morality PDF Author: M. Halliwell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230502733
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Modernism and Morality discusses the relationship between artistic and moral ideas in European and American literary modernism. Rather than reading modernism as a complete rejection of social morality, this study shows how early twentieth-century writers like Conrad, Faulkner, Gide, Kafka, Mann and Stein actually devised new aesthetic techniques to address ethical problems. By focusing on a range of decadent, naturalist, avant-garde and expatriate writers between 1890 and the late 1930s this book reassesses the moral trajectory of transatlantic fiction.

Modernism and Morality

Modernism and Morality PDF Author: M. Halliwell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230502733
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
Modernism and Morality discusses the relationship between artistic and moral ideas in European and American literary modernism. Rather than reading modernism as a complete rejection of social morality, this study shows how early twentieth-century writers like Conrad, Faulkner, Gide, Kafka, Mann and Stein actually devised new aesthetic techniques to address ethical problems. By focusing on a range of decadent, naturalist, avant-garde and expatriate writers between 1890 and the late 1930s this book reassesses the moral trajectory of transatlantic fiction.

The Ethics of Modernism

The Ethics of Modernism PDF Author: Lee Oser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113946289X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
What was the ethical perspective of modernist literature? How did Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett represent ethical issues and develop their moral ideas? Lee Oser argues that thinking about human nature restores a perspective on modernist literature that has been lost. He offers detailed discussions of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics to illuminate close readings of major modernist texts. For Oser, the reception of Aristotle is crucial to the modernist moral project, which he defines as the effort to transform human nature through the use of art. Exploring the origins of that project, its success in modernism, its critical heirs, and its possible future, The Ethics of Modernism brings a fresh perspective on modernist literature and its interaction with ethical strands of philosophy. It offers many new insights to scholars of twentieth-century literature as well as intellectual historians.

Modernist Commitments

Modernist Commitments PDF Author: Jessica Berman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231149514
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Modernism has long been characterized as more concerned with aesthetics than politics, but Jessica Berman argues that modernist narrative bridges the gap between ethics and politics, connecting ethical attitudes and responsibilities—ideas about what we ought to be and do—to active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges the divisions usually drawn between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation.

Radio Modernism

Radio Modernism PDF Author: Todd Avery
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754655176
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Weaving together the BBC's institutional history and developments in ethical philosophy, Todd Avery shows how the involvement of writers like T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf with radio helped to shape the ethical contours of literary modernism. His book recaptures for a twenty-first-century audience the interest, fascination, excitement, and often consternation that British radio induced in its literary listeners following its inception in 1922.

Errant Modernism

Errant Modernism PDF Author: Esther Gabara
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822389398
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Making a vital contribution to the understanding of Latin American modernism, Esther Gabara rethinks the role of photography in the Brazilian and Mexican avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. During these decades, intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil were deeply engaged with photography. Authors who are now canonical figures in the two countries’ literary traditions looked at modern life through the camera in a variety of ways. Mário de Andrade, known as the “pope” of Brazilian modernism, took and collected hundreds of photographs. Salvador Novo, a major Mexican writer, meditated on the medium’s aesthetic potential as “the prodigal daughter of the fine arts.” Intellectuals acted as tourists and ethnographers, and their images and texts circulated in popular mass media, sharing the page with photographs of the New Woman. In this richly illustrated study, Gabara introduces the concept of a modernist “ethos” to illuminate the intertwining of aesthetic innovation and ethical concerns in the work of leading Brazilian and Mexican literary figures, who were also photographers, art critics, and contributors to illustrated magazines during the 1920s and 1930s. Gabara argues that Brazilian and Mexican modernists deliberately made photography err: they made this privileged medium of modern representation simultaneously wander and work against its apparent perfection. They flouted the conventions of mainstream modernism so that their aesthetics registered an ethical dimension. Their photographic modernism strayed, dragging along the baggage of modernity lived in a postcolonial site. Through their “errant modernism,” avant-garde writers and photographers critiqued the colonial history of Latin America and its twentieth-century formations.

Reforming Modernity

Reforming Modernity PDF Author: Wael B. Hallaq
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550553
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Reforming Modernity is a sweeping intellectual history and philosophical reflection built around the work of the Morocco-based philosopher Abdurrahman Taha, one of the most significant philosophers in the Islamic world since the colonial era. Wael B. Hallaq contends that Taha is at the forefront of forging a new, non-Western-centric philosophical tradition. He explores how Taha’s philosophical project sheds light on recent intellectual currents in the Islamic world and puts forth a formidable critique of Western and Islamic modernities. Hallaq argues that Taha’s project departs from—but leaves behind—the epistemological grounds in which most modern Muslim intellectuals have anchored their programs. Taha systematically rejects the modes of thought that have dominated the Muslim intellectual scene since the beginning of the twentieth century—nationalism, Marxism, secularism, political Islamism, and liberalism. Instead, he provides alternative ways of thinking, forcefully and virtuosically developing an ethical system with a view toward reforming existing modernities. Hallaq analyzes the ethical thread that runs throughout Taha’s oeuvre, illuminating how Taha weaves it into a discursive engagement with the central questions that plague modernity in both the West and the Muslim world. The first introduction to Taha’s ethical philosophy for Western audiences, Reforming Modernity presents his complex thought in an accessible way while engaging with it critically. Hallaq’s conversation with Taha’s work both proffers a cogent critique of modernity and points toward answers for its endemic and seemingly insoluble problems.

The Morals of Modernity

The Morals of Modernity PDF Author: Charles Larmore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521497725
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Arguing against recent attempts to return to the virtue-centered perspective of ancient Greek ethics, these essays explore the problem of the relation between moral philosophy and modernity by studying the differences between ancient and modern ethics.

Amorous Acts

Amorous Acts PDF Author: Frances L. Restuccia
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804751827
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Amorous Acts uses psychoanalytic concepts to show how queer theory is operating to put in place a non-heterosexist social order.

Modernism and Theory

Modernism and Theory PDF Author: Stephen Ross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135267006
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Modernism and Theory boldly asks what role theory has to play in the new modernist studies. The three sections comprise expositions and debates on modernist topics by leading contributors, and the book concludes with an afterword from Fredric Jameson.

The Void of Ethics

The Void of Ethics PDF Author: Patrizia McBride
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810121093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In a pluralistic society without absolute standards of judgment, how can an individual live a moral life? This is the question Robert Musil (1880-1942), an Austrian-born engineer and mathematician turned writer, asked in essays, plays, and fiction that grapple with the moral ambivalence of modern life. Though unfinished, his monumental novel of Vienna in the febrile days before World War I, The Man without Qualities, is identified by German scholars as the most important literary work of the twentieth century. In a fresh examination of his essays, notebooks, and fiction, Patrizia McBride reconstructs Musil's understanding of ethics as a realm of experience that eludes language and thought. After situating Musil's work within its contemporary cultural-philosophical horizon, as well as the historical background of rising National Socialism, McBride shows how the writer's notion of ethics as a void can be understood as a coherent and innovative response to the crises haunting Europe after World War I. She explores how Musil rejected the outdated, rationalistic morality of humanism, while simultaneously critiquing the irrationalism of contemporary art movements, including symbolism, impressionism, and expressionism. Her work reveals Musil's remarkable relevance today-particularly those aspects of his thought that made him unfashionable in his own time: a commitment to fighting ethical fundamentalism and a literary imagination that validates the pluralistic character of modern life.