Author: Malika Maskarinec
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810137712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Forces of Form in German Modernism charts a modern history of form as emergent from force. Offering a provocative alternative to the imagery of crisis and estrangement that has preoccupied scholarship on modernism, Malika Maskarinec shows that German modernism conceives of human bodies and aesthetic objects as shaped by a contest of conflicting and reciprocally intensifying forces: the force of gravity and a self-determining will to form. Maskarinec thereby discloses, for the first time, German modernism's sustained preoccupation with classical mechanics and with how human bodies and artworks resist gravity. Considering canonical artists such as Rodin and Klee, seminal authors such as Kafka and Döblin, and largely neglected thinkers in aesthetics and art history such as those associated with Empathy Aesthetics, Maskarinec unpacks the manifold anthropological and aesthetic concerns and historical lineage embedded in the idea of form as the precarious achievement of uprightness. The Forces of Form in German Modernism makes a decisive contribution to our understanding of modernism and to contemporary discussions about form, empathy, materiality, and human embodiment.
Author: Malika Maskarinec
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781267437983
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Balancing Acts" presents a modernist notion of form conceived of as the site of contest between force and counterforce as it unfolds in German aesthetics, art criticism, and literature between 1900 and 1930. Central to texts examined here is the thought that all corporeal forms, including human subjects and artistic artifacts, are subject to mechanical forces that ceaselessly challenge their equilibrium. This notion of form emerges as a descriptive register for the visual arts, a foundation for anthropological inquiry, and an ambition of modernist narration. A study of the variegated aesthetic and social semantics across these registers unmasks the corporeal, heavy, and heroic aspects of German Modernism.
Author: Marshall Berman
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860917854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Get Book Here
Book Description
The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.
Author: Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191619205
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book Here
Book Description
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates that the exotic, as reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy and art that inspires it, provokes central questions about the modern self and the spaces it inhabits. Exotic spaces in the writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Simmel and the art of German Expressionism, are shown to present alternatives to the landscape and experience of modernity. In an examination of the concept of the exotic and of spatial experience in their cultural, subjective, and philosophical contingencies, Gosetti-Ferencei shows that exotic spaces may contest and reconfigure the relationship between the familiar and the foreign, the self and the other. Exotic spaces may serve not only to affirm the subject in a symbolic conquering of territory, as emphasized in post-colonial interpretations, or project the fantasy of escapism to a lost paradise, as utopian readings suggest, but condition moral, aesthetic, or imaginative transformation. Such transformation, while risking disaster or dissolution of the self as well as endangerment of the other, may promote new possibilities of perceiving or being, and reconfigure the boundaries of a familiar world. As exotic spaces are conceived as mystical, liberating, erotic, infectious, frightening or mysterious, several possibilities for transformation emerge in their exposure: re-enchantment through epiphany; the collapse of the rational self; liberation of the imagination from the confines of the familiar world; and aesthetic transformation, revealing the paradoxically 'primitive' nature of modern experience. In strikingly original readings of canonical authors and compelling rediscoveries of forgotten ones, this study establishes that exotic experience can evidence the fragility of the European or Germanic self as depicted in modernist literature, revealing the usually unconsidered boundaries of the subject's own familiar world.
Author: Kai Konstanty Gutschow
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Irit Rogoff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521345538
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Get Book Here
Book Description
Within a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary discussion, The divided heritage considers twentieth-century German art in its social and political context. It focuses on the problems of German cultural production, rather than on a narrative of styles and movements, and it applies both social history and critical theory to an investigation of the visual arts. The collected essays are arranged in four heavily illustrated groups, each drawing attention to the cultural continuities and disjunctures of the period. The first set looks at the issue of cultural disruption, on both a social and political and a conceptual level; the second discusses the effect of representation of gender on the continuity of cultural history; the third highlights the variants within historical patterns of patronage; the city in German social and cultural theory and its place in the world of visual representation. The volume editor brings together the views expressed in an introductory chapter.
Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271047171
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Joshua Mauldin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192637533
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Get Book Here
Book Description
Recent political events around the world have raised the spectre of an impending collapse of democratic institutions. Contemporary concerns about the decline of liberal democracy are reminicent to the tumult of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived in Germany during the rise of National Socialism, and each reflected on what the rise of totalitarianism meant for the aspirations of modern politics. Engaging the realities of totalitarian terror, they avoided despairing rejections of modern society. Beginning with Barth in the wake of the First World War, following Bonhoeffer through the 1930s and 1940s in Nazi Germany, and concluding with Barth's post-war reflections in the 1950s, this study explores how these figures reflected on modern society during this turbulent time and how their work is relevant to the current crisis of modern democracy.
Author: Markus Thiel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317024036
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 475
Get Book Here
Book Description
This collection provides an up-to-date analysis of key country approaches to Militant Democracy. Featuring contributions from some of the key people working in this area, including Mark Tushnet and Helen Irving, each chapter presents a stocktaking of the legal measures to protect the democracy against its enemies within. In addition to providing a description of the country's view of Militant Democracy and the current situation, it also examines the legal and political provisions to defend the democratic structure against attacks. The discussion also presents proposals for the development of the Militant Democracy principle or its alternatives in policy and legal practice. In the final chapter the editor compares the different arrangements and formulates a minimum consensus as to what measures are indispensable to protect a democracy. Highly topical, this book is a valuable resource for students, academics and policy-makers concerned with democratic principles.
