Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity

Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity PDF Author: Dagmar Barnouw
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253364272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
" . . . the range, power, and archival resourcefulness of Barnouw's book will make it impossible for anyone working in the field to ignore this powerful and disturbing historical meditation on the societal function and responsibility of the intellecutual." —The German Quarterly " . . . a work of real value for patient readers." —American Journal of Sociology " . . . a forceful and compelling thesis that challenges our understanding of several seminal figures writing during the first half of the century." —Monatshefte In this challenging study of a complex period, Barnouw investigates the works of seven representative figures of the Weimar republic: Walter Rahtenau, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Hermann Broch, and Alfred Döblin.

Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity

Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity PDF Author: Dagmar Barnouw
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253364272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
" . . . the range, power, and archival resourcefulness of Barnouw's book will make it impossible for anyone working in the field to ignore this powerful and disturbing historical meditation on the societal function and responsibility of the intellecutual." —The German Quarterly " . . . a work of real value for patient readers." —American Journal of Sociology " . . . a forceful and compelling thesis that challenges our understanding of several seminal figures writing during the first half of the century." —Monatshefte In this challenging study of a complex period, Barnouw investigates the works of seven representative figures of the Weimar republic: Walter Rahtenau, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Hermann Broch, and Alfred Döblin.

Weimar Thought

Weimar Thought PDF Author: Peter E. Gordon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691135118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
A comprehensive look at the intellectual and cultural innovations of the Weimar period During its short lifespan, the Weimar Republic (1918–33) witnessed an unprecedented flowering of achievements in many areas, including psychology, political theory, physics, philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, and the arts. Leading intellectuals, scholars, and critics—such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Martin Heidegger—emerged during this time to become the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. Even today, the Weimar era remains a vital resource for new intellectual movements. In this incomparable collection, Weimar Thought presents both the specialist and the general reader a comprehensive guide and unified portrait of the most important innovators, themes, and trends of this fascinating period. The book is divided into four thematic sections: law, politics, and society; philosophy, theology, and science; aesthetics, literature, and film; and general cultural and social themes of the Weimar period. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars from a remarkable array of fields, and each individual essay serves as an overview for a particular discipline while offering distinctive critical engagement with relevant problems and debates. Whether used as an introductory companion or advanced scholarly resource, Weimar Thought provides insight into the rich developments behind the intellectual foundations of modernity.

Women in the Metropolis

Women in the Metropolis PDF Author: Katharina von Ankum
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052091760X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies.

Fascist Modernities

Fascist Modernities PDF Author: Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520242165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship discusses the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. The work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past.

The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology

The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology PDF Author: Mikael Hard
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262581660
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This book examines the broad range of social and intellectualresponses to technology in the first four decades of this century, andsuggests that these responses set the terms that continue to governcontemporary debates. Starting around 1900, technology became a lively subject for debate among intellectuals, writers, and other opinion leaders. The expansion of the machine into ever more areas of social and economic life had led to a need to interpret its meanings in a more comprehensive way than in the past. World War I and its aftermath shifted the terms of this ongoing debate by underlining both the potential dangers of technology and its centrality to modern life. This book examines the broad range of social and intellectual responses to technology in the first four decades of this century, and suggests that these responses set the terms that continue to govern contemporary debates. Focusing on the broader contexts within which intellectual positions are formed, the book highlights the ways in which attitudes toward technology were shaped in a wide variety of national and organizational settings. A common theme is that, in debating technology, people drew on their distinctive national symbols and cultural traditions. By emphasizing the interplay between debates on technology and the making of modernity, the book challenges standard historical accounts of the early twentieth century. Contributors Ketil G. Andersen, Aant Elzinga, Tor Halvorsen, Mikael Hård, Kjetil Jakobsen, Andrew Jamison, Catharina Landström, Conny Mithander, Sissel Myklebust, Dick van Lente, Peter Wagner

Naipaul's Strangers

Naipaul's Strangers PDF Author: Dagmar Barnouw
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253215796
Category : Cultural pluralism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
From his reporting on Islamic true believers to his descriptions of the postcolonial world, V. S. Naipaul has been a controversial figure in contemporary letters. Winner of the Nobel Prize, Naipaul has traveled throughout the world, looking at its varied cultures and seeking out others' stories, recording and transforming them. His engagement with postcolonial cultures informs his novels, such as Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. However, it is his documentaries (such as Among the Believers and Beyond Belief) and his works that combine actual and fictional histories and memories (Finding the Center, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World) that best exhibit a growing awareness of the complexities of cultural difference--and the incompleteness and uncertainty of understanding "strangers." In this book, Dagmar Barnouw explores the sophisticated strategies and experimentations that Naipaul employs in his cultural critique and in his enterprise of learning about and documenting the enduring strangeness of this world.

Guardian of Dialogue

Guardian of Dialogue PDF Author: Michael D. Barber
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838752289
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This book shows how, on the basis of a phenomenological account of knowledge, values, and intersubjectivity, Max Scheler defends the objective structure of being and value and the distinctiveness of the Other against mechanistic attempts to deny them.

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin PDF Author: Esther Leslie
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745315683
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Powerful new insights into a key twentieth-century political thinker

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.

The Politics of Difference

The Politics of Difference PDF Author: Edwin Norman Wilmsen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226900162
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
According to most social scientists, the advent of a global media village and the rise of liberal democratic government would diminish ethnic and national identity as a source of political action. Yet the contemporary world is in the midst of an explosion of identity politics and often violent ethnonationalism. This volume examines cases ranging from the well-publicized ethnonationalism of Bosnia and post-Apartheid South Africa to ethnic conflicts in Belgium and Sri Lanka. Distinguished international scholars including John Comaroff, Stanley J. Tambiah, and Ernesto Laclau argue that continued acceptance of imposed ethnic terms as the most appropriate vehicle for collective self-identification and social action legitimizes the conditions of inequality that give rise to them in the first place. This ambitious attempt to explain the inadequacies of current approaches to power and ethnicity forges more realistic alternatives to the volatile realities of social difference.