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1
Jervis, John. Exploring the modern: Patterns of western culture and civilization. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.
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Exploring the modern: Patterns of western culture and civilisation. Malden, Ma: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.
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Inkeles, Alex. Exploring Individual Modernity. Columbia University Press, 2010.
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Exploring Individual Modernity. Columbia University Press, 1985.
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Wood, Andrew F. Rhetoric of Ruins: Exploring Landscapes of Abandoned Modernity. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2021.
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Johnston, Jean-Michel. Networks of Modernity. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198856887.001.0001.
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This book offers a fresh perspective on the history of Germany by investigating the origins and impact of the ‘communications revolution’ that transformed state and society during the nineteenth century. It focuses upon the period 1830–80, exploring the interactions between the many different actors who developed, administered, and used one of the most important technologies of the period—the electric telegraph. Drawing upon evidence from Prussia, Bavaria, Bremen, and a number of towns across Central Europe, it reveals the channels through which knowledge circulated across the region, stimulating both collaboration and confrontation between the scientists, technicians, businessmen, and bureaucrats involved in bringing the telegraph to life. It highlights the technology’s impact upon the conduct of trade, finance, news distribution, and government in the tumultuous decades that witnessed the 1848 revolutions, the wars of unification, and the establishment of the Kaiserreich in 1871. Following the telegraph lines themselves, it weaves together the changes which took place at a local, regional, national, and eventually global level, revisiting the technology’s impact upon concepts of space and time, and highlighting the importance of this period in laying the foundations for Germany’s experience of a profoundly ambiguous, networked modernity.
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Goldberg, Shalom. Chaim Goldberg: Exploring Modernism Vol 3. Independently Published, 2018.
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Jervis, John. Exploring the Modern. HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.
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Delsandro, Erica Gene, ed. Women Making Modernism. University Press of Florida, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5744/florida/9780813066172.001.0001.
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Women Making Modernism stands as a corrective to the consistent tension between feminist studies and modernist studies. Despite waves of feminism in the academy, feminism remains ancillary even in the expanded arena of new modernist studies. This volume makes the case for feminism’s necessity in modernist studies, arguing that without an integrated feminist approach our modernism is irresponsible at best and dishonest at worst. And the contributors included here take as their cue the renewed fervor around feminist inquiry in literary studies in the academy—exemplified by the new feminist literary studies journal, Feminist Modernist Studies (FMS), launched in 2018—and beyond. Collectively we assert the value of amplifying the reality of women’s contributions to modernism by exploring a myriad of women writers through a diverse set of approaches. Along the way, many of our authors engage in self-reflection, taking into account their personal histories, social locations, and anxieties, thus bridging the arbitrary division, long enforced by patriarchal postures of intellectualism, between the academic and affective self.
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Morello, Gustavo S. J. Lived Religion in Latin America. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197579626.001.0001.
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This book is about religion and modernity, how religion interacts with modern culture, and how modernity influences religion. “Modernity” signifies not only technological developments, but also the dynamics of capitalism, the differentiation of social functions, specialization of spheres of knowledge, and expansion of human rights. By religion is meant the cultural practices people use to connect with a suprahuman power that they experience as influencing their lives. The thesis presented is that in Latin America there is an interaction between modernity and religion, but the result has not been religion’s diminishment (secularization), but its transformation. Exploring religion as ordinary Latin Americans practice it, the research presented in this book discovered that there is more religion than secularists expect, but of a different kind than religious leaders would wish. The difficulty in assessing religiosity as it exists in Latin America is due in part to the continuing use of categories that were not designed for religious cultures outside the North Atlantic world. Those categories point us toward a different kind of dynamics, which in fact obscure Latin American religious dynamics. If we look at religion from the perspective of Latin America and of the people who practice it there, we will find a different definition and different conceptual tools for understanding the religious experience of Latin American people, and these new tools help us to look at religion in a different way.
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Dib, Roula-Maria. Jungian Metaphor in Modernist Literature: Exploring Individuation, Alchemy and Symbolism. Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.
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Dib, Roula-Maria. Jungian Metaphor in Modernist Literature: Exploring Individuation, Alchemy and Symbolism. Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.
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Dib, Roula-Maria. Jungian Metaphor in Modernist Literature: Exploring Individuation, Alchemy and Symbolism. Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.
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Dib, Roula-Maria. Jungian Metaphor in Modernist Literature: Exploring Individuation, Alchemy and Symbolism. Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.
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15
Engelhardt, Nina. Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416238.001.0001.
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Modernism in mathematics – this unusual notion turns out to provide new perspectives on central questions in and beyond literary modernism. This books draws on prose texts by mathematicians and on historical and cultural studies of mathematics to introduce the so-called ‘foundational crisis of mathematics’ in the early twentieth century, and it analyses major novels that employ developments in mathematics as exemplary of wider modernist movements. The monograph focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Hermann Broch’s novel trilogy The Sleepwalkers (1930-32), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930/32). These novels accord mathematics and its modernist transformation a central place in their visions and present it as interrelated with political, linguistic, epistemological and ethical developments in the modern West. Not least, the texts explore the freedoms and opportunities that the mathematical crisis implies and relate the emerging notion of ‘fictional’ characteristics of mathematics to the possibilities of literature. By exploring how the novels accord mathematics a central role as a particularly telling indicator of modernist transformations, this book argues that imaginative works contribute to establishing mathematics as part of modernist culture. The monograph thus opens up new frames of textual and cultural analysis that help understand the modernist condition from the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and mathematics studies, and it demonstrates the necessity to account for the specificity of mathematics in the field of literature and science studies.
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Crossland, Rachel. Modernist Physics. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198815976.001.0001.
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Modernist Physics takes as its focus the ideas associated with three scientific papers published by Albert Einstein in 1905, considering the dissemination of those ideas both within and beyond the scientific field, and exploring the manifestation of similar ideas in the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, Modernist Physics seeks both to combine and to distinguish between the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on the ideas associated with one of Einstein’s papers. Part I considers Woolf in relation to Einstein’s paper on light quanta, arguing that questions of duality and complementarity had a wider cultural significance in the early twentieth century than has yet been acknowledged, and suggesting that Woolf can usefully be considered a complementary, rather than a dualistic, writer. Part II looks at Lawrence’s reading of at least one book on relativity in 1921, and his subsequent suggestion in Fantasia of the Unconscious that ‘we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity’—a theory which is shown to be relevant to Lawrence’s writing of relationships both before and after 1921. Part III considers Woolf and Lawrence together alongside late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of molecular physics and crowd psychology, suggesting that Einstein’s work on Brownian motion provides a useful model for thinking about individual literary characters.
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Rizzoni, Giovanni. Parliamentarism and Encyclopaedism. Hart Publishing, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781509963942.
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This book explores a specific aspect of modern parliamentarism: its ability to produce and organise political knowledge. The book argues that the very meaning of modern parliamentarism cannot properly be understood without considering the cognitive value that is inherent in the representative function discharged by parliaments, vis-a-vis the political community. It does so by studying the ‘encyclopaedic patterns’ underlying modern parliamentarism. Exploring the concept from ancient times to modernity, it addresses the fundamental question of the relationship between knowledge and democratic decision-making. This is a truly innovative book; challenging, provocative and asking crucial questions of how parliaments work and legislate. Volume 9 in the series Parliamentary Democracy in Europe
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Mody, Sujata S. The Making of Modern Hindi. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199489091.001.0001.
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The Making of Modern Hindi examines the politics and processes of making Hindi modern at a formative moment in India’s history, when British imperialism was at its peak and anti-colonial sentiments were on the rise. It centres on the figure of Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi (1864-1938), an enterprising and contentious Hindi litterateur, and his project of constructing Hindi as a national language with a modern literature in the early twentieth century. Dwivedi’s unprecedented multimedia literary campaign as long-time editor of the Hindi journal Sarasvatī paved the way for Hindi’s progress into the modern era. This study casts new light on Dwivedi as an innovative and dynamic arbiter of literary modernity. He advanced his agenda by exploring the collaborative potential of art and literature, a critical element in national language and literary reform that has received little attention in other studies. This book also considers tensions between the editor and others in his realm of influence. His project sparked contest amongst a range of authorities who participated alongside Dwivedi in constructing Hindi modernity. Despite a common enthusiasm for Hindi, they challenged some aspects of his endeavour, based on their differing agendas and perspectives. Dwivedi’s responses to their challenges were pragmatic and strategically varied.
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Schmeink, Lars. The Anthropocene, the Posthuman, and the Animal. Liverpool University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781781383766.003.0003.
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Chapter 3 analyzes two exemplary literary works dealing with the creation of new posthuman species as a consequence of contemporary consumer society. With liquid modernity commodifying all aspects of life, the logical extrapolation, made possible by genetic science rapidly closing the gap in the dimension of science-fictional possibility, is the commodification of all life itself, including the human. Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi discuss future worlds that build upon tendencies of an extreme consumer society and the sea change of human impact in the anthropocene. Both story cycles enhance present dystopian tendencies of liquid modernity to explore the consequences of the hypercapitalist commodification of life and its effect on human subjectivity. In both story worlds, zoe is reduced to its mechanical, material quality and appropriated for consumption, manifest expressly in the changing status of the human into the inhuman, non-human, and posthuman. The chapter discusses this shift in the perception of the human and the consequences of posthuman social development. Most importantly though, in exploring the posthuman as an alternative form of communal and social practice, both literary works provide for a eutopian moment in the dystopian imagination – allowing a hybrid, changing and multiple posthuman perspective to emerge.
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Jacobs, Steven Leonard. A Short History of Judaism and the Jewish People. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350236592.
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In this exciting addition to Bloomsbury’s Short Histories series, Steven Leonard Jacobs critically yet concisely examines the history of Judaism and the Jewish people, drawing from maps, photographs and archives to illuminate the history of one of the world’s oldest religions. Beginning by establishing a definition of Judaism, Jacobs explores the historiography of the Jewish people, in addition to the role of memory in charting history. Including a comprehensive breakdown of the history of Judaism, the author splits discussion into defined eras, taking readers from the beginnings of Judaism, to the split between Judah in the South and Israel in the North, the united Monarchy, and the Age of the Prophets. Exploring the social structures and institutions of ancient Israel, Jacobs incorporates key themes such as civic life, economics, and art – before analysing the interactions of Judaism with Romanism and Hellenism. Moving through the Middle Ages and Pre-Modernity, and acknowledging the role of key figures such as Yosef Karo and Moses Mendelssohn, this book brings the narrative up to the present day, and uncovers the foundations of Judaism in modernity. Jacobs’ authoritative yet engaging prose shines through each of the thirteen chapters, which seamlessly intertwine to produce a thorough yet concise examination of the history of Judaism and Jewish peoples.
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Kallis, Aristotle. The Minimum Dwelling Revisited. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350346215.
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This book provides an intellectual history of the modernist ‘minimum dwelling’, exploring how early modernism saw mass housing as a primary vehicle for achieving the utopian transformation of society. It reappraises the often-overlooked 2nd and 3rd CIAM conferences (1929-31), addressing their engagement with the 'minimum dwelling' and revealing them both as milestones in the organisation's annals and as seminal moments in the history of interwar modernism. In 1929, an eclectic international group of avant-garde modernist architects, including Ernst May, Mart Stam, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, met in Frankfurt for the second instalment of the CIAM conferences. They discussed a design programme for cost-effective, good-quality housing, seeking new approaches and processes to maximize quality and functionality while ensuring affordability for the wider population. In exploring the meaning and form of the 'minimum dwelling', they also re-defined dwelling as the hub of a new way of living, proposing a revolutionary multi-scalar approach to urban design based on the concept of the Existenzminimum (‘optimally minimal housing’). Despite the two conferences falling short of the organizer’s expectations, and being overshadowed by later instalments, the participating architects sanctioned a semantic shift from minimum as bare necessity to a very different, aspirational, kind of minimalism – transforming the entire conversation on mass low-cost dwelling in design, social and ethical terms. Split into two parts, The Minimum Dwelling Revisited first takes a genealogical approach to explore the provenance of the concept of ‘minimum dwelling’ prior to the 2nd and 3rd CIAM conferences, it then traces the proceedings of the two conferences themselves. Addressing the origins of the ‘minimum dwelling’ concept but also its legacies, and serving as a corrective to the overemphasis on 4th CIAM conference and the Athens Charter, the book is essential reading for scholars researching urban design during the Interwar period.
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Peters, Timothy. A Theological Jurisprudence of Speculative Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424004.001.0001.
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This book sets a new trajectory for considering the intertwined relationship between theology and law. Through close readings of a range of popular Hollywood speculative fiction films—Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Snyder’s Man of Steel, Lucas’s and Disney’s Star Wars, Nolan’s The Dark Knight & The Dark Knight Rises, Proyas’ I, Robot, Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau and Jackson’s The Hobbit—Timothy Peters explores how fictional worlds, particularly those that ‘make strange’ the world of the viewer, can render visible and make explicit the otherwise opaque theologies of modern law. The book offers a key contribution to the fields of cultural legal studies, law and film and law and theology by considering speculative fiction (superheroes, science fiction, fantasy) as a way of revealing the theologies of modern law and legal theory. The overall narrative of the work marks a course from antagonism to reconciliation, from autonomy to reciprocity and from law to love. Throughout the work, the book draws on resources within the Christian theological tradition’s critical engagement with law, as a means for rethinking and reimagining our post-secular legal modernity—enabling both a deactivating and fulfilling of the law. In exploring speculative film’s estranged accounts of the mythos of modernity and modern law, it articulates an alternative theological jurisprudence based on a love that takes us beyond the law.
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van Wees, Hans. Thucydides on Early Greek History. Edited by Sara Forsdyke, Edith Foster, and Ryan Balot. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199340385.013.2.
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This chapter studies Thucydides’ account of early Greek history in the “Archaeology” (1.1.2–1.21.2). It shows that Thucydides’ criteria of development and his reconstruction of history are heavily influenced by power relations in Greece during the early stages of the Peloponnesian War. Comparison with other sources for both the legendary and the historical past reveals the extent to which Thucydides, by means of omission, selective emphasis, and skewed interpretation, manipulates traditions that were well known to Athenian audiences, in order to create his distinctive vision of history as reaching a peak of military and economic development and “modernity” in the Greece of his own day. The chapter concludes by exploring the ways in which Thucydides’ influential model of Greek history fails to do justice to the historical realities of archaic Greece.
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Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0001.
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This introduction traces the book’s origins across three significant dialogical moments. First is the mediated moment of television producer Middleweek interviewing the 7/7 survivor Tulloch, followed by their intertextual engagement with two texts of intimacy, Chéreau’s film and Giddens’s book. Second is an interdisciplinary dialogue employing feminist mapping theory to forge a “bridging” and “rainbow” scholarship between disciplinary fields that provide ways of seeing real sex films, including risk sociology, feminist psychoanalytical theory, and critical geopolitical theory, in combination with concepts of genre, authorship, production, stardom, social audience, and spectatorship. Third is a dialogue within theories of risk modernity exploring the tension between the “demand for constant emotional closeness” and the quest for “confluent love” in real sex film as the utopia and dystopia of love are played out through cinema.
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Hewitt, Seán. J. M. Synge. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862093.001.0001.
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This is a complete study of the works of the Irish playwright, travel writer, and poet J. M. Synge (1871–1909). A key and controversial figure in the Irish Literary Revival, and specifically in the Abbey Theatre, Synge’s career was short but dynamic. Moving from an early Romanticism, through Decadence, and on to a combative, protesting modernism, the development of Synge’s drama was propelled by his contentious relationship with the Irish politics of his time. This book is a full and timely reappraisal of Synge’s works, exploring both the prose and the drama through an in-depth study of Synge’s archive. Rather than looking at Synge’s work in relation to any distinct subject, this study examines Synge’s aesthetic and philosophical values, and charts the challenges posed to them as the impetus behind his reluctant movement into a more modernist mode of writing. Along the way, the book sheds new and often surprising light on Synge’s interests in occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, modernization, and even his late satirical engagement with eugenics. One of its key innovations is the use of Synge’s diaries, letters, and notebooks to trace his reading and to map the influences buried in his work, calling for them to be read afresh. Not only does this book reconsider each of Synge’s major works, along with many unfinished or archival pieces, it also explores the contested relationship between Revivalism and modernism, modernism and politics, and modernism and Romanticism.
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Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. The Transformation of Intimacy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0003.
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In chapter 2 different voices and theories are in dialogue. First, by exploring and critiquing risk sociology through Beck’s notion of “reflexive modernization,” Strydom’s extension of Beck’s thesis, Giddens’s observation of the contradictions between experts, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s “normal chaos of love,” and Giddens’s understanding of the transformation of intimacy within risk modernity, the chapter draws attention to the critical assumptions underlying this “new risk” position and how it can be strengthened and extended within media/cultural studies. Second, the chapter explores film reviewing and current film theory through scholar Linda Williams’s work on “cinema and the sex act,” emphasizing bodily performance and aesthetic form, and via literary scholar Raymond Williams’s understanding of naturalism, emotional realism, and the secularization of intimacy, especially in his notion of “structures of feeling.” The arrival of the underclass stranger in the real sex film Romance is considered in this context.
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Mach, Elżbieta M., and Paweł Kubicki, eds. European Cities in the Process of Constructing and Transmitting European Cultural Heritage. Ksiegarnia Akademicka Publishing, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.12797/9788381386708.
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The publication, which is the culmination of a European project carried out under the Erasmus Plus Programme, presents the city as a place of culture, heritage and sustainable development, a place where tradition and modernity mingle and where heritage is integrated with new forms. It is a place where cultures meet, but also a place where the inhabitants draw vitality, which is a source of identity; finally, it is a place where new generations are raised. The book shows life in the city as a composition of places of memory, which binds the past, the present and the future into a coherent whole (…). This book not only stimulates the reader's reflection on the city, inspiring them to their own reflections and cultural explorations, but it can also be an excellent textbook for students exploring the mysteries of cultural studies, anthropology, sociology or urban planning. prof. Marcin Rebes
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Roach, Rebecca. Legacies of Impersonality. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198825418.003.0007.
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The fifth chapter examines the roles of interviewer and interviewee, exploring debates around objectivity and personality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was a period in which these roles came under pressure, partly as a reaction against the interrogative interviewing that dominated in previous decades. Drawing on the famed series of interviews in The Paris Review and the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and colleagues, the chapter illustrates how the interview emerged as a site where authors could discuss those topics such as methodology, market orientation, and intention that had been largely dismissed by New Criticism. These writers and publications, while beholden to a canonical modernist tradition, reject this older conception of the interview. In so doing, they enabled the interview to be conceived by authors, including ageing modernists, as an aesthetically and critically engaged activity in an age of celebrity authorship.
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Harris, Andrea. Lincoln Kirstein’s Social Modernism and the Cultural Front. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199342235.003.0004.
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This chapter takes a biographical approach to Lincoln Kirstein’s creation of a modernist theory of ballet to situate its development in the 1930s cultural wing of the Popular Front and explore its evolution through and after World War II. Fueled by the cultural front’s belief in the role of the arts in social revolution, Kirstein seized the opportunity to decouple ballet from existing biases about its elitism and triviality, and formulate new ideas about its social relevance in the Depression period. After exploring the development of Kirstein’s social modernism in the cultural front, chapter 2 then turns to the challenges posed to the 1930s belief that art could be productively combined with politics through two major turning points in Kirstein’s life. These are his experiences in World War II, and the erosion of his own artistic role in the ballet company after the formation of the New York City Ballet and the ascendance of George Balanchine’s dance-for-dance-sake aesthetic in the late 1940s. The chapter illustrates Kirstein’s attempts to negotiate the social modernist aesthetic he crafted under the wing of the cultural front within the volatile political, economic, and artistic circumstances of World War II, anticommunism, and the Cold War.
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Andrews, Charles. The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350362062.
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Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors’ theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.
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Cottrell, Anna. London Writing of the 1930s. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474425643.001.0001.
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Exploring London's literary identity during the 1930s Anna Cottrell shows how vital writing was to the capital’s booming leisure scene on the eve of the Second World War. The book explores London and Londoners, with a focus on the way in which London's lower-middle-class citizens became inseparable from central London’s leisure scene in the period’s imagination. In contrast with Modernism’s flâneurs and flâneuses, the key figures of 1930s London literature were shop girls, clerks, dance hostesses, and financially insecure journalists whose leisure hours were spent in London’s cinemas, bars, and glittering teashops. Writing about this type of Londoner and her milieus was at the heart of the decade’s experiments in revitalising the British novel, which to many of the period’s writers and intellectuals appeared to lack energy and authenticity. Meticulous description was central to this project of re-energising British writing, and it is in passages describing London milieus such as the teashop and the Soho nightclub that this book locates the decade’s most original and astute meditations on modernity, mass culture, and the value of ordinary lives.
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Omer, Atalia, and Jason A. Springs. Religious Nationalism. ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798216007364.
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This book tackles the assumptions behind common understandings of religious nationalism, exploring the complex connections between religion, nationalism, conflict, and conflict transformation. Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook challenges dominant scholarly works on religious nationalism by identifying the preconceptions that skew analysis of the phenomenon dubbed “religious nationalism.” The book utilizes a multidisciplinary approach that draws insight from theories of nationalism, religious studies, peace research, and political theory, and reframes the questions of religious nationalism within the perspectives of secularism, modernity, and Orientalism. In doing so, the author enables readers to uncover their own presumptions regarding the role of religion in public life. Unlike other works on this subject, the work outlines connections between the analysis of the role of religion in conflict to thoughts regarding how religion may relate to processes of peacebuilding and conflict transformation, and further connects the discussion of religious nationalism to broader conversations on the so-called resurgence of religion. The book will serve advanced high school and college students studying religion, international relations, and related subjects while also appealing to a wide audience of readers with an interest in questions of religion and politics.
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DeLucia, JoEllen, and Juliet Shields, eds. Migration and Modernities. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440349.001.0001.
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Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.
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Aroney, Nicholas, and Ian Leigh, eds. Christianity and Constitutionalism. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197587256.001.0001.
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Abstract This book explores the contribution of Christianity to constitutional law and constitutionalism viewed from the perspectives of history, law, and theology. The historical chapters recount the relationship between the Christian faith and fundamental ideas about law, justice, government, and constitutionalism by focusing on particular eras and the contributions of specific figures at particular times in history. There are chapters on the Old and New Testaments, the patristic era, early Christendom, the High Middle Ages, the Reformation, and modernity. Key people considered in these chapters include the biblical figures of Moses, Jesus, Paul, and John, as well as later historical figures such as Constantine, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, and Roger Williams, reflecting several of the particular theological traditions that have developed within Christianity over time. The legal chapters focus on several of the central and most important doctrines and principles of constitutional law, evaluating them from a range of Christian perspectives. Key topics include sovereignty, the rule of law, democracy, the separation of powers, human rights, conscience, and federalism. The theological chapters then focus on particular Christian doctrines, exploring their constructive and sometimes critical implications for constitutional law and constitutionalism. There are chapters on revelation, the Trinity, Christology, political authority, natural law, subsidiarity, and eschatology.
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Strange, Jason G. Shelter from the Machine. University of Illinois Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043031.001.0001.
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Drawing upon deep ethnographic fieldwork, and written in lively prose that weaves together story and evidence, the book explores contemporary homesteading in Appalachia as a means of resistance to capitalist modernity. It is framed around two questions: Why are people still pursuing rural subsistence? And why are they often divided into two main groups, known to each other--not always kindly--as “hicks” and “hippies”? These turn out to be urgent questions, considering that the cultural divide between these two groups is one instance of the dangerous and growing schism between “liberal” and “conservative” in the contemporary United States. Because the answer turns upon the distribution of literacy and literate education, these also turn out to be profound questions that cannot be answered without exploring the inner workings of class and capitalism. Thus, the narrative begins by telling the complex and often misunderstood histories of both groups of back-to-the-landers, but turns in the middle chapters to an analysis of the ways in which working-class people are rendered educationally dispossessed through schooling and jobs, as well as discussion of the often devastating consequences of that dispossession. In the final chapter, the book returns to homesteading as a form of resistance, to address the question of whether it provides, as practitioners hope, a measure of shelter from the machine.
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de Faria Pereira, Mateus Henrique, and Valdei Lopes de Araujo. Updatism' and the Understanding of Time and History. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350410756.
Full textAbstract:
This book enables us to understand the current transformations in the experience of time that have been taking place in recent decades. Mateus Henrique de Faria Pereira and Valdei Lopes de Araujo convincingly argue that we live in a time of ‘Updatism’, the temporal dimension that emerges in those societies imprisoned by the structures of infinite expansion, and that this Updatism has profound consequences for how we think about the past, the present and the future. Using the theoretical works of Lyotard and Heidegger as its foundation, 'Updatism' and the Understanding of Time and History analyses our digital modernity and the significance of key themes, such as updating, solitude, democracy, internet, exposure, postmodernism and historicism. It discusses aspects of our present time that reveal substantial differences between the historicist-modern time, usually located in the 19th century, and an emergent ‘chronotope’ or ‘regime of historicity’ understood and explained here as Updatism. The book is effective in mapping the ubiquity of Updatism and the anxiety-inducing insistence of being constantly updated, as well as exploring some searching questions: If our reality is constantly being updated, and its previous versions are deleted or inaccessible, what does this mean for memory and our understanding of history? And what does this tell us about the world we live in today and the one we may update to in the future?
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Cave, Stephen, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, eds. AI Narratives. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846666.001.0001.
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This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real artificial intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed, and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue. Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. These chapters explore the revealing prehistory of key concerns of contemporary AI discourse, from the nature of mind and creativity to issues of power and rights, from the tension between fascination and ambivalence to investigations into artificial voices and technophobia. Part II focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerged alongside rapid developments in AI technology. These chapters reveal not only how AI narratives have consistently been entangled with the emergence of real robotics and AI, but also how they offer a rich source of insight into how we might live with these revolutionary machines. Through their close textual engagements, these chapters explore the relationship between imaginative narratives and contemporary debates about AI’s social, ethical, and philosophical consequences, including questions of dehumanization, automation, anthropomorphization, cybernetics, cyberpunk, immortality, slavery, and governance. The contributions, from leading humanities and social science scholars, show that narratives about AI offer a crucial epistemic site for exploring contemporary debates about these powerful new technologies.
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Meschonnic, Henri. The Henri Meschonnic Reader. Edited by Marko Pajevic. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474445962.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language and all that depends on it. His work has had a shaping influence in various fields and its importance is growing. Here, for the first time, some of the key texts are made available in English for a new generation of scholars in the humanities. By introducing key works of Henri Meschonnic, this Reader will enrich, enhance and challenge your understanding of language. This book includes fourteen key texts which cover the core concepts and topics of Meschonnic’s theory. It explores his key ideas on poetics, the poem, rhythm, discourse and his critique of the sign. Meschonnic’s vast oeuvre was continuously preoccupied with the question of a poetics of society; he constantly connected the theory of language to its practice in various fields and interrogated what that means for the individual and society. In exploring this fundamental question, this book is central to the study and philosophy of language, with rich repercussions in fields such as translation studies, poetics and literary studies, and in redefining notions such as rhythm, modernity, the poem and the subject. The Reader is accompanied by introductory texts to Meschonnic, his key concepts and his poetics of society, as well as by a glossary, index and bibliography.
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Gat, Azar. Ideological Fixation. Oxford University PressNew York, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197646700.001.0001.
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Abstract After theorists around 1960 proclaimed the “death of ideology”, ideological divides and clashes have re-emerged with renewed intensity throughout the world. In the United States they have become particularly venomous. Each side in America’s escalating ideological civil war charges the other with concocting “fake news” and “alternative facts”. The other side is widely viewed as malicious, irrational, or downright stupid, and, often, as barely legitimate. People are deaf to claims about reality that come from the opposite camp, no matter how valid they might be. The zeal of the opposing sides is often scarcely less than that which characterized the religious ideologies of old. Indeed, historical religious ideologies have largely been replaced by “secular religions” or “religion substitutes”. Ideology consists of normative prescriptions regarding how society should be shaped, together with an interpretive roadmap indicating how this normative vision can be implemented in reality. Ideological fixation is the result of tensions and conflicts between these two elements. The book focuses on ideologies’ factual claims about the world, typically subordinate to, and often distorted by, their normative commitment. In exploring this phenomenon, the book combines insights from evolutionary psychology regarding the nature of some of our deepest proclivities with a broad sweep through history. It proceeds from the Stone Age to the rise of civilization, the great religions, and modernity, to a critique of fundamental factual premises that underlie some of the major debates dominating today’s liberal democracies, not least the United States.
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Charbonneau, Oliver. Civilizational Imperatives. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501750724.001.0001.
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This book reveals the little-known history of the United States' colonization of the Philippines' Muslim South in the early twentieth century. Often referred to as Moroland, the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao were sites of intense US engagement and laboratories of colonial modernity during an age of global imperialism. Exploring the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized from the late nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War, the book argues that American power in the Islamic Philippines rested upon a transformative vision of colonial rule. Civilization, protection, and instruction became watchwords for U.S. military officers and civilian administrators, who enacted fantasies of racial reform among the diverse societies of the region. Violence saturated their efforts to remake indigenous politics and culture, embedding itself into governance strategies used across four decades. Although it took place on the edges of the Philippine colonial state, this fraught civilizing mission did not occur in isolation. It shared structural and ideological connections to U.S. settler conquest in North America and also borrowed liberally from European and Islamic empires. These circuits of cultural, political, and institutional exchange — accessed by colonial and anticolonial actors alike — gave empire in the Southern Philippines its hybrid character. This book is a story of colonization and connection, reaching across nations and empires in its examination of a Southeast Asian space under US sovereignty. It presents an innovative new portrait of the American empire's global dimensions and the many ways they shaped the colonial encounter in the Southern Philippines.
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Roski, Stefan, and Benjamin Schnieder, eds. Bolzano's Philosophy of Grounding. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192847973.001.0001.
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One of the liveliest debates in contemporary philosophy concerns the notions of grounding and metaphysical explanation. Many consider these notions to be of prime importance for metaphysics and the philosophy of explanation, or even for philosophy in general, and lament that they had been neglected for far too long. Although the current debate about grounding is of recent origin, its central ideas have a long and rich history in Western philosophy, going back at least to the works of Plato and Aristotle. Bernard Bolzano’s theory of grounding, developed in the first half of the nineteenth century, is a peak in the history of these ideas. On Bolzano’s account, grounding lies at the heart of a broad conception of explanation encompassing both causal and non-causal cases. Not only does his theory exceed most earlier theories in scope, depth, and rigour, it also anticipates a range of ideas that take a prominent place in the contemporary debate. But despite the richness and modernity of his theory, it is known only by a comparatively small circle of philosophers predominantly consisting of Bolzano scholars. This book is meant to make Bolzano’s ideas on grounding accessible to a broader audience. The book gathers translations of Bolzano’s most important writings on these issues, including material that has hitherto not been available in English. Additionally, it contains a survey article on Bolzano’s conception and nine research papers critically assessing elements of the theory and/or exploring its broad range of applications in Bolzano’s philosophy and beyond.
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Tweedie, James. Moving Pictures, Still Lives. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190873875.001.0001.
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Moving Pictures, Still Lives revisits the cinematic and intellectual atmosphere of the late twentieth century, exploring the work of artists and philosophers who complicated the usual association between the past and tradition or the future and modernity. The book retraces the “archaeomodern turn” in media and theory that viewed the past as a repository of abandoned but potentially transformative modern experiments. Three theoretical chapters consider key figuresWalter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Serge Daney—who grappled with the late twentieth century’s characteristic concerns, including history, memory, and belatedness. It reframes this theoretical work on film as a mourning play for revolutions past and a means of reviving the possibilities of the modern age (and its paradigmatic medium, cinema) during periods of political and cultural retrenchment. Like Daney, the book emphasizes the value of looking at cinema and the century in the “rear—view mirror,” at the aging of a quintessentially modern art like film, and at the phantoms that remain after the passage into the era of new media. The second part of the manuscript, titled “The Cinema of Painters,” is structured around a series of interactions among media, filmmakers, and national traditions. It examines late twentieth—century filmmakers who systematically adopt strategies normally associated with other visual media or art forms, especially painting. Focusing on Alain Cavalier, Terence Davies, Jean—Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, and AgnèVarda, the book concentrates on films that fill the frame with a succession of tableaux vivants, still lifes, illuminated manuscripts, and landscapes.
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Hawkes, Joel, ed. Mary Butts. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501380747.
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A scholarly and experimental collection that offers fresh insight—with a feminist focus—into the often overlooked modernist writer Mary Butts and the contested processes of recovering such an author. Scholars instrumental in the recovery of Mary Butts, along with newer writers, publishers, printers, and artists, enter into conversation exploring the work of the British author, whose body of work plays between high modernist forms and more popular genres—writing that can be described as occult, Gothic, queer, proto-environmental, and feminist. Taking its cue from Butts’s experimental, rhythmic writing and the transnational artistic communities in which Butts moved in the 1920s, the collection is a non-linear exchange rather than a collection of isolated arguments—a conversation constructed from "classical" academic chapters, "knight’s move" non-academic reflections, and short responses to these. This conversation lies at the intersection of "feminism" and "reconstruction": Chapters range between Butts’s writing techniques and forms, her position in the modernist canon, contested sites of feminism in her work, critical reception of that work, queer and post-critical readings, and the success of, and the need for, a feminist recovery of the author. The collection aims to be a feminist engagement, while asking questions of what this might look like, why it is needed, and how such an approach offers fresh insight into an erudite, playful, difficult, contradictory, and experimental body of work. Ultimately, the collection asks, how should we reconstruct the author and her work for the contemporary reader?
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Corbett, Mary Jean. Behind the Times. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501752469.001.0001.
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Virginia Woolf, throughout her career as a novelist and critic, deliberately framed herself as a modern writer invested in literary tradition but not bound to its conventions; engaged with politics but not a propagandist; a woman of letters but not a “lady novelist.” As a result, Woolf ignored or disparaged most of the women writers of her parents' generation, leading feminist critics to position her primarily as a forward-thinking modernist who rejected a stultifying Victorian past. This book finds that Woolf did not dismiss this history as much as she boldly rewrote it. Exploring the connections between Woolf's immediate and extended family and the broader contexts of late-Victorian literary and political culture, the book emphasizes the ongoing significance of the previous generation's concerns and controversies to Woolf's considerable achievements. It rereads and revises Woolf's creative works, politics, and criticism in relation to women writers including the New Woman novelist Sarah Grand, the novelist and playwright Lucy Clifford, and the novelist and anti-suffragist Mary Augusta Ward. The book explores Woolf's attitudes to late-Victorian women's philanthropy, the social purity movement, and women's suffrage. Closely tracking the ways in which Woolf both followed and departed from these predecessors, the book complicates Woolf's identity as a modernist, her navigation of the literary marketplace, her ambivalence about literary professionalism and the mixing of art and politics, and the emergence of feminism as a persistent concern of her work.
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Østermark-Johansen, Lene. Walter Pater's European Imagination. Oxford University PressOxford, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192858757.001.0001.
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Abstract Walter Pater’s European Imagination addresses Pater’s literary cosmopolitanism as the first in-depth study of his fiction in dialogue with European literature. Pater’s short pieces of fiction, the so-called ‘imaginary portraits’, trace the development of the European self over a period of some two thousand years. They include elements of travelogue and art criticism, together with discourses on myth, history, and philosophy, and are not easily classified. With settings ranging from ancient Greece to nineteenth-century England, they engage with the visual arts and operate pictorially in a series of receding planes of frame, foreground, and background. Examining Pater’s methods of composition, use of narrative voice, and construction of character, the book draws on all of Pater’s oeuvre and includes discussions of a range of his unpublished manuscripts, essays, and reviews. It engages with Pater’s dialogue with the visual portrait and problematizes the oscillation between type and individual, the generic and the particular, which characterizes both the visual and the literary portrait. Exploring Pater’s involvement with nineteenth-century historiography and collective memory, the book positions Pater’s fiction solidly within such nineteenth-century genres as the historical novel and the Bildungsroman, while also discussing the portraits as specimens of biographical writing. As the ‘Ur-texts’ from which generations of modernist life-writing developed, Pater’s ‘imaginary portraits’ became pivotal for such modernist writers as Virginia Woolf and Harold Nicolson, and Walter Pater’s European Imagination explores such twentieth-century successors, together with French precursors like Sainte-Beuve and followers like Marcel Schwob.
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Coates, Ruth. Deification in Russian Religious Thought. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198836230.001.0001.
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Deification in Russian Religious Thought is a study of the reception of the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) doctrine of deification by Russian religious thinkers of the immediate pre-revolutionary period. Deification is the metaphor that the Greek patristic tradition came to privilege in its articulation of the Christian concept of salvation: to be saved is to be deified, that is, to share in the divine attribute of immortality. The central thesis of this book is that between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Russian religious thinkers turned to deification in their search for a response to the imminent destruction of the Russian autocracy (and the social and religious order that supported it), that was commensurate with its perceived apocalyptic significance. Contextual chapters set out the parameters of the Greek patristic understanding of deification and the reception of the idea in nineteenth-century Russian religious culture, literature, and thought. Then, four major works by prominent thinkers of the Russian Religious Renaissance are analysed, demonstrating the salience of the deification theme and exploring the variety of forms of its expression. In these works by Merezhkovsky, Berdiaev, Bulgakov, and Florensky, deification is taken out of its original theological context and applied respectively to politics, creativity, economics, and asceticism: this is presented as a modernist endeavour. Nevertheless their common emphasis on deification as a project, a practice that should deliver the ontological transformation and immortalization of human beings, society, culture, and the material universe, whilst likewise modernist, is also what connects them to deification’s theological source.
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Smith, Daniel R. Comedy and Critique. Policy Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781529200157.001.0001.
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Comedy & Critique is a sociological inquiry which seeks to engage with the art-world of the stand-up comedian as well as providing an interpretation of comedic works. It demonstrates a correspondence between what is happening within stand-up comedy and what is going on in the society from which the comic material arises. The book demonstrates that stand-up comedians are engaged in a proto-sociological enterprise, a method of ‘doing’ sociology. Comedian’s material may be viewed as a comedic acting out of forms of sociological knowledge, an act which is self-driven and intra-personal. Stand-up comedians came to their proto-sociology as stand-up in Britain moved from the fringes of entertainment in working man’s clubs to Fringe theatre. Through this transition stand-up became a space where a ‘New Left’ politics of anti-racism, feminism and a queering of self and society was both lived and artfully positioned. By exploring the ‘art of stand-up’, as a modernist art-form and professionalised industry, the book argues that stand-up is the art of building and improvising social relations.
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Brady, Deirdre F. Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers' Club (1933-1958). Liverpool University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789622461.001.0001.
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This book presents a vivid history of the pioneering women involved in the Women Writers’ Club, showcasing their achievements, and challenging existing orthodoxy on the role of women in Irish print culture. As publishers in private printing presses, as writers of dissent texts, as political campaigner against creative censorship, and for the right to intellectual freedom, a radical group of women formed a female-only coterie to foster women’s writing and maintain a public space for women writers. This book offers a history of the Women Writers’ Club (1933-1958), examining its ethos, social and political struggles, and the body of works created and celebrated by its members. Exploring the period through a history of the book approach, this book covers social events, reading committees, literary prizes, publishing histories, modernist printing presses, book fairs, reading practices, intellectual circles, and the various political philosophies shared by members of the Club. It reveals how professional women writers deployed their networks and connections to carve out a space for their writing in the cultural marketplace, co-mingling with other artistic groups to fight for freedom of expression and the right to earn a living by the pen.
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Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories. Edited by Anthony Mellors and Fiona Robertson. Oxford University Press, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/owc/9780199552542.001.0001.
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The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a vivid psychological account of a young man’s experience of fighting in the American Civil War, based on Crane’s reading of popular descriptions of battle. The intensity of its narrative and its naturalistic power earned Crane instant success, and led to his spending most of his brief remaining life war reporting. The other stories collected in this volume draw on this experience; ‘The Open Boat’ (1898) was inspired by his fifty hour struggle with waves after his ship was sunk during an expedition to Cuba; ‘The Monster’ (1899) is a bitterly ironic commentary on the ostracization of a doctor for harbouring the servant who was disfigured and lost his sanity rescuing his son. As a rare example of Crane working in a vein of American Gothic, it is particularly striking for its treatment of race and social injustice. ‘The Blue Hotel’ traces the events that lead to a murder at a bar in a small Nebraska town. This edition is the most generously annotated edition of Crane’s work, exploring it from a fresh critical perspective and focusing on his place as an experimental writer, his modernist legacy and his social as well as literary revisionism.
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Camlot, Jason. Phonopoetics. Stanford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9781503605213.001.0001.
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Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early “talking records” and their significance for literature from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker, and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot’s experimental readings of “The Wasteland” and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to Modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.