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Culture/Metaculture

Author: Francis Mulhern

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-01-04

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1134852223

Culture/Metaculture is a stimulating introduction to the meanings of 'culture' in contemporary Western society. This essential survey examines: * culture as an antidote to 'mass' modernity, in the work of Thomas Mann, Julien Benda, José Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim and F. R. Leavis * changing views of the term in the work of Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, T. S. Eliot and Richard Hoggart * post-war theories of 'popular' culture and the rise of Cultural Studies, paying particular attention to the key figures of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall * theories of 'metaculture', or the ways in which culture, however defined, speaks of itself. Francis Mulhern's interdisciplinary approach allows him to draw out the fascinating links between key political issues and the changing definitions of culture. The result is an unrivalled introduction to a concept at the heart of contemporary critical thought.

Metaculture

Author: Greg Urban

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9781452905433

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What Is Cultural Criticism?

Author: Francis Mulhern

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2024-06-04

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1804293385

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In What Is Cultural Criticism?, two leading critics grapple with problems of literature, politics and intellectual practice. The debate opens with Francis Mulhern's account of what he terms 'metacultural discourse'. This embraces two opposing critical traditions, the elite pessimism of Kulturkritik and the populist enthusiasms of Cultural Studies. Each in its own way dissolves politics into culture, Mulhern argues. Collini, on the other hand, protests that cultural criticism provides resources for genuine critical engagement with contemporary society. Tension between culture and politics there may be, but it works productively in both directions. This widely noticed encounter is that rare thing, a sustained debate in which, as Collini remarks, the protagonists not only exchange shots but also ideas. It concludes with Mulhern's engagement with Collini's writing on the subordination of universities to metrics and bureaucracy, and a companion rejoinder from Collini on Mulhern's study of the 'condition of culture novel' and his essays on questions of nationality and the politics of intellectuals.

Evolution and Human Behavior

Author: John Cartwright

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780262531702

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The book covers fundamental issues such as the origins and function of sexual reproduction, mating behavior, human mate choice, patterns of violence in families, altruistic behavior, the evolution of brain size and the origins of language, the modular mind, and the relationship between genes and culture.

Linguistic Turns, 1890-1950

Author: Ken Hirschkop

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-04-04

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0191062936

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Linguistic Turns rewrites the intellectual and cultural history of early twentieth-century Europe. In chapters that study the work of Saussure, Russell, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Cassirer, Shklovskii, the Russian Futurists, Ogden and Richards, Sorel, Gramsci, and others, it shows how European intellectuals came to invest 'language' with extraordinary force, at a time when the social and political order of the continent was itself in question. By examining linguistic turns in concert rather than in isolation, the volume changes the way we see them—no longer simply as moves in individual disciplines, but as elements of a larger constellation, held together by common concerns and anxieties. In a series of detailed readings, the volume reveals how each linguistic turn invested 'language as such' with powers that could redeem not just individual disciplines but Europe itself. It shows how, in the hands of different writers, language becomes a model of social and political order, a tool guaranteeing analytical precision, a vehicle of dynamic change, a storehouse of mythical collective energy, a template for civil society, and an image of justice itself. By detailing the force linguistic turns attribute to language, and the way in which they contrast 'language as such' with actual language, the volume dissects the investments made in words and sentences and the visions behind them. The constellation of linguistic turns is explored as an intellectual event in its own right and as the pursuit of social theory by other means.

Modernism Beyond the Avant-Garde

Author: Jason M. Baskin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1108423396

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Uses the idea of embodiment to reconceptualize postwar literary history and recognize the political significance of literary modernism after 1945.

Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

Author: Charles Crawford

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2013-03-07

Total Pages: 664

ISBN-13: 113478869X

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Evolutionary psychology is concerned with the adaptive problems early humans faced in ancestral human environments, the nature of psychological mechanisms natural selection shaped to deal with those ancient problems, and the ability of the resulting evolved psychological mechanisms to deal with the problems people face in the modern world. Evolutionary psychology is currently advancing our understanding of altruism, moral behavior, family violence, sexual aggression, warfare, aesthetics, the nature of language, and gender differences in mate choice and perception. It is helping us understand the relationship between cognitive science, developmental psychology, behavior genetics, personality, and social psychology. Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology provides an up-to-date review of the ideas, issues, and applications of contemporary evolutionary psychology. It is suitable for senior undergraduates, first-year graduate students, or professionals who wish to become conversant with the major issues currently shaping the emergence of this dynamic new field. It will be interesting to psychologists, cognitive scientists, and anyone using new developments in the theory of evolution to gain new insights into human behavior.

Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain

Author: Ryan Trimm

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-08-24

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1351754319

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Bringing together heritage studies and literary studies, this book examines heritage as a ubiquitous trope in contemporary Britain, a seemingly inescapable figure for relations to the past. Inheritance has been an important metaphor for characterizing cultural and political traditions since the 1970s, but one criticized for its conservatism and apparent disinheritance of "new" Britons. Engaging with contemporary literary and cinematic texts, the book interrogates metaphoric resonances: that bestowing past, receiving present, and transmitted bounty are all singular and unified; that transmission between past and present is smooth, despite heritage depending on death; that the past enjoins the present to conserve its legacy into the future. However, heritage offers an alternative to modern market-driven relations, transactions stressing connection only through a momentary exchange, for bequest resembles gift-giving and connects past to present. Consequently, heritage contains competing impulses, subtexts largely unexplored given the trope’s lapse into cliché. The volume charts how these resonances developed, as well as charting more contemporary aspects of heritage: as postmodern image, tourist industry, historic environment, and metaculture. These dimensions develop the trope, moving it from singular focus on continuity with the past to one more oriented around different lines of relation between past, present, and future. Heritage as a trope is explored through a wide range of texts: core accounts of political theory (Locke and Burke); seminal documents within historic conservation; phenomenology and poststructuralism; film and television (Merchant-Ivory, Downton Abbey); and a broad range of contemporary fiction from novelists including Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Alan Hollinghurst, Peter Ackroyd, and Helen Oyeyemi.

Understanding Culture

Author: Robert S. Wyer

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 1136642919

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This volume contains contributions from 24 internationally known scholars covering a broad spectrum of interests in cross-cultural theory and research. This breadth is reflected in the diversity of the topics covered in the volume, which include theoretical approaches to cross-cultural research, the dimensions of national cultures and their measurement, ecological and economic foundations of culture, cognitive, perceptual and emotional manifestations of culture, and bicultural and intercultural processes. In addition to the individual chapters, the volume contains a dialog among 14 experts in the field on a number of issues of concern in cross-cultural research, including the relation of psychological studies of culture to national development and national policies, the relationship between macro structures of a society and shared cognitions, the integration of structural and process models into a coherent theory of culture, how personal experiences and cultural traditions give rise to intra-cultural variation, whether culture can be validly measured by self-reports, the new challenges that confront cultural psychology, and whether psychology should strive to eliminate culture as an explanatory variable.