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Author: Peter Bürger
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 202
ISBN-13: 9780271008905
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this book, the author addresses the relationship between art and society, from the emergence of bourgeois culture in the eighteenth century to the decline of modernism in the twentieth century.
Author: John Marx
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2005-12-08
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 1139448722
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the early twentieth century, subjects of the British Empire ceased to rely on a model of centre and periphery in imagining their world and came instead to view it as an interconnected network of cosmopolitan people and places. English language and literature were promoted as essential components of a commercial, cultural, and linguistic network that spanned the globe. John Marx argues that the early twentieth century was a key moment in the emergence of modern globalization, rather than simply a period of British imperial decline. Modernist fiction was actively engaged in this transformation of society on an international scale. The very stylistic abstraction that seemed to remove modernism from social reality, in fact internationalized the English language. Rather than mapping the decline of Empire, modernist novelists such as Conrad and Woolf celebrated the shared culture of the English language as more important than the waning imperial structures of Britain.
Author: James Ferguson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1999-10-01
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 052092228X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline." Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives—the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies. Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.
Author: Jay David Bolter
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2019-05-07
Total Pages: 231
ISBN-13: 0262039737
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →How the creative abundance of today's media culture was made possible by the decline of elitism in the arts and the rise of digital media. Media culture today encompasses a universe of forms—websites, video games, blogs, books, films, television and radio programs, magazines, and more—and a multitude of practices that include making, remixing, sharing, and critiquing. This multiplicity is so vast that it cannot be comprehended as a whole. In this book, Jay David Bolter traces the roots of our media multiverse to two developments in the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of elite art and the rise of digital media. Bolter explains that we no longer have a collective belief in “Culture with a capital C.” The hierarchies that ranked, for example, classical music as more important than pop, literary novels as more worthy than comic books, and television and movies as unserious have broken down. The art formerly known as high takes its place in the media plenitude. The elite culture of the twentieth century has left its mark on our current media landscape in the form of what Bolter calls “popular modernism.” Meanwhile, new forms of digital media have emerged and magnified these changes, offering new platforms for communication and expression. Bolter outlines a series of dichotomies that characterize our current media culture: catharsis and flow, the continuous rhythm of digital experience; remix (fueled by the internet's vast resources for sampling and mixing) and originality; history (not replayable) and simulation (endlessly replayable); and social media and coherent politics.
Author: Kurt Heinzelman
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 171
ISBN-13: 0292702841
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →What was Modernism, and why does it still matter? The term itself first gained currency in the 1930s, describing a kind of art that already may have peaked, some would say as early as 1922. Whatever its ups and downs in its own time, as the novelist Julian Barnes claims in one of the twenty essays commissioned for the present volume, Modernism never vanished. It remains our immovable feast. Modernism was international in scope; it left its mark on all genres, from literature and painting to opera, dance, and architecture; it pushed the boundaries of what was artistically possible and aesthetically important; and finally, for all its destructive urges which it shared with the century itself, it was also celebrative. This book is a response to the exhibition of the same name that opened at the Harry Ransom Center in October 2003. It includes original essays by such noted writers and artists as Russell Banks, Anita Desai, David Douglas Duncan, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Penelope Lively, which offer fresh perspectives on important Modernist figures, including William Gaddis, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, E. M. Forster, Paul Robeson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. In addition, essays by leading scholars in literature and art history focus on specific artifacts included in the exhibit. As the Center's Director, Thomas F. Staley, puts it in the Foreword, "Ours is an attempt not of definition but of discovery and rediscovery." Book and exhibition permit both reader and viewer to experience the textures, structures, and resonances which made the first part of the twentieth century so innovative that its art is still virtually synonymous with what "newness" means.
Author: Peter Gay
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 664
ISBN-13: 9780393052053
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.
Author: Terence McIntosh
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 9780807850633
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →During the Middle Ages, southwest Germany was one of the most prosperous areas of central Europe, but the Thirty Years' War brought devastating social and economic dislocation to the region. Focusing on the town of Schw bisch Hall, Terence McIntosh explor
Author: Samuel Jay Keyser
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-03-03
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 0262043491
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one. At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations. Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared between artist and audience, and that this is virtually the same cognitive shift that occurred when scientists abandoned the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution. The cultural explanations for Modernism may still be relevant, but they are epiphenomenal rather than causal. Artists felt that traditional forms of art had been exhausted, and they began to resort to private formats—Easter eggs with hidden and often inaccessible meaning. Keyser proposes that when artists discarded their natural rule-governed aesthetic, it marked a cognitive shift; general intelligence took over from hardwired proclivity. Artists used a different part of the brain to create, and audiences were forced to play catch up.
Author: Joshua Esty
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-01-10
Total Pages: 303
ISBN-13: 1400825741
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.
Author: Nathan Glazer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-01-10
Total Pages: 309
ISBN-13: 1400827582
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This is the decisive conclusion that renowned public intellectual Nathan Glazer has drawn from two decades of writing and thinking about what this architectural movement will bequeath to future generations. In From a Cause to a Style, he proclaims his disappointment with modernism and its impact on the American city. Writing in the tradition of legendary American architectural critics Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Glazer contends that modernism, this new urban form that signaled not just a radical revolution in style but a social ambition to enhance the conditions under which ordinary people lived, has fallen short on all counts. The articles and essays collected here--some never published before, all updated--reflect his ideas on subjects ranging from the livable city and public housing to building design, public memorials, and the uses of public space. Glazer, an undisputed giant among public intellectuals, is perhaps best known for his writings on ethnicity and social policy, where the unflinching honesty and independence of thought that he brought to bear on tough social questions has earned him respect from both the Left and the Right. Here, he challenges us to face some difficult truths about the public places that, for better or worse, define who we are as a society. From a Cause to a Style is an exhilarating and thought-provoking book that raises important questions about modernist architecture and the larger social aims it was supposed to have addressed-and those it has abandoned.
