The Promise of Nostalgia

The Promise of Nostalgia PDF

Author: Nicola Sayers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-01-08

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0429632517

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The Promise of Nostalgia analyses a range of texts – including The Virgin Suicides, both the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides’ and Sofia Coppola’s screen adaptation, photography of Detroit’s ‘abandoned spaces’, and blogger Tavi Gevinson's media output – to explore nostalgia as a prominent affect in contemporary American cultural production. Counter to the prevalent caricature of nostalgia as anti-future, the book proposes a more nuanced reading of its stakes and meanings. Instead of understanding it as evidence of the absence of utopia it contends that there is a masked utopian impulse in this nostalgia ‘mode’ and critical potential in what has typically been dismissed as ideological. This book will be of interest to scholars, graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students interested in contemporary culture, cultural theory, media studies, the Frankfurt School, utopian studies and American literature and culture.

The Hours Have Lost Their Clock

The Hours Have Lost Their Clock PDF

Author: Grafton Tanner

Publisher: Watkins Media Limited

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1913462544

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The Hours Have Lost Their Clock charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Grafton Tanner charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. Nostalgia is the defining emotion of our age. Political leaders promise a return to yesteryear. Old movies are remade and cancelled series are rebooted. Veterans reenact past wars, while the displaced across the world long for home. But who is behind this collective ache for a home in the past? Do we need to eliminate nostalgia, or just cultivate it better? And what is at stake if we make the wrong choice? Moving from the fight over Confederate monuments to the birth of homeland security to the mourning of species extinction, Grafton Tanner traces nostalgia’s ascent in the twenty-first century, revealing its power as both a consequence of our unstable time and a defense against it. With little faith in a future of climate change and economic anxiety, many have turned to nostalgia to weather the present, while powerful elites exploit it for their own gain. An exploration into the politics of loss and yearning, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock is an urgent call to take nostalgia seriously. The very future depends on it.

The False Promise of Liberal Order

The False Promise of Liberal Order PDF

Author: Patrick Porter

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-05-11

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1509542132

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In an age of demagogues, hostile great powers and trade wars, foreign policy traditionalists dream of restoring liberal international order. This order, they claim, ushered in seventy years of peace and prosperity and saw post-war America domesticate the world to its values. The False Promise of Liberal Order exposes the flaws in this nostalgic vision. The world shaped by America came about as a result of coercion and, sometimes brutal, compromise. Liberal projects – to spread capitalist democracy – led inadvertently to illiberal results. To make peace, America made bargains with authoritarian forces. Even in the Pax Americana, the gentlest order yet, ordering was rough work. As its power grew, Washington came to believe that its order was exceptional and even permanent – a mentality that has led to spiralling deficits, permanent war and Trump. Romanticizing the liberal order makes it harder to adjust to today’s global disorder. Only by confronting the false promise of liberal order and adapting to current realities can the United States survive as a constitutional republic in a plural world.

Zeitgeist Nostalgia

Zeitgeist Nostalgia PDF

Author: Alessandro Gandini

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2020-11-27

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1789044480

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We live an age of nostalgia, incarnated by populist fantasies of “taking back control” and making nations “great again". In the long aftermath of the 2007-08 economic crisis, nostalgia has been established as the cultural zeitgeist of Western society. Populist fantasies of nostalgia represent a cry for help against the demise of the societal model of the postwar era, based on stable employment and mass consumption. The promise of an impossible return to the 'good life' of the 20th century, Gandini contends, particularly appeals to the older generations, who are incapable of making sense of the evolution of Western societies after decades of globalization and neoliberal policies. The younger generations, in the meantime, are instead trying to build a new 'good life' based on another form of return, this time to old practices of craft production and consumption.

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel PDF

Author: John J. Su

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-11-24

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1139448536

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Images of loss and yearning played a crucial role in literary texts written in the later part of the twentieth century. Despite deep cultural differences, novelists from Africa, the Caribbean, Great Britain, and the United States share a sense that the economic, social, and political forces associated with late modernity have evoked widespread nostalgia within the communities in which they write. In this original and wide-ranging study, John J. Su explores the relationship between nostalgia and ethics in novels across the English-speaking world. He challenges the tendency in literary studies to characterise memory as positive and nostalgia as necessarily negative. Instead, this book argues that nostalgic fantasies are crucial to the ethical visions presented by topical novels. From Jean Rhys to Wole Soyinka and from V. S. Naipaul to Toni Morrison, Su identifies nostalgia as a central concern in the twentieth-century novel.

Screening Nostalgia

Screening Nostalgia PDF

Author: Christine Sprengler

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9781845455590

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Through a series of detailed visual analyses of popular films, the author demonstrates that the visual creation of 'pastness' does not necessarily sever our connection to history as is commonly claimed, but can yield new insights into the relationship between the present and the past.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia PDF

Author: Helmut Illbruck

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2012-10-31

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0810128373

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Helmut Illbruck traces the concept of nostalgia from the earliest uses of the term in the seventeenth century to today as it evolves with different meanings and intensities in the discourses of medicine, literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. Following nostalgia’s troubled relations to the philosophical project of the Enlightenment, Illbruck’s study builds a cumulative argument about nostalgia’s modern significance that often revises and thoroughly enriches our understanding of cultural, literary, and intellectual history. Illbruck concludes with an attempt at a reinterpretation and defense of nostalgia, which seduces us to read and think with, rather than against, nostalgia’s wistful yearning for the past. Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease is a comprehensive, insistent, and profound interdisciplinary investigation of the history of an idea. It should appeal to readers interested in the cultural makings of the Enlightenment and modernity or in the histories of medicine, literature, and philosophy.

Ecologies of Affect

Ecologies of Affect PDF

Author: Tonya K. Davidson

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2011-06-13

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1554583489

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Ecologies of Affect offers a synthetic introduction to the felt dynamics of cities and the character of places. The contributors capture the significance of affects including desire, nostalgia, memory, and hope in forming the identity and tone of places. The critical intervention this collection of essays makes is an active, consistent engagement with the virtualities that produce and refract our idealized attachments to place. Contributors show how place images, and attempts to build communities, are, rather than abstractions, fundamentally tied to and revolve around such intangibles. We understand nostalgia, desire, and hope as virtual; that is, even though they are not material, they are nevertheless real and must be accounted for. In this book, the authors take up affect, emotion, and emplacement and consider them in relation to one another and how they work to produce and are produced by certain temporal and spatial dimensions. The aim of the book is to inspire readers to consider space and place beyond their material properties and attend to the imaginary places and ideals that underpin and produce material places and social spaces. This collection will be useful to practitioners and students seeking to understand the power of affect and the importance of virtualities within contemporary societies, where intangible goods have taken on an increasing value.

Intimations of Nostalgia

Intimations of Nostalgia PDF

Author: Hviid Jacobsen, Michael

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2021-11-05

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1529214785

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Nostalgia, a complex and multi-layered emotion, has gained interest since the turn of the century in both society and academic circles. Written by an international group of scholars, this volume investigates the relationship between nostalgia and contemporary social issues from a multidisciplinary perspective. From history and political theory to marketing and media, each chapter discusses the way nostalgia has been presented within a disciplinary context and shows how it has evolved over time as a topic of research. Casting light on many recent changes in society and culture, this is an important contribution to the study of nostalgia and emotions.