Inexorable Modernity

Inexorable Modernity
Author: Hiroshi Nara
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780739118429

Beginning in the late Edo period, the Japanese faced a rapidly and irreversibly changing world in which industrialization, westernization, and internationalization were exerting pressure upon an entrenched traditional culture. The Japanese themselves felt threatened by Western powers, with their sense of superiority and military might. Yet the Japanese were more prepared to meet this challenge than was thought at the time, and they used a variety of strategies to address the tension between modernity and tradition. Inexorable Modernity illuminates our understanding of how Japan has dealt with modernity and of what mechanisms, universal and local, we can attribute to the mode of negotiation between tradition and modernity in three major forms of art: theatre, the visual arts, and literature. Dr. Hiroshi Nara brings together a thoughtful collection of essays that demonstrate that traditional and modern approaches to life draw from one another, and tradition, whether real or created, was sought out in order to find a way to live with the burden of modernity. Inexorable Modernity is a valuable and enlightening read for those interested in Asian studies and history. Book jacket.

Organizing Modernity

Organizing Modernity
Author: Larry Ray
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2002-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134879164

This book provides a reassessment of the significance of Max Weber's work for the current debates about the institutional and organizational dynamics of modernity. It re-evaluates Weber's sociology of bureaucracy and his general account of the trajectory of modernity with reference to the strategic social structures that dominated the emergence and development of modern society. Included here are detailed analyses of contemporary issues such as the collapse of communism, fordism, coporatism and traditionalism in both Western and Eastern societies. All of the contributors are scholars of international repute. They undertake analyses of Weber's texts and his broader intellectual inheritance to reassert the centrality of Weberian sociology for our understanding of the moral, political and organizational dilemmas of late modernity. These analyses challenge orthodox readings of Weber as the prophet of the iron cage. Instead they offer interpretations of his work which emphasize the reality of modernity as a dual process with the potential for both disarticulation of rational structures and deeper colonization of daily life. Not only is this book essential reading for Weber specialists but it also provides compelling analyses of modernity and the inherently contingent nature of global cultural and stuctural transformation. Martin Albrow, Roehampton Institute; Stewart Clegg, University of Western Sydney; David Chalcraft, Oxford Brookes University; John Eldridge, Glasgow University; Larry J

Epic

Epic
Author: Herbert F. Tucker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 748
Release: 2012-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199232997

Literary history has conventionally viewed Milton as the last real practitioner of the epic in English verse. Herbert Tucker's spirited book shows that the British tradition of epic poetry was unbroken from the French Revolution to World War I.

Two-Timing Modernity

Two-Timing Modernity
Author: Keith J. Vincent
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2020-05-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1684175283

"Until the late nineteenth century, Japan could boast of an elaborate cultural tradition surrounding the love and desire that men felt for other men. By the first years of the twentieth century, however, as heterosexuality became associated with an enlightened modernity, love between men was increasingly branded as “feudal” or immature. The resulting rupture in what has been called the “male homosocial continuum” constitutes one of the most significant markers of Japan’s entrance into modernity. And yet, just as early Japanese modernity often seemed haunted by remnants of the premodern past, the nation’s newly heteronormative culture was unable and perhaps unwilling to expunge completely the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse. Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors—Mori Ōgai, Natsume Sōseki, Hamao Shirō, and Mishima Yukio—encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by employing new narrative techniques to stage tensions between two forms of temporality: the forward-looking time of modernization and normative development, and the “perverse” time of nostalgia, recursion, and repetition."

The Other Roots

The Other Roots
Author: Pedro Meira Monteiro
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2017-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0268102368

First published in 1936, the classic work Roots of Brazil by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda presented an analysis of why and how a European culture flourished in a large tropical environment that was totally foreign to its traditions, and the manner and consequences of this development. In The Other Roots, Pedro Meira Monteiro contends that Roots of Brazil is an essential work for understanding Brazil and the current impasses of politics in Latin America. Meira Monteiro demonstrates that the ideas expressed in Roots of Brazil have taken on new forms and helped to construct some of the most lasting images of the country, such as the "cordial man," a central concept that expresses the Ibero-American cultural and political experience and constantly wavers between liberalism's claims to impersonality and deeply ingrained forms of personalism. Meira Monteiro examines in particular how "cordiality" reveals the everlasting conflation of the public and the private spheres in Brazil. Despite its ambivalent relationship to liberal democracy, Roots of Brazil may be seen as part of a Latin Americanist assertion of a shared continental experience, which today might extend to the idea of solidarity across the so-called Global South. Taking its cue from Buarque de Holanda, The Other Roots investigates the reasons why national discourses invariably come up short, and shows identity to be a poetic and political tool, revealing that any collectivity ultimately remains intact thanks to the multiple discourses that sustain it in fragile, problematic, and fascinating equilibrium.

Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right

Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right
Author: Kimberly Jannarone
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2015-11-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472121391

Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right challenges assumptions regarding “radical” and “experimental” performance that have long dominated thinking about the avant-garde. The book brings to light vanguard performances rarely discussed: those that support totalitarian regimes, promote conservative values, or have been effectively snapped up by right-wing regimes the performances intended to oppose. In so doing, the volume explores a central paradox: how innovative performances that challenge oppressive power structures can also be deployed in deliberate, passionate support of oppressive power. Essays by leading international scholars pose engaging questions about the historical avant-garde, vanguard acts, and the complex role of artistic innovation and live performance in global politics. Focusing on performances that work against progressive and democratic ideas (including scripted drama, staged suicide, choral dance, terrorism, rallies, and espionage), the book demonstrates how many compelling performance ideals—unification, exaltation, immersion—are, in themselves, neither moral nor immoral; they are only emotional and aesthetic urges that can be powerfully channeled into a variety of social and political outlets.

Thai Art

Thai Art
Author: David Teh
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2017-03-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262338920

The interplay of the local and the global in contemporary Thai art, as artists strive for international recognition and a new meaning of the national. Since the 1990s, Thai contemporary art has achieved international recognition, circulating globally by way of biennials, museums, and commercial galleries. Many Thai artists have shed identification with their nation; but “Thainess” remains an interpretive crutch for understanding their work. In this book, the curator and critic David Teh examines the tension between the global and the local in Thai contemporary art. Writing the first serious study of Thai art since 1992 (and noting that art history and criticism have lagged behind the market in recognizing it), he describes the competing claims to contemporaneity, as staked in Thailand and on behalf of Thai art elsewhere. He shows how the values of the global art world are exchanged with local ones, how they do and don't correspond, and how these discrepancies have been exploited. How can we make sense of globally circulating art without forgoing the interpretive resources of the local, national, or regional context? Teh examines the work of artists who straddle the local and the global, becoming willing agents of assimilation yet resisting homogenization. He describes the transition from an artistic subjectivity couched in terms of national community to a more qualified, postnational one, against the backdrop of the singular but waning sovereignty of the Thai monarchy and sustained political and economic turmoil. Among the national currencies of Thai art that Teh identifies are an agricultural symbology, a Siamese poetics of distance and itinerancy, and Hindu-Buddhist conceptions of charismatic power. Each of these currencies has been converted to a legal tender in global art—signifying sustainability, utopia, the conceptual, and the relational—but what is lost, and what may be gained, in such exchanges?

Antigone, Interrupted

Antigone, Interrupted
Author: Bonnie Honig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1107355648

Sophocles' Antigone is a touchstone in democratic, feminist and legal theory, and possibly the most commented upon play in the history of philosophy and political theory. Bonnie Honig's rereading of it therefore involves intervening in a host of literatures and unsettling many of their governing assumptions. Exploring the power of Antigone in a variety of political, cultural, and theoretical settings, Honig identifies the 'Antigone-effect' - which moves those who enlist Antigone for their politics from activism into lamentation. She argues that Antigone's own lamentations can be seen not just as signs of dissidence but rather as markers of a rival world view with its own sovereignty and vitality. Honig argues that the play does not offer simply a model for resistance politics or 'equal dignity in death', but a more positive politics of counter-sovereignty and solidarity which emphasizes equality in life.

Print Cultures

Print Cultures
Author: Caroline Davis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2019-07-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1349930512

This reader is the most comprehensive selection of key texts on twentieth and twenty-first century print culture yet compiled. Illuminating the networks and processes that have shaped reading, writing and publishing, the selected extracts also examine the effect of printed and digital texts on society. Featuring a general introduction to contemporary print culture and publishing studies, the volume includes 42 influential and innovative pieces of writing, arranged around themes such as authorship, women and print culture, colonial and postcolonial publishing and globalisation. Offering a concise survey of critical work, this volume is an essential companion for students of literature or publishing with an interest in the history of the book.

Historical Dictionary of Japan to 1945

Historical Dictionary of Japan to 1945
Author: Kenneth Henshall
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 630
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0810878720

The Historical Dictionary of Japan to 1945 spans the entire period from the earliest evidence of human habitation in Japan through to the end of the Pacific War. It includes substantial topics such as cultural and literary history, with entries ranging from aesthetics to various genres of writing. Other branches of history also feature, such as economic history, industrial history, political history, and so forth. And of course there are the makers of Japanese history, ranging from emperors and shoguns to politicians and extremists – as well as foreign arrivals. The early history of Japan is told through a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, an extensive bibliography, and over 800 cross-referenced dictionary entries on important people, organizations, activities, and events. The Historical Dictionary of Japan to 1945 will appeal to both academics and the general public who have an interest in Japan, particularly those who want reliable information quickly and easily.