Symptoms of Modernity

Symptoms of Modernity
Author: Matti Bunzl
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2004-02-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520238435

This book is an ethnography of Central European modernity in the form of a comparative study of Jews and queers in late twentieth-century Vienna.

Symptoms of an Unruly Age

Symptoms of an Unruly Age
Author: Rivi Handler-Spitz
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 029574197X

Symptoms of an Unruly Age compares the writings of Li Zhi (1527–1602) and his late-Ming compatriots to texts composed by their European contemporaries, including Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Emphasizing aesthetic patterns that transcend national boundaries, Rivi Handler-Spitz explores these works as culturally distinct responses to similar social and economic tensions affecting early modern cultures on both ends of Eurasia. The paradoxes, ironies, and self-contradictions that pervade these works are symptomatic of the hypocrisy, social posturing, and counterfeiting that afflicted both Chinese and European societies at the turn of the seventeenth century. Symptoms of an Unruly Age shows us that these texts, produced thousands of miles away from one another, each constitute cultural manifestations of early modernity.

The Violence of Modernity

The Violence of Modernity
Author: Debarati Sanyal
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421429292

The Violence of Modernity turns to Charles Baudelaire, one of the most canonical figures of literary modernism, in order to reclaim an aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Works of modern literature are commonly theorized as symptomatic responses to the trauma of history. In a climate that tends to privilege crisis over critique, Debarati Sanyal argues that it is urgent to rethink literary experience in terms that recall its contestatory potential. Examining Baudelaire's poems afresh, she shifts the focus of critical attention toward an account of modernism as an active engagement with violence, specifically the violence of history in nineteenth-century France. Sanyal analyzes a literary current that uses the traditional hallmarks of modernism—irony, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and formalism—to challenge the historical violence of modernity. Baudelaire and the committed ironists writing in his wake teach us how to read and resist the violence of history, and thereby to challenge the melancholy tenor of our contemporary "wound culture." In a series of provocative readings, Sanyal presents Baudelaire's poetry as an aesthetic form that contests historical violence through rhetorical strategies of complicity, counterviolence, and critique. The book develops a new account of Baudelaire's significance as a modernist by dislodging him both from his traditional status as a practitioner of "art for art's sake" and from his more recent incarnation as the poet of trauma. Following her extended analysis of Baudelaire's poetry, Sanyal in later chapters considers a number of authors influenced by his strategies—including Rachilde, Virginie Despentes, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre—to examine the relevance of their interventions for our current climate of trauma and terror. The result is a study that underscores how Baudelaire's legacy continues to energize literary engagements with the violence of modernity.

Exploring Individual Modernity

Exploring Individual Modernity
Author: Alex Inkeles
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780231515344

With contributions by David H. Smith, Karen A. Miller, Amar K. Singh, Vern L. Bengston, and James J. Dowd.

Mental Health Symptoms in Literature since Modernism

Mental Health Symptoms in Literature since Modernism
Author: Nicolas Pierre Boileau
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2023-10-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031376307

The Function of Symptoms in British Literature since Modernism looks at various ways of treating symptoms of psychological disorders in the literature of the long twentieth century. This book shows that literature can, in its questioning of commonly accepted views of this lived experience of psychic symptoms, help engender new theories about the functioning of subjective cases. Modernism emerged at about the same time as Freudian psychoanalysis did and the aim of this book is to also show that to a certain extent, Woolf preceded Freud in her exploration of the symptom and contributed to fashioning another approach that is now more common, especially in writers from the 1990s-onwards.

Irony and the Discourse of Modernity

Irony and the Discourse of Modernity
Author: Ernst Behler
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0295801530

Behler discusses the current state of thought on modernity and postmodernity, detailing the intellectual problems to be faced and examining the positions of such central figures in the debate as Lyotard, Habermas, Rorty, and Derrida. He finds that beyond the “limits of communication,” further discussion must be carried out through irony. The historical rise of the concept of modernity is examined through discussions of the querelle des anciens et des modernes as a break with classical tradition, and on the theoretical writings of de Stael, the English romantics, and the great German romantics Schlegel, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The growth of the concept of irony from a formal rhetorical term to a mode of indirectness that comes to characterize thought and discourse generally is then examined from Plato and Socrates to Nietzsche, who avoided the term “irony” but used it in his cetnral concept of the mask.

Heidegger's Later Philosophy

Heidegger's Later Philosophy
Author: Julian Young
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2002
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521006095

Heidegger's later philosophy has often been regarded as a lapse into unintelligible mysticism. While not ignoring its deep and difficult complexities, Julian Young's book explains in simple and straightforward language just what it is all about. It examines Heidegger's identification of loss of 'the gods', the violence of technology, and humanity's 'homelessness' as symptoms of the destitution of modernity, and his notion that overcoming 'oblivion of Being' is the essence of a turning to a post-destitute, genuinely post-modern existence. Young argues that Heidegger's conception of such an overcoming is profoundly fruitful with respect to the ancient quest to discover the nature of the good life. His book will be an invaluable resource for both students and scholars of Heidegger's works.

The Sunset of Tradition and the Origin of the Great War

The Sunset of Tradition and the Origin of the Great War
Author: Alexander Wolfheze
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527517853

From a Traditionalist perspective, the cultural history of the Modern Era amounts to the genesis of the Dark Age. The Traditionalist meta-historical narrative deconstructs the modernist myth of “historic progress” as an anti-intellectual superstition. It exposes the quintessential features of Modernity – namely, secular nihilism, historical materialism, socio-political egalitarianism, and collective narcissism – as structural inversions of Traditional values. The historic accumulation of these inversions set the stage for a final showdown between Tradition and Modernity. In terms of ancient prophecy and Traditionalist philosophy, the Great War represents the apocalyptic sunset of the world of Tradition. This work follows the forgotten path of the philosophia perennis to trace the historic onset of the Dark Age. It clears away a century-deep deposit of “progressive” illusions and “politically-correct” axioms. The restored road of Traditional thought will lead a new generation of scholars to their rightful inheritance: an intellectual tabula rasa on which history can be written anew.

Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture

Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture
Author: R. Saunders
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2007-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230607055

Saunders analyzes the ideological uses of loss in literary, philosophical, and social texts from the late 19th and 20th centuries through the lens of women's lament traditions and includes philosophical texts by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida; and literary works by William Faulkner, Stéphane Mallarmé, Dimitris Hatzis, and Tahar Ben Jelloun.