Writing disenchantment

Writing disenchantment
Author: Andrew Frayn
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2015-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526103184

It has become axiomatic that First World War literature was disenchanted, or disillusioned, and returning combatants were unable to process or communicate that experience. In Writing disenchantment, Andrew Frayn argues that this was not just about the war: non-combatants were just as disenchanted as those who fought, and writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf produced some of the sharpest criticisms. Its language already existed in contemporary sociological and historical accounts of the problems of mass culture and the modern city, whose structures contained the conflict and were strengthened during it. Archival material, sales data and reviews are used to chart disenchantment in a wide range of early twentieth-century war literature from novels about fears of invasion and pacifism, through the modernist novels of the 1920s to its dominance in the War Books Boom of 1928–30. This book will appeal to scholars and students of English literature, social and cultural history, and gender studies.

The Myth of Disenchantment

The Myth of Disenchantment
Author: Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2017-05-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 022640336X

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures

Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures
Author: Max Weber
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1681373904

A new translation of two celebrated lectures on politics, academia, and the disenchantment of the world. The German sociologist Max Weber is one of the most venturesome, stimulating, and influential theorists of the modern condition. Among his most significant works are the so-called vocation lectures, published shortly after the end of World War I and delivered at the invitation of a group of student activists. The question the students asked Weber to address was simple and haunting: In a modern world characterized by the division of labor, economic expansion, and unrelenting change, was it still possible to consider an academic or political career as a genuine calling? In response Weber offered his famous diagnosis of “the disenchantment of the world,” along with a challenging account of the place of morality in the classroom and in research. In his second lecture he introduced the notion of political charisma, assigning it a central role in the modern state, even as he recognized that politics is more than anything “a slow and difficult drilling of holes into hard boards.” Damion Searls’s new translation brings out the power and nuance of these celebrated lectures. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s introduction describes their historical and biographical background, reception, and influence. Weber’s effort to rethink the idea of a public calling at the start of the tumultuous twentieth century is revealed to be as timely and stirring as ever.

The Problem of Disenchantment

The Problem of Disenchantment
Author: Egil Asprem
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 662
Release: 2018-05-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1438469942

Max Weber famously characterized the ongoing process of intellectualization and rationalization that separates the natural world from the divine (by excluding magic and value from the realm of science, and reason and fact from the realm of religion) as the "disenchantment of the world." Egil Asprem argues for a conceptual shift in how we view this key narrative of modernity. Instead of a sociohistorical process of disenchantment that produces increasingly rational minds, Asprem maintains that the continued presence of "magic" and "enchantment" in people's everyday experience of the world created an intellectual problem for those few who were socialized to believe that nature should contain no such incalculable mysteries. Drawing on a wide range of early twentieth-century primary sources from theoretical physics, occultism, embryology, radioactivity, psychical research, and other fields, Asprem casts the intellectual life of high modernity as a synchronic struggle across conspicuously different fields that shared surprisingly similar intellectual problems about value, meaning, and the limits of knowledge.

Disenchantment

Disenchantment
Author: Charles Edward Montague
Publisher: London Chatto & Windus 1922.
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1922
Genre: World War, 1914-1918
ISBN:

First prose work which criticized the way World War I was fought.

Disenchantment

Disenchantment
Author: Matt Groening
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019
Genre: Graphic novels
ISBN: 9781892849762

Revolution and Disenchantment

Revolution and Disenchantment
Author: Fadi A. Bardawil
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2020-04-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478007583

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

The Limits of Disenchantment

The Limits of Disenchantment
Author: Peter Dews
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1995
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781859840221

Explores some of the most urgent problems confronting contemporary European thought: the status of the subject after postmodernism, the ethical dimensions of critical theory, the encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy, and the possibilities of non-foundational metaphysical thought.

A Discourse on Disenchantment

A Discourse on Disenchantment
Author: Gilbert G. Germain
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 1993-02-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1438403968

This book is the first full-length study of the ongoing debate over the status of our "disenchanted" world—a world stripped of mysterious and supernatural forces by the demythologizing power of reason and modern science. It draws together for the first time the writings of various theorists on this theme, such as Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas, providing a coherent overview of an evolving dialogue, as well as Germain's own evaluation of the disenchantment problematic.