Five Faces of Modernity
Title | Five Faces of Modernity PDF eBook |
Author | Matei Călinescu |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Total Pages | 416 |
Release | 1987 |
Genre | Avant-Garde (Aesthetics) |
ISBN | 9780822307679 |
Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity--the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours--is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.
All that is Solid Melts Into Air
Title | All that is Solid Melts Into Air PDF eBook |
Author | Marshall Berman |
Publisher | Verso |
Total Pages | 388 |
Release | 1983 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780860917854 |
The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.
Kitsch and Art
Title | Kitsch and Art PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas Kulka |
Publisher | Penn State Press |
Total Pages | 148 |
Release | 2015-07-14 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0271074183 |
What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art seeks to give this phenomenon its due by exploring the basis of artistic evaluation and aesthetic value judgments. Tomas Kulka examines kitsch in the visual arts, literature, music, and architecture. To distinguish kitsch from art, Kulka proposes that kitsch depicts instantly identifiable, emotionally charged objects or themes, but that it does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes. He then addresses the deceptive nature of kitsch by examining the makeup of its artistic and aesthetic worthlessness. Ultimately Kulka argues that the mass appeal of kitsch cannot be regarded as aesthetic appeal, but that its analysis can illuminate the nature of art appreciation.
A Crime So Monstrous
Title | A Crime So Monstrous PDF eBook |
Author | E. Benjamin Skinner |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Total Pages | 341 |
Release | 2009-03-24 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0743290089 |
Based on four years of research in over a dozen countries across the globe, journalist Skinner provides a shocking expos of the inner workings of the modern-day slave trade. Maps.
The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
Title | The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter PDF eBook |
Author | Matei Calinescu |
Publisher | New York Review of Books |
Total Pages | 161 |
Release | 2018-03-20 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1681371952 |
A new translation of the only novel by lauded Romanian literary critic Matei Călinescu An NYRB Classics Original Ugly, unkempt, a haunter of low dives who begs for a living and lives on the street, Zacharias Lichter exists for all that in a state of unlikely rapture. After being engulfed by a divine flame as a teenager, Zacharias has devoted his days to doing nothing at all—apart, that is, from composing the odd poem he immediately throws away and consorting with a handful of stray friends: Poldy, for example, the catatonic alcoholic whom Zacharias considers a brilliant philosopher, or another more vigorous barfly whose prolific output of pornographic verses has won him the nickname of the Poet. Zacharias is a kind of holy fool, but one whose foolery calls in question both social convention and conventional wisdom. He is as much skeptic as ecstatic, affirming above all the truth of perplexity. This of course is what makes him a permanent outrage to the powers that be, be they reactionary or revolutionary, and to all other self-appointed champions of morality who are blind to their own absurdity. The only thing that scares Zacharias is that all-purpose servant of conformity, the psychiatrist. This Romanian classic, originally published under the brutally dictatorial Ceauşescu regime, whose censors initially let it pass because they couldn’t make head or tail of it, is as delicious and telling an assault on the modern world order as ever.
The Stuffed Owl
Title | The Stuffed Owl PDF eBook |
Author | D.B. Wyndham Lewis |
Publisher | New York Review of Books |
Total Pages | 324 |
Release | 2003-04-30 |
Genre | Poetry |
ISBN | 9781590170380 |
The editors of this legendary and hilarious anthology write: "It would seem at a hasty glance that to make an anthology of Bad Verse is on the whole a simple matter . . . On the contrary . . . Bad Verse has its canons, like Good Verse. There is bad Bad Verse and good Bad Verse. It has been the constant preoccupation of the compilers to include in this book chiefiy good Bad Verse." Here indeed one finds the best of the worst of the greatest poets of the English language, masterpieces of the maladroit by Dryden, Wordsworth, and Keats, among many others, together with an index ("Maiden, feathered, uncontrolled appetites of, 59;. . . Manure, adjudged a fit subject for the Muse, 91") that is itself an inspired work of folly.
Modernism and the Machinery of Madness
Title | Modernism and the Machinery of Madness PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Gaedtke |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 260 |
Release | 2017-10-26 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108307663 |
Modernism and the Machinery of Madness demonstrates the emergence of a technological form of paranoia within modernist culture which transformed much of the period's experimental fiction. Gaedtke argues that the works of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Anna Kavan, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and others respond to the collapse of categorical distinctions between human and machine. Modern British and Irish novels represent a convergence between technological models of the mind and new media that were often regarded as 'thought-influencing machines'. Gaedtke shows that this literary paranoia comes into new focus when read in light of twentieth-century memoirs of mental illness. By thinking across the discourses of experimental fiction, mental illness, psychiatry, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind, this book shows the historical and conceptual sources of this confusion as well as the narrative responses. This book contributes to the fields of modernist studies, disability studies, and medical humanities.