Understanding modern societies : an introduction. 2. The political and economic forms of modernity PDF Download

Author: John Allen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780745609614
Category : Social structure
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Rachel Lynn Schmidt
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442642513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory. Schmidt's discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists' examinations of Cervantes's fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels.

Author: Stuart Hall
Publisher: Understanding Modern Societies
ISBN: 9780745609645
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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This book considers the social and cultural aspects of 20th-century modern industrial social formations, focusing on Britain and Europe, with reference to North America and Australasia. The main topics of the social dimension include an analysis of the class, gender and racial divsions; women, the family, and the romantic sphere; patterns of consumption; and conceptions of the self, the body and sexuality. The section on cultural dimensions focuses on an analysis of contemporary ideologies and belief systems; the growth in popular culture, the revolution in mass communications; the reshaping of knowledge in education and the modern metropolis as the privileged scene of modernity.

Author: Bram Gieben
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745609607
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Formations of Modernity is a major introductory textbook offering an account of the important historical processes, institutions and ideas that have shaped the development of modern societies. This challenging and innovative book 'maps' the evolution of those distinctive forms of political, economic, social and cultural life which characterize modern societies, from their origins in early modern Europe to the nineteenth century. It examines the roots of modern knowledge and the birth of the social sciences in the Enlightenment, and analyses the impact on the emerging identity of 'the West' of its encounters through exploration, trade, conquest and colonization, with 'other civilizations'. Designed as an introduction to modern societies and modern sociological analyses, this book is of value to students on a wide variety of social science courses in universities and colleges and also to readers with no prior knowledge of sociology. Selected readings from a broad range of classical writers (Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Freud, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) and contemporary thinkers (Michael Mann, E.P. Thompson, Edward Said) are integrated in each chapter, together with student questions and exercises.

Author: Claude Lefort
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262620545
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Claude Lefort is one of the leading social and political theorists in France today. This anthology of his most important work published over the last four decades makes his writing widely accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time. With exceptional skill Lefort combines the analysis of contemporary political events with a sensitivity to the history of political thought. His critical account of the development of bureaucracy and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a timely contribution to current debates about the nature and shortcomings of these societies. His incisive analyses of Marx's theory of history and concept of ideology provide the backdrop for a highly original account of the role of symbolism in modern societies. While critical of many traditional assumptions and doctrines, Lefort develops a political position based on a reappraisal of the idea of human rights and a reconsideration of what "democracy" means today. The Political Forms of Modern Society is a major contribution to contemporary social and political theory. The volume includes a substantial introduction that describes the context of Lefort's writings and highlights the central themes of his work.

Author: Daniel Chernilo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134150121
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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A Social Theory of the Nation-State construes a novel and original social theory of the nation-state. It rejects nationalistic ways of thinking that take the nation-state for granted as much as globalist orthodoxy that speaks of its current and definitive decline.

Author: Andrew Feenberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520915701
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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In this new collection of essays, Andrew Feenberg argues that conflicts over the design and organization of the technical systems that structure our society shape deep choices for the future. A pioneer in the philosophy of technology, Feenberg demonstrates the continuing vitality of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He calls into question the anti-technological stance commonly associated with its theoretical legacy and argues that technology contains potentialities that could be developed as the basis for an alternative form of modern society. Feenberg's critical reflections on the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-François Lyotard, and Kitaro Nishida shed new light on the philosophical study of technology and modernity. He contests the prevalent conception of technology as an unstoppable force responsive only to its own internal dynamic and politicizes the discussion of its social and cultural construction. This argument is substantiated in a series of compelling and well-grounded case studies. Through his exploration of science fiction and film, AIDS research, the French experience with the "information superhighway," and the Japanese reception of Western values, he demonstrates how technology, when subjected to public pressure and debate, can incorporate ethical and aesthetic values.

Author: James Wilkerson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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While in some cases modernity may place "traditional" forms of expression at a disadvantage, in others, the modern is embraced as a welcome source of new ideas that can be incorporated into "tradition" in order to change it, while remaining within its own parameters. This is actually likely to help a tradition survive. Maintaining a strong and distinct cultural identity with the help of modernity helps representatives of that identity cope with the modern world more generally. Assimilation to a dominant culture marked as modern, by contrast, is clearly associated with not only the loss of a distinct identity, but also its specific forms of cultural expression. This book explores the interface between modernity and tradition in selected societies in Taiwan, mainland China and Vietnam. The chapters question to what extent traditions are themselves exploiting modernity in creative ways, in the interests of their own further developments.

Author: Robert Bocock
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Women in Society, sexuality, etc.

Author: Debarati Sanyal
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421429292
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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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.