Author: Franco Moretti Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 178168085X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
Who – and what – are the Bourgeois? “The bourgeois ... Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. ‘I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,’ wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois ‘opinions and ideals’—what are they?” Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature—a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti’s gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords—“useful” and “earnest,” “efficiency,” “influence,” “comfort,” “roba”—and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the “working master” of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the “national malformations” of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen’s twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance.
Author: Franco Moretti Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1781684855 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
"The bourgeois ... Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. 'I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,' wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois 'opinions and ideals'-what are they?" Thus begins Franco Moretti's study of the bourgeois in modern European literature-a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti's gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords-"useful" and "earnest," "efficiency," "influence," "comfort," "roba"-and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the "working master" of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the "national malformations" of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen's twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance.
Author: Alexander Kluge Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1784782416 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 353
Book Description
The “public sphere” is a key concept in political discourse, designating a space for political action. But is this a single authoritative and universal space in which various positions compete for recognition, or does it consist of multiple local spaces spread over diverse collectivities? In Kluge and Negt’s groundbreaking book they examine the material conditions of experience in an arena that had previously figured only as an abstract term: the media of mass and consumer culture. With a new, up-to-date introduction from Alexander Kluge.
Author: Franco Moretti Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1781684812 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions. From the evolutionary model of "Modern European Literature," through the geo-cultural insights of "Conjectures of World Literature" and "Planet Hollywood," to the quantitative findings of "Style, inc." and the abstract patterns of "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of "distant reading," that has come to define-well beyond the wildest expectations of its author-a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.
Author: Julia Prewitt Brown Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 9780813934280 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
From Robinson Crusoe’s cave to Henry Selwyn’s hermitage, the domestic interior tells a story about "things" and their relation to character and identity. Beginning with a description of a typical middle-class interior in America today—noting how its contents echo interiors described in literatures of the past—Julia Prewitt Brown asks why certain features persist, despite radical changes in domestic life over the past three hundred years. The answer lies, Brown argues, in the way the bourgeois interior functions as a medium, a many-layered fabric across which different energies travel, be they psychological, political, or aesthetic. In this way, objects are not symbols but rather the materials out of which symbols are made--symbols that constitute the very soul of the bourgeois. In a wide-ranging analysis, moving from works by Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Henry James to those by Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman, John Updike, and W. G. Sebald, Brown shows that what is at issue is less the economic basis of class than the bourgeoisie’s imagination of itself. The themes explored include the middle class’s ever-increasing desire for more wealth, as well as Victorian women’s identification with the domestic interior and the changes that took place when they began working outside the home. Brown also examines the ambivalence of economically determined objects both as repositories of memory and dreams and as fetishized commodities that become detached from everyday reality. Does the bourgeois possess the interior and its objects, or do the interior and its objects possess the bourgeois?
Author: Christof Dejung Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691195838 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 396
Book Description
This essay collection presents a global history of the middle class and its rise around the world during the age of empire. It compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods and was a result of international connections and entanglements. Grouped by theme, the book shows how bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order.
Author: Roger Magraw Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0195205030 Category : France Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
In this lively and stimulating study, Roger Magraw examines how the 19th-century French bourgeoisie struggled and eventually succeeded in consolidating the gains it made in 1789. The book describes the attempts of the bourgeoisie to remold France in its own image and its strategy for overcoming the resistance from the old aristocratic and clerical elites and the popular classes. Incorporating the most recent research on religion and anticlericalism, the development of the economy, the role of women in society, and the educational system, this work is the first to draw extensively on the new social history in its interpretation of events in 19th-century France.
Author: Didier Maleuvre Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1349948691 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
Didier Maleuvre argues that works of art in Western societies from Ancient Greece to the interconnected worlds of the Digital Age have served to rationalize and normalize an engagement with bourgeois civilization and the city. Maleuvre details that the history of art itself is the history civilization, giving rise to the particular aesthetics and critical attitudes of respective moments and movements in changing civilizations in a dialogical mode. Building a visual cultural account of shifting forms of culture, power, and subjectivity, Maleuvre illustrates how art gave a pattern and a language to the model of social authority rather than simply functioning as a reflective one. Through a broad cultural study of the relationship between humanity, art, and the culture of civilization, Maleuvre introduces a new set of paradigms that critique and affirm the relationship between humanity and art, arguing for it as an engine of social reproduction that transforms how culture is inhabited.
Author: Peter Uwe Hohendahl Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801496226 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 380
Book Description
Building a National Literature boldly takes issue with traditional literary criticism for its failure to explain how literature as a body is created and shaped by institutional forces. Peter Uwe Hohendahl approaches literary history by focusing on the material and ideological structures that determine the canonical status of writers and works. He examines important elements in the making of a national literature, including the political and literary public sphere, the theory and practice of literary criticism, and the emergence of academic criticism as literary history. Hohendahl considers such key aspects of the process in Germany as the rise of liberalism and nationalism, the delineation of the borders of German literature, the idea of its history, the understanding of its cultural function, and the notion of a canon of major and minor authors.
Author: Franco Moretti
Author: Franco Moretti
Author: Alexander Kluge
Author: Franco Moretti
Author: Julia Prewitt Brown
Author: Christof Dejung
Author: Roger Magraw
Author: Didier Maleuvre
Author: Peter Uwe Hohendahl
Author: Richard T. Gray