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Author: David Lowenthal Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1044
Book Description
"Heritage is a most compelling modern cause. In the last quarter century it has expanded from a small elite pastime to a major popular crusade - a crusade to save and celebrate anything and all that we inherit from the past. Everything - from Euro-Disney to the Holocaust Museum, from Balkan enmities to the Northern Irish troubles, from Elvis memorabilia to the Elgin marbles - bears the marks of the cult of heritage. Heritage attachments pervade politics and education and form our views on such diverse realms as heredity, environment, racism, and tourism." "Enthralled by the past, we deploy it for present benefits of every kind. A goodly heritage persuades us we belong to a community of like-minded folk and act within a tradition sanctified by age-old experience. Heritage is all the more valued in a world where turbulent change and global fears make the present seem frightful and the future fearsome. Yet the very zeal with which heritage is pursued leads to countless abuses of the treasured past. Roots and relics become weapons to foment hatred of others, to warp historical truth, to deform our own legacy, to further some class or cause. Despite new recognition that the world's diverse legacies belong to and require the care of all mankind, heritage passions remain animated largely by self-regarding chauvinism." "In Possessed by the Past, David Lowenthal explains the rise of this new obsession with the past and shows its power for both good and evil. He probes the passions that generate a need to find or invent a prideful past - or to mourn a grievous one - and shows how they are similar the world over. He demonstrates why and how relics, ancestry, and memory today, more than ever, become a source of both pride and peril."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: David Lowenthal Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1044
Book Description
"Heritage is a most compelling modern cause. In the last quarter century it has expanded from a small elite pastime to a major popular crusade - a crusade to save and celebrate anything and all that we inherit from the past. Everything - from Euro-Disney to the Holocaust Museum, from Balkan enmities to the Northern Irish troubles, from Elvis memorabilia to the Elgin marbles - bears the marks of the cult of heritage. Heritage attachments pervade politics and education and form our views on such diverse realms as heredity, environment, racism, and tourism." "Enthralled by the past, we deploy it for present benefits of every kind. A goodly heritage persuades us we belong to a community of like-minded folk and act within a tradition sanctified by age-old experience. Heritage is all the more valued in a world where turbulent change and global fears make the present seem frightful and the future fearsome. Yet the very zeal with which heritage is pursued leads to countless abuses of the treasured past. Roots and relics become weapons to foment hatred of others, to warp historical truth, to deform our own legacy, to further some class or cause. Despite new recognition that the world's diverse legacies belong to and require the care of all mankind, heritage passions remain animated largely by self-regarding chauvinism." "In Possessed by the Past, David Lowenthal explains the rise of this new obsession with the past and shows its power for both good and evil. He probes the passions that generate a need to find or invent a prideful past - or to mourn a grievous one - and shows how they are similar the world over. He demonstrates why and how relics, ancestry, and memory today, more than ever, become a source of both pride and peril."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Rebecca R. Falkoff Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501752820 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 202
Book Description
In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects. The 2000s have seen a surge of cultural interest in hoarding and those whose possessions overwhelm their living spaces. Unlike traditional economic elaborations of hoarding, which focus on stockpiles of bullion or grain, contemporary hoarding results in accumulations of objects that have little or no value or utility. Analyzing themes and structures of hoarding across a range of literary and visual texts—including works by Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luigi Malerba, Song Dong and E. L. Doctorow—Falkoff traces the fraught materialities of the present to cluttered spaces of modernity: bibliomaniacs' libraries, flea markets, crime scenes, dust-heaps, and digital archives. Possessed shows how the figure of the hoarder has come to personify the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity. Thanks to generous funding from New York University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.
Author: William L. Andrews Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199728119 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
With the continued expansion of the literary canon, multicultural works of modern literary fiction and autobiography have assumed an increasing importance for students and scholars of American literature. This exciting new series assembles key documents and criticism concerning these works that have so recently become central components of the American literature curriculum. Each casebook will reprint documents relating to the work's historical context and reception, present the best in critical essays, and when possible, feature an interview of the author. The series will provide, for the first time, an accessible forum in which readers can come to a fuller understanding of these contemporary masterpieces and the unique aspects of American ethnic, racial, or cultural experience that they so ably portray. This casebook to Morrison's classic novel presents seven essays that represent the best in contemporary criticism of the book. In addition, the book includes a poem and an abolitionist's tra published after a slave named Margaret Garner killed her child to save her from slavery--the very incident Morrison fictionalizes in Beloved.
Author: Wendy Shaw Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520928563 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 283
Book Description
Possessors and Possessed analyzes how and why museums—characteristically Western institutions—emerged in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Shaw argues that, rather than directly emulating post-Enlightenment museums of Western Europe, Ottoman elites produced categories of collection and modes of display appropriate to framing a new identity for the empire in the modern era. In contrast to late-nineteenth-century Euro-American museums, which utilized organizational schema based on positivist notions of progress to organize exhibits of fine arts, Ottoman museums featured military spoils and antiquities long before they turned to the "Islamic" collections with which they might have been more readily associated. The development of these various modes of collection reflected shifting moments in Ottoman identity production. Shaw shows how Ottoman museums were able to use collection and exhibition as devices with which to weave counter-colonial narratives of identity for the Ottoman Empire. Impressive for both the scope and the depth of its research, Possessors and Possessed lays the groundwork for future inquiries into the development of museums outside of the Euro-American milieu.
Author: Simon Ditchfield Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317741641 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
Just what is it that we want from the past? History offers us true stories about the past; heritage sells or provides us with the past we appear to desire. The dividing line between history and heritage is, however, far from clear. This collection of papers addresses the division between history and heritage by looking at the ways in which we make use of the past, the way we consume our yesterdays. Looking at a wide variety of fields, including architectural history, museums, films, novels and politics, the authors examine the ways in which the past is invoked in contemporary culture, and question the politics of drawing upon 'history' in present-day practices. In topics ranging from Braveheart to Princess Diana, the Piltdown Man to the National History Curriculum, war memorials to stately homes, "History and Heritage" explores the presence of the past in our lives, and asks, how, and to what end, are we using the idea of the past. Who is consuming the past and why?
Author: James Gould Cozzens Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P ISBN: 9780156148702 Category : Community life Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In the span of forty-nine hours, small-town lawyer, Arthur Winner, discovers the deeper meaning of his world, his relationships, and himself.
Author: Frederick M. Smith Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231510659 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 732
Book Description
The Self Possessed is a multifaceted, diachronic study reconsidering the very nature of religion in South Asia, the culmination of years of intensive research. Frederick M. Smith proposes that positive oracular or ecstatic possession is the most common form of spiritual expression in India, and that it has been linguistically distinguished from negative, disease-producing possession for thousands of years. In South Asia possession has always been broader and more diverse than in the West, where it has been almost entirely characterized as "demonic." At best, spirit possession has been regarded as a medically treatable psychological ailment and at worst, as a condition that requires exorcism or punishment. In South (and East) Asia, ecstatic or oracular possession has been widely practiced throughout history, occupying a position of respect in early and recent Hinduism and in certain forms of Buddhism. Smith analyzes Indic literature from all ages-the earliest Vedic texts; the Mahabharata; Buddhist, Jain, Yogic, Ayurvedic, and Tantric texts; Hindu devotional literature; Sanskrit drama and narrative literature; and more than a hundred ethnographies. He identifies several forms of possession, including festival, initiatory, oracular, and devotional, and demonstrates their multivocality within a wide range of sects and religious identities. Possession is common among both men and women and is practiced by members of all social and caste strata. Smith theorizes on notions of embodiment, disembodiment, selfhood, personal identity, and other key issues through the prism of possession, redefining the relationship between Sanskritic and vernacular culture and between elite and popular religion. Smith's study is also comparative, introducing considerable material from Tibet, classical China, modern America, and elsewhere. Brilliant and persuasive, The Self Possessed provides careful new translations of rare material and is the most comprehensive study in any language on this subject.
Author: David Lowenthal
Author: David Lowenthal
Author: David Lowenthal
Author: Rebecca R. Falkoff
Author: William L. Andrews
Author: 
Author: Wendy Shaw
Author: Simon Ditchfield
Author: James Gould Cozzens
Author: Associated Veterans of the Mexican War
Author: Frederick M. Smith