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.
Essays tracing the intellectual life of a quintessential New York City writer and thinker Marshall Berman was one of the great urbanists and Marxist cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and his brilliant, nearly sui generis book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a masterpiece of the literature on modernism. But like many New York intellectuals, the essay was his characteristic form, accommodating his multifarious interests and expressing his protean, searching exuberant mind. This collection includes early essays from and on the radical ’60s, on New York City, on literary figures from Kafka to Pamuk, and late essays on rock, hip hop, and gentrification. Concluding with his last essay, completed just before his death in 2013, this book is Berman’s intellectual autobiography, tracing his career as a thinker through the way he read the “signs in the street.””
Citing a lifelong engagement with Marxism, critic and writer Marshall Berman reveals the movement's positive points and suggests a new beginning for Marxism may be on the horizon with its recent 150th anniversary attention.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan was one of Britain's most influential radical thinkers. As Director of the Institute of Race Relations for forty years, his work changed the way that we think about race, racism, globalisation and resistance. Communities of Resistance collects together some of his most famous essays, including his excoriating polemic on Thatcherism and the left "The Hokum of New Times". This updated edition contains a new preface by Gary Younge and an introduction by Arun Kundnani.
Marshall Berman was a political theorist, urbanist, and public intellectual that gave a generation a way to think about what it means to be modern. He offered a vision of Marx as a preeminent modernist and humanist, which served as a touchstone for his exploration into the complexity of our modern world and lives. Marshall was singularly capable of seamlessly weaving together the ideas of Dostoevsky and Kurtis Blow, the experiences of St. Petersburg and the South Bronx. In so doing, he helped make sense of the maelstrom of modern life into which we are born, and helped buttress a sense of optimism in the midst of a chaos in which all that is solid melts into air.Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman is a testament to just how deeply and broadly his influence can be felt, as its contributors consist of theorists, architects, media critics, urbanists, and historians from across the globe. Some essays demonstrate the potential for applying Marshall?s methods of analysis into new locales such as Iran or Scotland. Others return to familiar places like the South Bronx or Times Square in order to stretchor update Marshall?s analyses. Some essays engage Marshall as a theorist, and analyze his ideas of public, urban life, and of modernism and modernity. Another explores the impact Marshall?s work has in the classroom, as well as his own role as a teacher. Collectively, the essays that comprise this volume reflect deeply on Marshall?s work, and speak to its continued relevance in helping to not only decipher, but to find meaning in our modern world.
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.
"A bubbling caldron of ideas . . . Enlightening and valuable." —Mervyn Jones, New Statesman. The political and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, the pivotal writings of Goethe, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others, and the creation of new environments to replace the old—all have thrust us into a modern world of contradictions and ambiguities. In this fascinating book, Marshall Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and cultures, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism. From a reinterpretation of Karl Marx to an incisive consideration of the impact of Robert Moses on modern urban living, Berman charts the progress of the twentieth-century experience. He concludes that adaptation to continual flux is possible and that therein lies our hope for achieving a truly modern society.