Mirror of Modernity

Mirror of Modernity

Author: Stephen Vlastos

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1998-05

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0520206371

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection of essays challenges the notion that Japan's present cultural identity is the simple legacy of its pre-modern and insular past. Scholars examine "age-old" Japanese cultural practices and show these to be largely creations of the modern era.


Mirror of Modernity

Mirror of Modernity

Author: Stephen Vlastos

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1998-05

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 9780520206373

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection of essays challenges the notion that Japan's present cultural identity is the simple legacy of its pre-modern and insular past. Scholars examine "age-old" Japanese cultural practices and show these to be largely creations of the modern era.


The Distorting Mirror

The Distorting Mirror

Author: Laikwan Pang

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2007-10-31

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0824830938

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Distorting Mirror analyzes the multiple and complex ways in which urban Chinese subjects saw themselves interacting with the new visual culture that emerged during the turbulent period between the 1880s and the 1930s. The media and visual forms examined include lithography, photography, advertising, film, and theatrical performances. Urbanites actively engaged with and enjoyed this visual culture, which was largely driven by the subjective desire for the empty promises of modernity—promises comprised of such abstract and fleeting concepts as new, exciting, and fashionable. Detailing and analyzing the trajectories of development of various visual representations, Laikwan Pang emphasizes their interactions. In doing so, she demonstrates that visual modernity was not only a combination of independent cultural phenomena, but also a partially coherent sociocultural discourse whose influences were seen in different and collective parts of the culture. The work begins with an overall historical account and theorization of a new lithographic pictorial culture developing at the end of the nineteenth century and an examination of modernity’s obsession with the investigation of the real. Subsequent chapters treat the fascination with the image of the female body in the new visual culture; entertainment venues in which this culture unfolded and was performed; how urbanites came to terms with and interacted with the new reality; and the production and reception of images, the dynamics between these two being a theme explored throughout the book. Modernity, as the author shows, can be seen as spectacle. At the same time, she demonstrates that, although the excessiveness of this spectacle captivated the modern subject, it did not completely overwhelm or immobilize those who engaged with it. After all, she argues, they participated in and performed with this ephemeral visual culture in an attempt to come to terms with their own new, modern self.


A Literary Mirror

A Literary Mirror

Author: I . Nyoman Darma Putra

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9004253637

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Literary mirror is the first English-language work to comprehensively analyse Indonesian-language literature from Bali from a literary and cultural viewpoint. It covers the period from 1920 to 2000. This is an extremely rich field for research into the ways Balinese view their culture and how they respond to external cultural forces. This work complements the large number of existing studies of Bali and its history, anthropology, traditional literature, and the performing arts. A Literary Mirror is an invaluable resource for those researching twentieth-century Balinese authors who wrote in Indonesian. Until now, such writers have received very little attention in the existing literature. An appendix gives short biographical details of many significant writers and lists their work.


Enemy in the Mirror

Enemy in the Mirror

Author: Roxanne L. Euben

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1999-11-21

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 069105844X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This text draws on different diciplines, including postmodernist and critical theory, comparative politics, and anthropology, to examine Islamic fundamentalisim.


The Off-Modern

The Off-Modern

Author: Svetlana Boym

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-06-15

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1501328956

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Svetlana Boym writes a new genealogy of modernity, moving beyond older debates between modernism and postmodernism to focus on the intersection of art, architecture, technology, and philosophy in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson, Aby Warburg, and Jacques Derrida, Boym presents the off-modern as an eccentric, self-questioning, anti-authoritarian perspective with roots in the Russian avant-garde, now developed in surprising ways by contemporary artists, architects, and curators around the world. She illustrates the off-modern in discussions of (and with) figures as diverse as architect Rem Koolhaas, Albanian artist-turned-mayor Edi Rama, an art collective in Delhi, and the creator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Both a manifesto and a memoir, The Off-Modern often returns to themes of travel and immigration, exploring issues of diasporic intimacy and productive estrangement amid nostalgic landscapes of urban ruins.


Japan's Castles

Japan's Castles

Author: Oleg Benesch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-05-02

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1108481949

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Considering Castles and Tenshu -- Modern Castles on the Margins -- Overview: "from Feudalism to the Edge of Space" -- From Feudalism to Empire -- Castles and the Transition to the Imperial State -- Castles in the Global Early Modern World -- Castles and the Fall of the Tokugawa -- Useless Reminders of the Feudal Past -- Remilitarizing Castles in the Meiji Period -- Considering Heritage in Early Meiji -- Castles and the Imperial House -- The Discovery of Castles, 1877-1912 -- Making Space Public -- Civilian Castles and Daimyo Buyback -- Castles as Sites and Subjects of Exhibitions -- Civil Society and the Organized Preservation of Castles -- Castles, Civil Society, and the Paradoxes of "Taisho Militarism" -- Building an Urban Military -- Castles and Military Hard Power -- Castles as Military Soft Power -- Challenging the Military -- The military and Public in Osaka -- Castles in War and Peace: Celebrating Modernity, Empire, and War -- The Early Development of Castle Studies -- The Arrival of Castle Studies in Wartime -- Castles for town and country -- Castles for the empire -- From feudalism to the edge of space -- Castles in war and peace II: Kokura, Kanazawa, and the Rehabilitation of the -- Nation -- Desolate gravesites of fallen empire: what became of castles -- The imperial castle and the transformation of the center -- Kanazawa castle and the ideals of progressive education -- Losing our traditions: lamenting the fate of japanese heritage -- Kokura castle and the politics of japanese identity -- "Fukko": hiroshima castle rises from the ashes -- Hiroshima castle: from castle road to macarthur boulevard and back -- Prelude to the castle: rebuilding hiroshima gokoku shrine -- Reconstructions: celebrations of recovery in hiroshima -- Between modernity and tradition at the periphery and the world stage -- The weight of Meiji: the imperial general headquarters in hiroshima and the -- Meiji centenary -- Escape from the center: castles and the search for local identity -- Elephants and castles: odawara and the shadow of tokyo -- Victims of history I: Aizu-wakamatsu and the revival of grievances -- Victims of history II: Shimabara castle and the Enshrinement of loss -- Southern Barbarians at the gates: Kokura castle's struggle with authenticity -- Japan's new castle builders: recapturing tradition and culture -- Rebuilding the Meijo: (re)building campaigns in Kumamoto and Nagoya -- No business like castle business: castle architects and construction companies -- Symbols of the people? conflict and accommodation in Kumamoto and Nagoya -- Conclusions.


Dissonances of Modernity

Dissonances of Modernity

Author: Irene Gómez-Castellano

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2021-03-15

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1469651939

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Dissonances of Modernity illuminates the ways in which music, as an artifact, a practice, and a discourse redefines established political, social, gender, and cultural conventions in Modern Spain. Using the notion of dissonance as a point of departure, the volume builds on the insightful approaches to the study of music and society offered by previous analyses in regards to the central position they give to identity as a socially and historically constructed concept, and continues their investigation on the interdependence of music and society in the Iberian Peninsula. While other serious studies of the intersections of music and literature in Spain have focused on contemporary usage, Dissonances of Modernity looks back across the centuries, seeking the role of music in the very formation of identity in the peninsula. The volume's historical horizon reaches from the nineteenth-century War of Africa to the Catalan working class revolutions and Enric Granados' central role in Catalan identity; from Francisco Barbieri's Madrid to the Wagnerian's influence in Benito Perez Galdos' prose; and from the predicaments surrounding national anthems to the use of the figure of Carmen in Francoist' cinema. This volume is a timely scholarly addition that contemplates not only a broad corpus that innovatively comprises popular and high culture--zarzuelas, choruses of industrial workers, opera, national anthems--but also their inter-dependence in the artists' creativity.


Overcome by Modernity

Overcome by Modernity

Author: Harry D. Harootunian

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0691095485

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Between the two world wars, Japanese society underwent a massive industrial transformation. The author explores the differences between the United States, England and France which safely modernised and Japan which moved unfortunately towards fascism.


Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

Author: Kōjin Karatani

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780822313236

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Karatani Kojin is one of Japan's leading critics. In his work as a theoretician, he has described Modernity as have few others; he has re-evaluated the literature of the entire Meiji period and beyond. As one critic has said, Karatani's thought "has had a profound effect on the way we formulate the questions we ask about modern literature and culture ... [his] argument is compelling, moving even, and in the end the reader comes away with a different understanding not only of modern Japanese literature but of modern Japan itself." Among the many authors discussed are Soseki Natsume, Doppo Kunikida, Katai Tayama, and Shoyo Tsubouchi.