Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism

Author: Maria Margaroni

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-11-03

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1501362364

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Julia Kristeva has revolutionized the study of modernism by developing a theoretical approach that is uniquely attuned to the dynamic interplay between, on the one hand, linguistic and formal experimentation, and, on the other hand, subjective crisis and socio-political upheaval. Inspired by the contestatory spirit of the late 1960s in which she emerged as a theorist, Kristeva has defended the project of the European avant-gardes and has systematically attempted to reclaim their legacy in the new societal structures produced by a global, spectacle-dominated capitalism. Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism brings together essays that take up the threads in Kristeva's analyses of the avant-garde, offering an appreciation of her overall contribution, the intellectual and political horizon within which she has produced her seminal works as well as of the blind spots that need to be acknowledged in any contemporary examination of her insights. As with other volumes in this series, this volume is structured in three parts. The first part provides new readings of key texts or central aspects in Kristeva's oeuvre. The second part takes up the task of showing the impact of Kristeva's thought on the appreciation of modernist concerns and strategies in a variety of fields: literature, philosophy, the visual arts, and dance. The third part is a glossary of some of Kristeva's key terms, with each entry written by an expert contributor.


Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism

Author: Aaron Jaffe

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-11-18

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1501348442

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The Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) has been recognized as a decisive past master in the emergence of contemporary media theory and media archeology. His work engages and also rethinks several mythologies of modernity, devising new methodologies, experimental literary practices, and expanded hermeneutics that trouble traditional practices of literary/literate knowledge, shared experience, reception, and communication. Working within an expanded concept of modernism, Flusser presciently noted the power inherent in algorithmic information apparatuses to reshape our fundamental conceptions of culture and history. In an increasingly technological world, Flusser's form of experimental theory-fiction pits philosophy against cybernetics as it forces the category of “the human” to confront the inhuman world of animals and machines. The contributors to Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism engage with the multiplicity of Flusser's thought as they provide a general analysis of his work, engage in comparative readings with other philosophers, and offer expanded conceptualizations of modernism. The final section of the volume includes an extended glossary clarifying the playful terminology used by Flusser, which will be a valuable resource for experts and students alike.


The Crisis of Political Modernism

The Crisis of Political Modernism

Author: D. N. Rodowick

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0520087712

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"Gives a superb critical and polemical overview of the '70s film theory. Rodowick is particularly good at showing both the political stakes of these influential theories and their blind spots."—Constance Penley, University of California, Santa Barbara


Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism

Author: Robin Truth Goodman

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1501342975

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Having studied philosophy at a time when its traditions were being seriously uprooted by the atrocities of World War II, Theodor Adorno had an enormous impact on thinking about aesthetics at a transitional historical moment when the philosophy of science and leftist politics were looking for new ground. Moreover, with his focus on the rise of commercial culture and its effects on identity-construction, Adorno can be said to have reinvigorated modernist concerns by introducing the prevailing terms in our contemporary versions of cultural politics and cultural studies. Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism traces Adorno's social and aesthetic ideas as they appear and reappear in his corpus. As per other volumes in the series, this book is divided into three parts. The first, “Adorno's Keywords,” is organized by the aesthetic terms around which Adorno's philosophy circulates. The second section is devoted to “Adorno and Aesthetics.” While Adorno's philosophical viewpoints influenced modernism's evolution into the 21st century, the history of modernist aesthetics also shaped his philosophical approaches. The third and final part, “Adorno's Constellations,” discusses how aesthetic form in Adorno's thinking underlies the terms of his social analysis.


Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism

Author: Brian Pines

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-02-21

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 150133915X

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Friedrich Nietzsche believed his own work represented the dawning of a new historical era, and, despite the fact that he lived most of his sane life suffering in obscurity, it is not an exaggeration to say that his vision helped lay the foundations for modernism in style, substance and attitude. Nietzsche was himself devoted to the modern, for he reinterpreted every philosophy, every historical figure and event, every movement that came before him. This reconceptualization of the past through new, modern eyes opened up Nietzsche's thinking to exploring daring possibilities for the future. This prophetic boldness, which is so unique to his style, seduced the modernist generation across the spectrum. He was read by early Zionists as well as by Nazi racial theorists; by Thomas Mann and as well as by Salvador Dali. His influence stretched from psychoanalysis to anarchist politics. Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism traces the effect of Nietzsche's thinking upon a diverse set of problems: from ontology, to politics, to musical and literary aesthetics. The first section of the volume is a series of essays, each exploring a major work of Nietzsche's, explaining its significance while contributing new interpretations of the text. The middle portion connects Nietzsche's thought to the various strands of modernism in which it reveals itself. The final section is a glossary of key terms that Nietzsche uses throughout his works. An excellent resource for any scholar attempting to conceptualize the foundations of modernism or the historical importance of Nietzsche, this volume seeks to outline the philosopher's works and their reception amongst the generations that immediately followed his passing.


Understanding James, Understanding Modernism

Understanding James, Understanding Modernism

Author: David H. Evans

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-04-20

Total Pages: 509

ISBN-13: 1501302752

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Psychologist, philosopher, teacher, writer-William James stood closer than any other thinker to the center of the confluence of intellectual and artistic forces that defined the culture of modernism. The outstanding feature of this volume lies in its intent to investigate James's influence on both American and International Modernism. It provides, on the one hand, a multifaceted introduction to students of history, philosophy, and culture, and on the other, a compendium of some of the most up-to-date thinking on this central figure. James's first book, Principles of Psychology (1890) immediately established James as the leading psychologist of his time, at a moment in history when psychology seemed to offer the promise of finding some definitive answers to eternal philosophical conundra. James's innovations would register a clear effect on much modernist art, most evidently in the stylistic prose experiments of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and their imitators. James's tentative skepticism concerning the concept of consciousness as such, and the post-Cartesian ego that was its foundation, also anticipates the questioning of the subject that would be the theme of much modern, and indeed postmodern thought. The contributors to this volume explore James's most essential texts as well as his influence on contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers. The final section is a glossary of James's key terms, with entries written by leading experts.


Revolt, Affect, Collectivity

Revolt, Affect, Collectivity

Author: Tina Chanter

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0791482642

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These original essays explore how the concept of revolution permeates and unifies Julia Kristeva's body of work by tracing its trajectory from her early engagement with the Tel Quel group, through her preoccupation in the 1980s with abjection, melancholia, and love, to her latest work. Some of the leading voices in Kristeva scholarship examine her reevaluation of the concept of revolt in the context of the changing cultural and political conditions in the West; the questions of the stranger, race, and nation; her reflections on narrative, public spaces, and collectivity in the context of her engagement with Hannah Arendt's work; her development and refinement of the notions of abjection, melancholia, and narcissism in her ongoing interrogation of aesthetics; as well as her contribution to film theory. Focused primarily on Kristeva's newest work—much of it only recently translated into English—this book breaks new ground in Kristeva scholarship.


Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism

Author: David Scott

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-02-23

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1628927704

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Michel Foucault remains to this day a thinker who stands unchallenged as one of the most important of the 20th century. Among the characteristics that have made him influential is his insistent blurring of the border separating philosophy and literature and art, carried out on the basis of his confronting the problem of modernism, which he characterizes as a permanent task. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries, which on their surface would seem not to have anything to do with literature, are full of allusions to modernist writers and artists like Mallarme, Baudelaire, Artaud, Klee, Borges, Broch-sometimes fleetingly, sometimes more extensively, as is the case with Foucault's life-long devotion to Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, and de Sade. Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism.


Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

Author: Ewa Płonowska Ziarek

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0231161492

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Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.