Modern, Stevie The appearance of Ayn Rand's 'lost' novel Ideal, 80 years after it was written, gives us cause to examine the life and works of the humanist author, playwright and philosopher.

Modern, Stevie In a dark uniform, she walks swiftly through the tram carriage, her movements machine-like and efficient. Wordlessly, she punches passengers' tickets and passes money from the coin-changer strapped to her hip. The passengers pay small attention, their gazes vaguely forward. They do not see the face of evil, the anonymous official who stands above them returning their ticket stub. The tram clatters on through Berlin's streets.

Modern, Stevie March 15, 2016: A 19 year-old American tourist is arrested in Jerusalem. Police authorities had found him asleep in a prohibited cave area, deep under the Muslim quarter of the Old City. A search finds his backpack loaded with rubble dug with a pickaxe, at a site where myth tells of lost religious treasure. The tourist claims no memory of his actions. Israeli media reports the story as a possible case of 'Jerusalem Syndrome' - a religiously themed psychosis. (...) The syndrome affects nearly 100 people each year out of millions of tourists who visit Jerusalem. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie At its annual general meeting in May this year, the Council of Australian Humanist Societies voted in support of volunteer ethics teachers entering public schools and teaching ethics programs to students as a secular alternative in religious education. The motion was put to the meeting by the NSW Society with the support of the Humanist Society of Victoria. The motion was opposed by the Queensland, Western Australian and South Australian Societies. Here is why the motion is a grave (...) mistake, and why Western Australia moved its own motion against it. (shrink)

Modern, Stevie The September 11 Memorial Museum at Ground Zero opened in May this year, nearly 13 years from the date when 2,983 people were murdered by Islamist hijackers. It is 20 years from Al Qaida's first attempt to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.

Modern, Stevie In the movie Exodus set in 1947, Paul Newman plays a Jewish 'people smuggler' Ari Ben Canaan in an amusing early scene where he disguises himself as a British soldier. Ben Canaan fools a commanding officer into signing off on the transport of recent holocaust survivors out of detention in Cyprus, making the officer believe the survivors would be shipped back to Germany.

Madness and Modernism provides a phenomenological study of schizophrenic disorders, criticizing some standard conceptions of these disorders. Sass argues that many aspects of this group of disorders can actually involve more sophisticated (albeit dysfunctional) forms of mind and experience.

Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetics has dominated discussions about art and aesthetic modernism since World War II, and continues to inform contemporary theorizing. Situating Adorno's aesthetic theory in the context of post-Kantian European philosophy, Espen Hammer explores Adorno's critical view of art as engaged in reconsidering fundamental features of our relation to nature and reality. His book is structured around what Adorno regarded as the contemporary aesthetician's overarching task: to achieve a vision of the fate of art in the modern (...) world, while demonstrating its unique cognitive potential. Hammer offers a lively examination of Adorno's work through the central problem of what full human self-actualization would require, and also discusses the wider philosophical significance of aesthetic modernism. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of social philosophy, art, and aesthetics. (shrink)

Jackson's Before Modernism is animated by a desire, in the author's telling, to redress the absence of Black poets in accounts of American lyric by accounting for how Black poets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced the conditions for the invention of modern American lyric poetry. Lyric is notoriously difficult to define, but the working definition for this book is mostly consistent: “an elevated form of self-expression addressed to everyone at once and to no one in (...) particular,” in which “what is left unsaid is more significant than what is said.” Lyric poetry is characterized by a condition in which the “subjective expression” is the “locus of impossible speech” of an alienated speaker and is the “basis for later emphases on the fiction of ‘the speaker’ as an imaginary person who says what the reader of lyric poetry wants to hear.” Reading lyrically is to “confuse the poem with the person.”The transformative “antagonism” (Jackson draws on Adorno's belief that “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of social antagonism”) between Black and white poetries begins, for Jackson, with white appropriation of the “impossible speech” of enslaved poets such as Phillis Wheatley Peters and George Moses Horton, whose poetry's importance lies in “what it reveals or suggests of the slaves who wrote it, and, by extension, what it reveals about the institution of slavery.” In Jackson's telling, white poets appropriated the pathos of this surplus value, and this appropriation “animated the transformation of the neoclassical and Romantic poetic genres in which Wheatley and Horton wrote into modern lyric forms.” This appropriation was done by white abolitionist poets through the literary devices of apostrophe, personification, and animation, as Jackson demonstrates through skilled close readings of the work of John Pierpont as against that of Ann Plato, a free poet of color. Next, Jackson argues that Black poets reframed these forms as white appropriations, through the fugitive poetics of a Black surplus lyricism, such as Frederick Douglass's reprinting of Pierpont's “The Fugitive Slave's Apostrophe to the North Star” in his antislavery newspaper, The North Star. Particularly skillful is Jackson's reading of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's poem “Eva's Farewell” among the fray of “Eva” poems and songs following the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Jackson is an excellent close reader, and her readings are particularly gripping when she compares Harper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow under the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, which functions “as both a kind of trans-poem and a kind of trans-person.”My argument with this study is that, in figuring American lyricism, as it does, by way of Hegel, Adorno, and Benjamin, Jackson implicitly installs their views as normative, without making an adequate historical case for their having that status—a move especially striking if her goal is to trouble the white transatlantic genealogies that erased eighteenth- and nineteen-century poets hitherto, and poets of color almost wholesale. Jackson's book reflects this dialectical structure: It begins a “dialectical process” by focusing on the work of Black poets in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Next, it focuses on the early nineteenth-century poetics of whiteness, and finally it interlaces the racialization of Black and white poetics in the 1840s and 1850s. To this end, Jackson conducts what she terms “slow readings”—readings centered on who is speaking in a poem and the dramatic situation that these speech acts generate—of works by Wheatley Peters, Horton, Douglass, Plato, Harper, and James Monroe Whitfield.I am uncertain how best to characterize the foundational premise of Jackson's monograph and consider that my uncertainty is less an indication of my own rhetorical indecisiveness and more an expression of an ambiguity at the heart of Before Modernism. I mean the recurrent slippage between the biographical identity of the poet and the I that constitutes the poetic speaker that structures Jackson's analyses of the work of enslaved poets but not that of white poets or of Douglass. This conflation of the biographical poet and the rhetorical poetic voice is notable because Jackson herself recognizes that Wheatley Peters and Horton's writing comprised neoclassical and Romantic poetic genres. And it was white appropriation of these genres that transformed them into modern lyric forms, not anything that Wheatley Peters or Horton or Plato themselves wrote. Puzzling out my unease here made me feel I must have been reading Jackson incorrectly.This approach to Wheatley Peters and Horton stood out to me in stark contrast to that in Jackson's first monograph on the lyric, Dickinson's Misery, which began with the premise that Emily Dickinson's mid-nineteenth-century poetry was not understood as lyric (in the sense that I have defined it here) at the time it was written; Jackson's subject of inquiry, then, was the process of lyrical reading that, she claimed, transforms virtually all poetry we read today into lyrical poetry. I was struck by Jackson's note in the preface to Before Modernism that the book began as an “almost-all-White book about nineteenth-century American poetry in public” and that, as the project shifted “to a book about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Black poets’ interventions in American poetry in public,” she had difficulty “figuring out what poems or people or fake people I was reading.”Jackson's preface seems to perform five disingenuous acts to make the case that today's reader “thinks of lyric poetry as personal expression” and that doing so when reading Wheatley Peters is disappointing because, rather than a person, we find “an airy frame around nothing at all—or at least nothing for which we have a name.” The contortions Jackson must make to read Wheatley Peters's poem as personal (as opposed to commissioned, or as a poem in search of a commission) leave the reader with the impression that writing lyric is so exhausting as to raise the question of the genre's necessity. Jackson's previous work, The Lyric Reader (2014), may offer a clue: When writing about the convergence in lyric of intention and reception, Jackson notes, “we have been better at serving as vehicles for cultural transmission than we are at representing our own views.” Perhaps Jackson's reading of Wheatley Peters in her preface is a vehicle for cultural transmission. Jackson may be performing a contemporary white lyric reading of Wheatley Peters's poem.If so, it is a brilliant performance: an erasure of the various genres of poetry by particular white critics who are most interested in an abstract speaker whom we can make say whatever the reader most wants to hear, especially when, as in this book, the speaker is Black. But if scholarship—and not the poetry or the poets themselves—has taught us to read this way, why not introduce a new model for understanding the poetry of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slaves, freed slaves, free people of color, based on different terms that are more appropriate to the goals and circumstances of the poems? (shrink)

The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt rereads Arendt's political philosophy in light of newly gained insights into the historico-cultural background of her work.

Madness and Modernism is undoubtedly one of the most profound and perspicacious treatments of an illness that is utterly baffling to most laypersons and academics alike. Sass artfully brings together two obscure, complex, and unnerving realms -- the schizophrenic and the modern and postmodern aesthetic -- into mutual enlightenment. The comparisons between schizophrenic symptoms such as loss of ego boundaries, perspectival switching, and world catastrophe with modern literature and art is so adroit that it is almost eerie. The reader (...) finds herself peering into a borderline incomprehensible realm with increasing levels of clarity, by which she gains insight into the utterly chaotic, confused, and bizarre. The lucidity Sass brings to the obscure and confused is a reflection of the many contradictions he introduces to his readers as being entirely paradigmatic of both madness and modernism: that of desiring human contact but also shunning it entirely, of being both afflicted by disease but also exercising a sort of agency, and indeed, an ideal intellectual freedom within the confines of such an affliction, of moving both towards an objectifying materiality of the external world and a total subjectivization of perception, of the tendency towards the hyperabstract and the utterly concrete (between being too "far away" or "too close," respectively). Sass is able to make sense of a world in which these contradictions exist side by side simultaneously, and the disconcerting confusion this causes is palpable to the reader. Sass demonstrates not only his penetrating intellect, but also his unwavering patience and empathy, both in the treatment of the subject matter and the treatment of the subjects suffering from this extraordinary illness. The book is required reading for anyone interested in phenomenological psychiatry, or even psychiatry more generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 83-104 [Access article in PDF] Reluctant Modernism: Moses Mendelssohn's Philosophy of History Matt Erlin In a well-known passage from the second section of Jerusalem (1784) Moses Mendelssohn takes his old friend Lessing to task for his recent treatise on The Education of the Human Race (1780). His respect for the author notwithstanding, Mendelssohn has little sympathy for Lessing's view of (...) human progress. Opposing the attempt to force the entire species into a single framework of linear development, Mendelssohn claims that, as a species, humankind has always oscillated between cultivation and barbarism. Borrowing the "ages of man" metaphor that Lessing employed in his own discussion, he writes that at almost any point in human history, man is "child, adult, and old man at the same time, though in different places and regions of the world." 1 Against Lessing's concept of global progress Mendelssohn proposes a model in which each individual follows his own trajectory of self-cultivation, a trajectory that begins before birth, intersects more or less briefly with the plane of historical time, and then continues after death into eternity.Mendelssohn's resistance to the Geschichtsphilosophie articulated here by Lessing and later appropriated by Kant, Schiller, and Hegel has been subject to a variety of interpretations. Not surprisingly, more recent commentators have stressed the philosopher's defense of particularity, his opposition to a totalizing theory of history that threatens to grant the individual nothing more than a bit part in the realization of some future state of human perfection. Norbert Hinske, for example, has argued that Mendelssohn's late writings engage in a conscious confrontation with Kant's understanding of historical progress. 2 [End Page 83]According to Hinske, especially Mendelssohn's short text On the Ideal Constitution indicates that the author "must have recognized spontaneously that Kant's proposed solution, whether intentionally or unintentionally, degraded the individual to a mere means of social progress...." 3Mendelssohn's concern for the individual is certainly central to his rejection of a species-based historical teleology, but one should also keep in mind the ethnic and cultural implications of such a model. As both Kant's and Hegel's later writings reveal, any attempt to understand human history in terms of a coherent, linear narrative, especially one that culminates in the rise of Christian Europe, is necessarily troubled by the continued existence of Judaism. In other words it is not just the individual who suffers an implicit reduction in status in late eighteenth-century theories of progress; entire cultures become vestigial once their historical function has been fulfilled. 4 Although the texts containing the most striking hostility toward Judaism were published after the appearance of Jerusalem, a somewhat surprising anti-Jewish bias is already evident in Lessing's explorations of the topic. Lessing does after all refer to the Jews in the period of Egyptian exile as "the most rude and the most ferocious" people imaginable. 5 Moreover, although he grants them a crucial role as educators of humanity, this role lasts only until the appearance of Jesus Christ, an event that simultaneously marks the end of the childhood of humankind. As Hans Liebeschütz has remarked, Lessing's adoption of this position must have been quite a blow to Mendelssohn. 6Each of these reasons for Mendelssohn's skepticism is significant in its own right; taken together, they also raise fundamental questions regarding his relationship to modernity and modern historical consciousness more generally. In one respect, of course, the topic of Mendelssohn's modernity has been much debated. Ever since Alexander Altmann's 1973 biography addressed the philosopher's complex relation to the "two disparate worlds of Judaism and modern Enlightenment," scholars have sought to untangle the strands of tradition and innovation in his work. 7 Most recently, Allan Arkush has depicted Mendelssohn as a radical deist whose observance of Jewish law was largely [End Page 84] strategic, while David Sorkin has emphasized the more conservative aims of his long neglected Hebrew works. 8In light of this interest... (shrink)

This revised and expanded second edition of Cahoone's classic anthology provides an unparalleled collection of the essential readings in modernism and postmodernism. Places contemporary debate in the context of the criticism of modernity since the seventeenth century. Chronologically and thematically arranged. Indispensable and multidisciplinary resource in philosophy, literature, cultural studies, social theory, and religious studies.

Introduction. Modernism as a culture -- Culture and cognition -- Culture, mythology, politics -- Culture, community, cartography -- Cultural spaces and their travelers -- The toponymical labyrinth of Russian modernist culture. Early Russian modernism and its "isms" ; The Russian domestication of the term Modernism ; New names, old problems ; Politics and cultural toponymy ; Naming the field -- The errant compass rose of Russian modernist studies. Realism as a cardinal direction ; Tradition and innovation as (...) cardinal directions -- Russian modernism in time and space. The myth of 1917 ; Culture and border patrol ; Putting late Russian modernism on the map ; Chronologies of Russian modernism -- Navigating Russia's cultures of modernity. The intelligentsia and the two avant-gardes ; The two avant-gardes and mass culture -- Russian modernism in the cultural market. The economics of Russian cultural modernity ; The formalist writer-type and the evolving institution of authorship ; The political economy of Russian modernism -- Conclusion. (shrink)

This volume studies a range of modernist works by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and James Joyce to explore what Modernism looks like when viewed through the lens of disability.

Modernism's theological project was an attempt to explain two things: firstly, how faith might enable persons to experience their lives as hanging together, even in the face of disintegrating forces like injustice, tragedy, and luck; and secondly, how one could see such faith, and so a life held together by it, as self-expressive. Modern theologians such as Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Ritschl, and Tillich thus offer accounts of how one's life would have to hang together such that one could identify (...) with it; of the oppositions which stand in the way of such hanging-together; of God as the one by whom oppositions are overcome, such that one can have faith that one's life ultimately hangs together; and of what such faith would have to be like in order for one to identify with it, too. So understood, modern theology not only sheds light on faith's potential role in enabling persons to identify with their lives, but stands in unexpected continuity with contemporary 'contextual' theologies.This book offers clear, careful readings of modernism's key figures in order to explain their relevance to practical concerns and to contemporary understandings of faith. (shrink)

Just as becoming-woman is a divided concept, looking back to a seemingly redemptive figure of the feminine beyond rigid being, but also forward to a positive annihilation of fixed genders, so modernism was also a doubled movement. But modernism was a pulverisation of ‘the’ subject for the sake of a plural and multiplying point of view, and like ‘becoming-woman’, should be read as a defiant and affirmative refusal.

In this interview, Paul Virilio talks at length about his life and numerous published works ranging from Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology to the recently translated Polar Inertia. Considering important theoretical themes and questions relating to post- and 'hyper'- modernism, poststructuralism, modernity and postmodernity, Virilio discusses his often controversial views on the cultural writings of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Baudrillard. In so doing, Virilio not only clarifies many of his architectural, political and cultural concepts such as 'military (...) space', 'dromology' and the 'integral accident' but also provides much food for thought for all those presently concerned with the social implications of the 'disappearance' of aesthetics, technoculture, information warfare, cloning and 'cyberfeminism'. (shrink)

By the author of Adorno's Aesthetics of Music. This book consists of four sections: critical theory and music; Adorno's aesthetics of modernism; Adorno, popular music and mass culture; and critical reflections on Adorno.

In the last half-century Ludwig Wittgenstein's relevance beyond analytic philosophy, to continental philosophy, to cultural studies, and to the arts has been widely acknowledged. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published in 1922 - the annus mirabilis of modernism - alongside Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Waste Land, Mansfield's The Garden Party and Woolf's Jacob's Room. Bertolt Brecht's first play to be produced, Drums in the Night, was first staged in 1922, as was Jean Cocteau's Antigone, with settings by Pablo Picasso and (...) music by Arthur Honegger. In different ways, all these modernist landmarks dealt with the crisis of representation and the demise of eternal metaphysical and ethical truths. Wittgenstein's Tractatus can be read as defining, expressing and reacting to this crisis. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein adopted a novel philosophical attitude, sensitive to the ordinary uses of language as well as to the unnoticed dogmas they may betray. If the gist of modernism is self-reflection and attention to the way form expresses content, then Wittgenstein's later ideas - in their fragmented form as well as their “ear-opening” contents - deliver it most precisely. Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism shows Wittgenstein's work, both early and late, to be closely linked to the modernist Geist that prevailed during his lifetime. Yet it would be wrong to argue that Wittgenstein was a modernist tout court. For Wittgenstein, as well as for modernist art, understanding is not gained by such straightforward statements. It needs time, hesitation, a variety of articulations, the refusal of tempting solutions, and perhaps even a sense of defeat. It is such a vision of the linkage between Wittgenstein and modernism that guides the present volume. (shrink)