Book Description
Post-modernism offers a revolutionary approach to the study of society: in questioning the validity of modern science and the notion of objective knowledge, this movement discards history, rejects humanism, and resists any truth claims. In this comprehensive assessment of post-modernism, Pauline Rosenau traces its origins in the humanities and describes how its key concepts are today being applied to, and are restructuring, the social sciences. Serving as neither an opponent nor an apologist for the movement, she cuts through post-modernism's often incomprehensible jargon in order to offer all readers a lucid exposition of its propositions. Rosenau shows how the post-modern challenge to reason and rational organization radiates across academic fields. For example, in psychology it questions the conscious, logical, coherent subject; in public administration it encourages a retreat from central planning and from reliance on specialists; in political science it calls into question the authority of hierarchical, bureaucratic decision-making structures that function in carefully defined spheres; in anthropology it inspires the protection of local, primitive cultures from First World attempts to reorganize them. In all of the social sciences, she argues, post-modernism repudiates representative democracy and plays havoc with the very meaning of "left-wing" and "right-wing." Rosenau also highlights how post-modernism has inspired a new generation of social movements, ranging from New Age sensitivities to Third World fundamentalism. In weighing its strengths and weaknesses, the author examines two major tendencies within post-modernism, the largely European, skeptical form and the predominantly Anglo-North-American form, which suggests alternative political, social, and cultural projects. She draws examples from anthropology, economics, geography, history, international relations, law, planning, political science, psychology, sociology, urban studies, and women's studies, and provides a glossary of post-modern terms to assist the uninitiated reader with special meanings not found in standard dictionaries.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent, clear, concise, engaging summary of the issues.......2004-02-24
Outstanding book! One of the best overviews of the often confusing post-modern literature I have ever encountered. Highly recommended!!!
Timely and well done.......2000-08-14
It's really hard to know how a nihilistic movement such as post-modernism can have anything other than a renunciatory effect upon science of any kind. That notwithstanding, Rosenau distinguishes two main strands within PoMo, which may otherwise cause confusion. The skeptical strand comprises the purists who brook no compromise with their anti-foundational findings. On the other hand, are what Rosenau calls the"affirmatives". They comprise the compromisers within the broader PoMo camp, and are prepared to somehow accomodate modernist precepts within a broader PoMo framework. Whether these affirmatives compose anything more than an unworkable eclecticism, is left wisely unresolved. Even so, Rosenau believes their sensitivity to openess has the capacity to force modernism into major revisions. In any event, it is the purists, the other major strand, who define the movement itself.
If the affirmative's problem is trying to eclectically blend unblendables, the skeptics tend to refute themselves, the usual outcome of extreme abeyance. In an excellent concluding section, the author summarizes the endemic paradoxes of this position. For example, PoMo's use of theory to disavow theory; deconstruction's use of the very tools it deconstructs, viz. reason and logic; moreover, in raising the marginal at the expense of the center, a value judgement takes place even when such judgements are programmatically condemned.
Boiled down to basics, purist PoMo ends in its own version of solipsism: millions of unsynthesizable personal narratives. Small wonder that only the narrowest, most localized results are sanctioned in a prospective post-modern social science. In Rosenau's account, the possibility that such a science can emerge focuses on individuals instead of subjects or personalities. Since reason, structure, and other modes of synthesis are impossible, how such idiosyncratic accounts can even approach a threshold of science seems inexplicable to me even after reading the book.
But since PoMo is the fashion of the day, it's to the author's credit to have crystallized these topical questions in clearly understood terms.
A Modern Classic in the Social Sciences.......2000-04-06
As a graduate student I encountered this book on several levels over the years. I first bought it in India while doing anthropological fieldwork to catch up on theory. The applications on social inquiry to the "Third world" were very helpful, especially the section on views of the west in the post-Marxist era. More recenty I have read it with an interest in public policy, and found relevant insights on the nature of the public sphere. The glossary is unique in its throroughness. This book serves as a classic--elegantly written, comprehensively researched- and more importantly a useful guide to postmodern ideas for the working academic and student alike.
A Modern Classic in the Social Sciences.......2000-04-06
Through my years in graduate school I have encountered this book on several levels- I first used it in India while working as an antrhopologist to review the basics and get "caught up" with some theroy. The book proved to be especially useful in applying postmodern ideologies to the "Thrid World". More recently I have re-read it with a focus on public policy, and again was not disappointed. Dr. Rosenau's research is impeccable and comprehensive. The book is useful for both experienced academicians as well as beginners.
Book Description
Marketing in the early 21st century is dominated by two approaches, neither of which is visible to the naked eye: the use of data to define and shape human affairs into machine-readable form and the effort to create and sustain ongoing two-way relationships with customers. The former is one way human life is being subjugated to the regime of the machine; the latter is one way the individual may one day emerge from within the datascape. A post-modern perspective is used to reveal both the "kaleidoroscope" of data and the "raw immaterials" of relationships in two companion essays.
Customer Reviews:
Rebecca Nailed It.......2007-03-18
Rebecca's review is spot-on. I could read this book several times and get something new out of it each time. Ellis succinctly captures the changes in consumer-marketer interaction and the new 21st century value exchange and does a great job of putting it in historical and philosophical context.
Big Thoughts on Marketing .......2007-03-09
Most books on business (particularly those by self-proclaimed "gurus") seize on a single idea. With terrier-like tenacity they explain it, illustrate it, present case studies of it, then explain it yet again, until a readers feels she's entered some sort of textual version of "Groundhog's Day."
"Marketing in the In-Between," takes the opposite approach. It packs so many clusters of thought, ideas, revelations and connections on every page, the reader will need to repeatedly dip in to glean all the thoughts. It challenges readers to truly ponder and to question the basic precepts and practices upon which marketing is based.
Customer Reviews:
This is THE story of Western Architecture.......2006-08-25
I am a Registered architect(with National Certification), Registered Interior Designer and instructor of Architectural History. Trachtenberg and Hyman have written the definitive history of western architecture in this tract. The reading is awkward at times, but the ideas conveyed comprise the foundation of todays architectural theory. There are few, if any textbooks on this subject which maintain a consistant thread of thought all the way through. This one does. If you are vitally interested in the underpinnings of today's designs, you should read it.
Didactic and moribund overuse of words to describe simple truths........2006-07-31
It does not take a whole lot of verbiage or a Ph.D. to describe what the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, or the modern Americans have achieved in constructing their architecture. This book is written with an unecessary amount of big words and is extremely abstract throughout and tends to over-explains simple architectural realms. It does have great color photos.
If you want to read an excellent architectural book buy or read Sir Banister Fletcher's Architecture.
Average customer rating:
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Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Modern Art Practices and Debates)
Francis Frascina ,
Tamar Garb ,
Nigel Blake ,
Briony Fer , and
Charles Harrison
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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ASIN: 0300055145 |
Book Description
This remarkable book draws its inspiration from what its authors describe as the post-modern epic now unfolding at the grassroots. It portrays the ways in which the world’s social majorities are now escaping from the monoculture of a single global civilization and regenerating their own cultural and natural spaces. In so doing, they are challenging the three sacred cows of modernity--the idea, entrenched in globalization, that there is only one, universally valid way of understanding social reality; the exclusive and general validity of Western-defined notions of human; and the notion of the self-sufficient individual, as opposed to people-in-community, which has grotesquely transformed how we see the human condition. This is quite simply, a book which will transform how one sees the world--North and South.
Customer Reviews:
A must read.......2006-11-02
A must read for individuals that want to understand the new social movements occurring within our times; the writers describe stylistically the rift that is widening on the issue of globalization in our world, and more specifically Mexico. The thesis is that the Zapatista movement is justified, but it goes beyond the normal rhetoric; this book is not meant to be taken as the only source of wisdom on the subject but it does help see beyond our economic goggles. An analysis based on sustainable development, cultural upheaval, and anti-globalization stance. For so long have viewed the world through the confined bifocals of economic language and hearsay, this book allows us to venture beyond certain overdrawn arguments and back to some more personal and basic arguments that we sometimes have forgotten the validity of. I haven't rated the book with five stars, for I believe its usage of language at times to be fairly abusive and pompous.
An introduction to alternative thought on grassroots culture.......1999-05-11
Esteva and Prakash provide sources of alternative thought about what is important in and of the world. The book offers evidence of how grassroots cultures in non-western nations are combining people interests with environmental interests to assure a future for their cultures. The book gives support to the idea that technological development is not inevitable, but a choice that may be much easier for non-western nations to make. Additionally, the authors offer food for thought for rural sustainable community development in the U. S.
Book Description
Contemporary theory is replete with metaphors of travel—displacement, diaspora, borders, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, and tourism to name a few. In Questions of Travel, Caren Kaplan explores the various metaphoric uses of travel and displacement in literary and feminist theory, traces the political implications of this “traveling theory,” and shows how various discourses of displacement link, rather than separate, modernism and postmodernism.
Addressing a wide range of writers, including Paul Fussell, Edward Said, James Clifford, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey, Chandra Mohanty, and Adrienne Rich, Kaplan demonstrates that symbols and metaphors of travel are used in ways that obscure key differences of power between nationalities, classes, races, and genders. Neither rejecting nor dismissing the powerful testimony of individual experiences of modern exile or displacement, Kaplan asks how mystified metaphors of travel might be avoided. With a focus on theory’s colonial discourses, she reveals how these metaphors continue to operate in the seemingly liberatory critical zones of poststructuralism and feminist theory. The book concludes with a critique of the politics of location as a form of essentialist identity politics and calls for new feminist geographies of place and displacement.
An important and timely intervention into contemporary theoretical debates, Questions of Travel will be of interest to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, including literary criticism, cultural studies, feminist theory, colonial and postcolonial studies, geography, anthropology, and sociology.
Customer Reviews:
No comments.......2002-09-28
Really a huge mistake by buying this book... Just a miscellaneous of several authors, and some of them, she just really doesn't know at all... really desappointed... mutiples attacks but no arguments.
The question that remains:
What is the matter with Cultural Studies?
The decline of the western thought.......2000-07-19
I frankly nothing learned from this feminist postmodernist approach of displacements and travels. If you want my opinion as a social anthropologist all this postmodern buhaha combining feminist studies, postcolonialism and post structuralism ( baptised as cultural studies) mark the decline or the impossibility of our western culture to approach the Otherness or the Difference. Culturalists such as Carmen Kaplan who seldom move from their safe arm-chair are harming ethnological studies much more than Frazer did a century ago from his Victorian arm-chair in Oxford. If Frazer had as an excuse his classisist background I should like to ask Ms Kaplan what her background could be. Something of all and nothing at all. I bet that she does not even conceive the etymology of her name. Academia and the layman are not greatly beneficiated by this sort of pseudo social science books. I admit loosing four hours of my life trying to collect a valuable information from this book but I did not succeed. In conclusion : PURE TRUSH. Why on earth uneducated western people who never dared to visit remoted populations practicing original popular culture, write this sort of books addressed to a western public if they cannot communicate even for un hour with original patterns of culture. The symptom of this alienation is not hazardous : The most one is baptised in our western culture the less one can see "beyond the lines" of the different cultures. Tomorrow I will burn this trash in my fireplace !
Travel and Its Metaphors.......2000-03-31
Following the path set by James Clifford, who long ago proposed a much-needed bridge between anthropological, literary and historical approaches to the topic of travel culture, Kaplan analyzes the various metaphoric uses of travel in feminist and poststructuralist criticisms. Displacement, diaspora, borders, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, tourism and so on: Kaplan aims to investigate the role played by these symbols and metaphors in contemporary literary and cultural theory in Europe and the United States, linking them to the history of production of colonial discourses. Her main argument is that these metaphors of travel contribute to the blurring of fundamental differences and disputes between national identities, classes, races and genders. In each chapter, a particular binary formation (e.g., exile/tourism) or charged metaphor (e.g., nomad) is examined in order to highlight the possibilities and limitations of these terms as they appear in Euro-American theory. "Without rejecting or dismissing the powerful testimony of personal and individual experiences of displacement", she asks, "how is it possible to avoid ahistorical universalization and the mystification of social relations that Euro-American discourses of displacements often deploy?" (p. 2-3). In other words, it is necessary to investigate which material forces allow a social and collective phenomenon such as the modern experience of mass-movement, voluntary or forced, to be so often represented as an individualized experience. But Kaplan, as she herself acknowledges, is more concerned with the movement of ideas and practices rather than with movements of bodies through specific places. The lack of empirical references, I suspect, many times leads her to be imprisoned by the same rhetorical conventions she proposes to criticize.
Product Description
From roughly 1965 to 1980, Conceptual Art and Performance Art took center stage throughout the western world, introducing new and complex ideas to the practice of contemporary art which reverberate to this day. Thomas McEvilley's The Triumph of Anti-Art not only explains the origins of these controversial and compelling art forms, but also uncovers many relatively unrecognized yet indisputably important artists, American and European. He guides the reader through a thicket of seemingly arcane meanings of these nonrepresentational art form, and brings clarity to the intentions and agendas of these artists, as well as to their real world contexts. The long-term effects of "anti-art," and the development of the pluralistic situation known as post-Modernism, are described in vivid detail. From the Greek philosopher Diogenes, through the 19th-century German romantic tradition, to the modern art critic Clement Greenberg, McEvilley traces philosophical ideas and political impulses that temporarily led to a toppling of painting and sculpture in the decades right after World War II. Following an overview of Modernism and Marcel Duchamp's influence, a chapter on Yves Klein sets the state for surveys of Conceptual Art and its practitioners, including Bernar Venet, John Baldessari, and Francis Alys. McEvilley then gives equal focus to Performance Art with chapters on Andy Warhol, Brian O'Doherty, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay, among others. At the end of the volume the "triumph" of "anti-art" is explored in depth, as are the origins of the terms, practices, and politics of global art history.
Customer Reviews:
A "must-read" for novices and experienced art connoisseurs alike.......2006-01-12
Much has been written about traditional art forms of drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, music, plays and movies; but little has been said about the more esoteric and avant-garde forms of conceptual and performance art; The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism handily remedies this deficiency. The Triumph of Anti-Art is an absorbing tour through the origins of the controversial art forms of conceptual art and performance art, walking the reader through the seemingly complicated and ambiguous meanings and nuances of such formats. Chapters specifically focus upon the works of Francois Morellet, Bernar Venet, Beuys and Warhol, Marina Abramovic, and many more. Offering enlightenment as to the motives, messages, and expressions of conceptual and performance art, The Triumph of Anti-Art is a "must-read" for novices and experienced art connoisseurs alike.
Book Description
With over 400 color illustrations, this authoritative introduction covers every major development in the visual arts from Impressionism to Post-Modernism. Anyone seeking a gallery of the masterpieces of twentieth-century art, together with an informed survey of the period, will find no better single volume. Covers: Impressionism; Symbolism; Art Nouveau; Fauvism; Expressionism; Cubism; Futurism; Constructivism; Dada; Surrealism; Abstract Expressionism; New Realism; Op Art; Minimal Art; Arte Povera; Land Art; Hyper-realism; Happenings; New Figuration; Pop Art; Conceptual Art; Post-Modernism.
Customer Reviews:
Modern Art!.......2002-07-12
I just purchased this book, it looks wonderful. It has the quality of a textbook, but it does not read like a textbook. that is to say it does not drone on and on, it reads well for those who have an interest in modern art. I cover all the periods of modern art and gives concise background to the artists and events of the perod in which the mode of art occurred.
I highly reccomend this book.
Book Description
Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism.
“We have a great desire to be supremely American,” Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America’s cultural and collective identity—ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism.
Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity—linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos—something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels’s sustained rereading of the texts of the period—the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar—exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.
Customer Reviews:
Fascinating.......2003-06-21
Walter Benn Michaels has really interesting and unusual ideas. He reads texts in ways that nobody else does. If you are well versed in books like The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, and An American Tragedy, you will enjoy reading Michael's take on these texts.
A great, daring, and original book.......2001-06-05
Walter Benn Micheals is one of the most brilliant, gifted literary critics in the world. His prose is extremely clear, and his thought is equally challenging.
I hate this book.......2000-10-02
This book is really boring. It's language is confusing, its references to other obscure pieces of literature are too complex, and it just really stinks.
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Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post Modernism and Beyond (Key Contemporary Thinkers)
Douglas Kellner
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Classics
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ASIN: 0804717389 |
Customer Reviews:
Critical but excellent.......2004-11-23
Kellner is highly critical of Baudrillard's turn from Marxist/political solutions to a kind of techno-nihilism but the book is a great review and analysis of Baudrillard's work; it is much easier to read this book with many passages from Baudrillard's own writings with Kellner's critical but complete commentaries than to read some of the horribly translated works of Baudrillard out there. Baudrillard read's more like a sci-fi dystopian at times-his theory of the code and his use of the term Matrix (pre-movie) is very interesting stuff. This is a great introduction to a cutting edge philosophy that provocatively analyzes our current capitalistic and media saturated society.
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