In a Western world suddenly acutely interested in Islam, one question has been repeatedly heard above the din: where are the Muslim reformers? As the number of Muslims living in the West grows, the ...question of what it means to be a Western Muslim becomes increasingly important to the futures of both Islam and the West. While the media are focused on radical Islam, this book claims that a silent revolution is sweeping Islamic communities in the West, as Muslims actively seek ways to live in harmony with their faith within a Western context. French, English, German, and American Muslims—women as well as men—are reshaping their religion into one that is faithful to the principles of Islam, dressed in European and American cultures, and definitively rooted in Western societies. The book's goal is to create an independent Western Islam, anchored not in the traditions of Islamic countries but in the cultural reality of the West. It begins by offering a fresh reading of Islamic sources, interpreting them for a Western context and demonstrating how a new understanding of universal Islamic principles can open the door to integration into Western societies. The author contends that Muslims can—indeed must—be faithful to their principles while participating fully in the civic life of Western secular societies. This book offers a vision of a new Muslim Identity that rejects the idea that Islam must be defined in opposition to the West.
The effort to go beyond given knowledge in different domains - artistic, scientific, political, metaphysical - is a characteristic driving force in modernism and the avant-gardes. Since the late 19th ...century, artists and writers have frequently investigated their medium and its limits, pursued political and religious aims, and explored hitherto unknown physical, social and conceptual spaces, often in ways that combine these forms of critical inquiry into one and provoke further theoretical and methodological innovations. The fifth volume of the EAM series casts light on the history and actuality of investigations, quests and explorations in the European avant-garde and modernism from the late 19th century to the present day. The authors seek to answer questions such as: How have modernism and the avant-garde appropriated scientific knowledge, religious dogmas and social conventions, pursuing their investigation beyond the limits of given knowledge and conceptions? How have modernism and avant-garde created new conceptual models or representations where other discourses have allegedly failed? In what ways do practises of investigation, quest or exploration shape artistic work or the formal and thematic structures of artworks?
Luxury and Modernism Schuldenfrei, Robin
2018, 2018., 20180605, 2018-06-05
eBook
This beautifully illustrated book provides a new interpretation of modern architecture and design in Germany during the heyday of the Bauhaus and the Werkbund, tracing modernism's lasting allure to ...its many manifestations of luxury. Robin Schuldenfrei casts the work of legendary figures such as Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in an entirely different light, revealing the complexities and contradictions inherent to modernism's promotion and consumption. Luxury and Modernism shows how luxury was present in bold, literal forms in modern designs--from lavish materials and costly technologies to deluxe buildings and household objects—and in subtler ways as well, such as social milieus and modes of living. While modernism was publicized as a fusion of technology, new materials, and rational aesthetics to improve the lives of ordinary people, it was often out of reach to the very masses it purportedly served. Schuldenfrei exposes the disconnect between modernism's utopian discourse and its luxury objects and elite architectural commissions. Despite the movement's egalitarian rhetoric, many modern designs addressed the desires of the privileged individual. Yet as Schuldenfrei demonstrates, luxury was integral not only to how modern buildings and objects were designed, manufactured, and sold, but has contributed to modernism's appeal to this day. Featuring stunning color images throughout, Luxury and Modernism provides an entirely new look at one of the most celebrated and influential eras in the history of architecture. Robin Schuldenfrei is the Katja and Nicolai Tangen Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Modernism at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
This e-book explores the growth and development of Nordic modernisms in a European context. Concentrating on and yet not limiting itself to the study of literary texts, the book shows that the ...emergence of modernism in the Nordic countries is linked to, and inspired by, the innovative works published in Western Europe and the USA towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century. Presenting Nordic art as multi-dimensional and dynamic, it also shows that, while responding to aspects of these innovative works, Nordic modernism itself contributed to modernism as a complex international trend. The plural form “modernisms” in the book’s title indicates that the contributors adopt an understanding of modernism that, while recognizing the importance of the modernist movement between circa 1890 and 1940, is sufficiently elastic to include various forms of extension and continuation of Nordic modernisms in the post-war period. The book shows that the experience of crisis—cultural, political, moral, aesthetic—that underlies modernist artists’ invention of radically new forms of expression was by no means limited to just one country or one identifiable group of writers; nor was it, as modernisms’ global relevance makes clear, restricted to just one continent. At the level of historical reality, the First World War represents the culmination of a crisis which had its beginnings several decades earlier. The Second World War, along with the Holocaust, represents a second culmination of the crisis, and there is, this book suggests, a sense in which the experience of crisis has continued to influence and shape Nordic literature written in the post-war period. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the experience of crisis has increasingly been extended to include a growing uncertainty about the future prompted by the reality of climate change.
This volume opens up, in new and innovative ways, a range of dimensions, some familiar and some more obscure, of late Victorian and modern literature and culture, primarily in British contexts. Our ...volume’s title, Late Victorian into Modern, emphasises the in-between: the gradual changeover from one period to the next. This approach enables us to examine shared developments and to point out continuities rather than ruptures. The volume explores and exploits an understanding of the late 19th to the early 20th centuries as a cultural moment in which new knowledges were forming with particular speed and intensity. Our contributors include both established and emerging scholars of the literature and culture of the period. The organising principle of this book is to retain a key focus on literary texts, broadly understood to include familiar categories of genre as well as extra-textual elements such as press and publishing history, performance events and visual culture, while remaining keenly attentive to the inter-relations between text and context in the period. Individual chapters explore such topics as Celticism, the New Woman, popular fictions, literatures of empire, aestheticism, periodical culture, political formations, avant-garde poetics, and theatricality.
In the end Pessoa considered his works -fragments, masks, intuitions, paradoxes- as a monumental failure, a disappointed end to his dream of national and universal regeneration. Para los habituados a ...la taxonomía literaria más o menos canónica, el sintagma "la épica", al igual que su equivalente "(la)poesía épica" remite casi siempre al territorio de la epopeya clásica y a sus posteriores y sucesivas actualizaciones, en especial a las producidas en la órbita de la producción literaria renacentista, salvo en aquellos caso en que se amplía y complementa con otros -como, por ejemplo, "la épica de la Modernidad", etc.- que, como sucede con los múltiples usos del adjetivo "épico, épica", ofrece una mayor abertura tanto genérica como histórica, de lo que puede ser ejemplo el uso abundante del sintagma "tono épico" aplicado a una parte de la mejor poesía lírica moderna. Por eso, si bien la obra conoció enseguida un éxito notable visible en las numerosas ediciones y en las imitaciones inmediatas (Luis Pereira Brandão, Elegiada, 1588; Jerónimo Corte Real, O segundo cerco de Diu y O Naufrágio do Sepúlveda, 1594; Francisco de Andrade, O primeiro cerco de Diu, 1598), su influencia cedió muy pronto ante la de la Gerusalemme Liberata del Tasso (Vasco Mouzinho, Afonso o Africano, 1621; Francisco de Sá Meneses, Malaca Conquistada, 1634; Gabriel Pereira de Castro, Ulisseia de Lisboa Edificada, 1636; António de Sousa Macedo, Ulyssipo, 1640) en virtud del triunfo de los ideales contrarreformistas y también de la progresiva ausencia de una motivación real para la exaltación y el canto épico en un momento histórico en que Portugal había perdido su independencia política y sufría una progresiva decadencia económica, momento "disfórico" que adoptarían como punto de vista obras tan importantes como la Peregrinação de Fernão Mendes Pinto o los pliegos de cordel con relatos de naufragios que más tarde recogería Gomes de Brito en su História Trágico-Marítima, sin que la Restauración política portuguesa (1640) supusiera, contra lo que sería de prever, una resurrección del aliento épico, sino más bien al contrario: baste recordar que quizás la obra más significativa del momento fuera un libro satírico que resume en su título -Arte de Furtar- su intención y contenidos netamente anti-heroicos. Otro punto en que Os Lusíadas traiciona el canon de la epopeya clásica tiene que ver con el héroe individual que representa los valores colectivos considerados como positivos y propios: más allá del héroe individual, Vasco de Gama, e incluso del héroe colectivo nacional, los Lusíadas, es decir, los Portugueses, destaca como telón de fondo un héroe que se quiere universal, el hombre nuevo de un orden nuevo que empieza a construirse sobre la base de un conocimiento fundamentado en la razón y la experiencia y no en el peso muerto de la auctoritas, un hombre del que el propio Camões podría ser ejemplo particular.
Art Periodical Culture in Late Imperial Russia (1898-1917). Print Modernism in Transition offers a detailed exploration of the major Modernist art periodicals in late imperial Russia, the World of ...Art (Mir Iskusstva, 1899-1904), The Golden Fleece (Zolotoe runo, 1906-1909) and Apollo (Apollon, 1909-1917).
A theoretical reexamination of the concept of the "tragic" combined with detailed analyses of Japanese literary texts. Inspired by Western critical theory, the author unveils a rich tradition of ...tragic literature in Japan that has registered the unbridgeable gap between universal ideals and social values at a historical moment.
A bold reading of the modern-realist aesthetic and an articulate challenge to several enduring and limiting myths about Canadian writing,Modern Realism in English- Canadian Fictionwill stimulate ...important debate in literary circles everywhere.
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