Suitably Modern

Download or read book Suitably Modern written by Mark Liechty and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suitably Modern traces the growth of a new middle class in Kathmandu as urban Nepalis harness the modern cultural resources of mass media and consumer goods to build modern identities and pioneer a new sociocultural space in one of the world's "least developed countries." Since Nepal's "opening" in the 1950s, a new urban population of bureaucrats, service personnel, small business owners, and others have worked to make a space between Kathmandu's old (and still privileged) elites and its large (and growing) urban poor. Mark Liechty looks at the cultural practices of this new middle class, examining such phenomena as cinema and video viewing, popular music, film magazines, local fashion systems, and advertising. He explores three interactive and mutually constitutive ethnographic terrains: a burgeoning local consumer culture, a growing mass-mediated popular imagination, and a recently emerging youth culture. He shows how an array of local cultural narratives--stories of honor, value, prestige, and piety--flow in and around global narratives of "progress," modernity, and consumer fulfillment. Urban Nepalis simultaneously adopt and critique these narrative strands, braiding them into local middle-class cultural life. Building on both Marxian and Weberian understandings of class, this study moves beyond them to describe the lived experience of "middle classness"--how class is actually produced and reproduced in everyday practice. It considers how people speak and act themselves into cultural existence, carving out real and conceptual spaces in which to produce class culture.

Download or read book The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories written by Patricia Craig and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The inadequate acknowledgement of women short story writers in standard anthologies is a cause for wonder or affront. How else, indeed, can you view it, given the riches overlooked?" So states editor Patricia Craig in her introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories, a rich, wide-ranging collection that, at last, redresses this historical imbalance by bringing together forty examples of the very best women's stories--from established authors such as Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Mansfield, to such modern masters as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Bharati Mukherjee, and Amy Tan. Here readers will find humor, passion, eccentricity, forcefulness, elan, intellectual vigor, subversion--indeed every shading of tone and mood, from ironic detachment to full-blooded engagement. Each writer has her own, perfectly realized angle of vision, whether it's the zestfulness of Angela Carter, the breathtaking evocations of Willa Cather, the quirkiness of Grace Paley, or the pungency of Flannery O'Connor. Breaking with tradition, editor Patricia Craig offers few stories about traditional "women's" topics. Instead, the entries in this collection range from an unforgettable tale of racism in South Africa to explorations of adultery, immigration, the importance of cultural identity, and the rootlessness of American cities. Craig also includes some provocative offerings from outside the mainstream of twentieth century fiction--a ghost story by Edith Wharton, a delightful fairy tale, and several engaging historical pieces. Eloquent and captivating, The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories offers a dazzling assortment of classic stories and overlooked gems that will amuse, intrigue, and challenge every lover of fine fiction.

Download or read book A Suitable Boy written by Vikram Seth and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 1994 with total page 1372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sense And Sensibility written by Joanna Trollope and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beloved and internationally bestselling author’s contemporary retelling of Jane Austen’s classic novel of love, money and two very different sisters. When their father unexpectedly dies, the three Dashwood girls—Elinor, Marianne and Margaret—must face the harsh reality of a life where they no longer have the home or the financial security that they have always taken for granted. As they come to terms with life without the comforts of either their country house or an inheritance, Elinor, a sensible architecture student, and Marianne, a passionate, musical free spirit, are also confronted by a world where their choices are abruptly limited by their new and alarming circumstances. With her trademark insight and wit, Joanna Trollope has brought Austen’s characters and their story into the 21st century. In the timeless spirit of their creator, she casts a clever, gently satirical eye on Elinor and Marianne as they are forced to navigate the modern world and the search for love. The results are both heartbreaking and hilarious, but always, in the hands of consummate storyteller Trollope, hugely entertaining and achingly true to life. Reimagining Sense and Sensibility in a fresh and contemporary light, Trollope recasts this beloved coming-of-age story as a perfect tale for our times.

Download or read book From a Cause to a Style written by Nathan Glazer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This is the decisive conclusion that renowned public intellectual Nathan Glazer has drawn from two decades of writing and thinking about what this architectural movement will bequeath to future generations. In From a Cause to a Style, he proclaims his disappointment with modernism and its impact on the American city. Writing in the tradition of legendary American architectural critics Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Glazer contends that modernism, this new urban form that signaled not just a radical revolution in style but a social ambition to enhance the conditions under which ordinary people lived, has fallen short on all counts. The articles and essays collected here--some never published before, all updated--reflect his ideas on subjects ranging from the livable city and public housing to building design, public memorials, and the uses of public space. Glazer, an undisputed giant among public intellectuals, is perhaps best known for his writings on ethnicity and social policy, where the unflinching honesty and independence of thought that he brought to bear on tough social questions has earned him respect from both the Left and the Right. Here, he challenges us to face some difficult truths about the public places that, for better or worse, define who we are as a society. From a Cause to a Style is an exhilarating and thought-provoking book that raises important questions about modernist architecture and the larger social aims it was supposed to have addressed-and those it has abandoned.

Download or read book The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature written by Amit Chaudhuri and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-11-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years American readers have been thrilling to the work of such Indian writers as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Now this extravagant and wonderfully discerning anthology unfurls the full diversity of Indian literature from the 1850s to the present, presenting today’s brightest talents in the company of their distinguished forbearers and likely heirs. The thirty-eight authors collected by novelist Amit Chaudhuri write not only in English but also in Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. They include Rabindranath Tagore, arguably the first international literary celebrity, chronicling the wistful relationship between a village postal inspector and a servant girl, and Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, represented by an excerpt from his classic novel about an impoverished Bengali childhood, Pather Panchali. Here, too, are selections from Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, R. K. Narayan’s The English Teacher, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children alongside a high-spirited nonsense tale, a drily funny account of a pre-Partition Muslim girlhood, and a Bombay policier as gripping as anything by Ed McBain. Never before has so much of the subcontinent’s writing been made available in a single volume.

Download or read book The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex written by Mark Kermode and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If blockbusters make money no matter how bad they are, then why not make a good one for a change? How can 3-D be the future of cinema when it's been giving audiences a headache for over a hundred years? Why pay to watch films in cinemas that don't have a projectionist but do have a fast-food stand? And, in a world where Sex and the City 2 was a hit, what are film critics even for? Outspoken, opinionated and hilariously funny, The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex is a must for anyone who has ever sat in an undermanned, overpriced cinema and wondered: 'How the hell did things get to be this terrible?'