The Dynastic Imagination

Download or read book The Dynastic Imagination written by Adrian Daub and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-02-17 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adrian Daub’s The Dynastic Imagination offers an unexpected account of modern German intellectual history through frameworks of family and kinship. Modernity aimed to brush off dynastic, hierarchical authority and to make society anew through the mechanisms of marriage, siblinghood, and love. It was, in other words, centered on the nuclear family. But as Daub shows, the dynastic imagination persisted, in time emerging as a critical stance by which the nuclear family’s conservatism and temporal limits could be exposed. Focusing on the complex interaction between dynasties and national identity-formation in Germany, Daub shows how a lingering preoccupation with dynastic modes of explanation, legitimation, and organization suffused German literature and culture. ? Daub builds this conception of dynasty in a syncretic study of literature, sciences, and the history of ideas, engaging with remnants of dynastic ideology in the work of Richard Wagner, Émile Zola, and Stefan George, and in the work of early feminists and pioneering psychoanalysts. At every stage of cultural progression, Daub reveals how the relation of dynastic to nuclear families inflected modern intellectual history.

Download or read book Genealogies of Fiction written by Eleonora Stoppino and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project challenges the fixed distinction between medieval and early modern texts and reclaims medieval popular epic as a key source for the Furioso. Tracing the formation of the character of the warrior woman, from the Amazon to Bradamante, the book analyzes the process of gender construction in early modern Italy. By reading the tension between the representations of women as fighters, lovers, and mothers, this study shows how the warrior woman is a symbolic center for the construction of legitimacy in the complex web of fears and expectations of the Northern Italian Renaissance court.

Download or read book Staging Philanthropy written by Jean Helen Quataert and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Philanthropy is a history of women's philanthropic associations during Germany's "long" nineteenth century. Challenged by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic occupation and war, dynastic groups in Germany made community welfare and its defense part of newly-gendered social obligations, sponsoring a network of state women's associations, philanthropic institutions, and nursing orders which were eventually coordinated by the German Red Cross. These patriotic groups helped fashion an official nationalism that defended conservative power and authority in the new nation-state. An original and truly multi-disciplinary work, Staging Philanthropy uses archival research to reconstruct the neglected history of women's philanthropic organizations during the 'long' nineteenth century. Borrowing from cultural anthropologists, Jean Quataert explores how meaning is created in the theater of politics. Linking gender with nationalism and war with humanitarianism, Quataert weaves her analysis together with themes of German historiography and the wider context of European history. Staging Philanthropy will interest readers in German history, women's history, politics and anthropology, as well as those whose interest is in medicalization and the German Red Cross. This book situates itself in the middle of a string of debates pertaining to modern German history and, thus, should also appeal to readers from the general educated public. Jean Quataert is Professor of History and Women's Studies, Binghamton University. She has previously published a number of books, including Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present with Marilyn J. Boxer (Oxford, 1999).

Download or read book What Tech Calls Thinking written by Adrian Daub and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." --The New York Times Book Review From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Download or read book The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination written by Haiyan Lee and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last two decades, China has become a dramatically more urban society and hundreds of millions of people have changed residence in the process. Family and communal bonds have been broken in a country once known as "a society of kith and kin." There has been a pervasive sense of moral crisis in contemporary China, and the new market economy doesn't seem to offer any solutions. This book investigates how the Chinese have coped with the condition of modernity in which strangers are routinely thrust together. Haiyan Lee dismisses the easy answers claiming that this "moral crisis" is merely smoke and mirrors conjured up by paternalistic, overwrought leaders and scholars, or that it can be simply chalked up to the topsy-turvy of a market economy on steroids. Rather, Lee argues that the perception of crisis is itself symptomatic of a deeper problem that has roots in both the Confucian tradition of kinship and the modern state management of stranger sociality. This ambitious work is the first to investigate the figure of the stranger—foreigner, peasant migrant, bourgeois intellectual, class enemy, unattached woman, animal—across literature, film, television, and museum culture. Lee's aim is to show that hope lies with a robust civil society in which literature and the arts play a key role in sharpening the moral faculties and apprenticing readers in the art of living with strangers. In so doing, she makes a historical, comparative, and theoretically informed contribution to the on-going conversation on China's "(un)civil society."

Download or read book Dreams, Memory and Imagination in Byzantium written by Bronwen Neil and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of studies on Dreams, Memory and Imagination in Byzantium covers four main themes: the place of dreams, imagination and memory in the Byzantine philosophical tradition; the political uses of prophetic dreams and visions in imperial contexts; the appearance and manipulation of dreams and memory in Byzantine poetry and histories, and changing commemorations of the saints over time in art, epigraphy and literature. These studies reveal the distinctive and important roles of memory, imagination and dreams in the Byzantine court, the proto-Orthodox church and broader society from Constantinople to Syria and beyond. This volume of Byzantina Australiensia brings together the work of senior and early career scholars from Australia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and the United States.

Download or read book What the Ballad Knows written by Adrian Daub and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The German ballad was an unusual poetic genre: supposedly inspired by a treasure trove of authorless poems that had for centuries circulated among the common people, the ballad attained popularity in the form of deeply ironic poems written by some of Germany's most canonic authors. Supposedly a celebration of the oral culture of the German Volk, the ballad instead circulated through the emerging channels of nineteenth century culture industry: from anthologies and picture books via the exploding market for song settings, from the opera house to the vaudeville stage, the ballad hewed to its medieval pretence while sounding surprisingly modern. This book traces the strange trajectory of this poetic genre from its origins in the late 18th century to its political appropriations in the 20th. Throughout, the ballad and its path across a wide variety of milieus and media told a surprising and contradictory story of the German nation. What The Ballad Knows shows that, even though the ballad arrived in Germany as a literary genre, it very quickly came to make its home in between different genres and even different media - to the point that laypeople were as likely to encounter it in a concert hall, a classroom, an art museum or a choral rehearsal as they were to encounter it in a book. When cultural conservatives in the early 20th century sought to claim the ballad as a straightforward and serious vehicle of German nationalism, they ignored just how complex the ballad's relationship to the nation had been, and what complexities within nationalism the form had managed to highlight through the decades"--