Illuminations From The Past
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Illuminations from the Past
This book offers a cultural history of modern China by looking at the tension between memory and history. Mainstream books on China tend to focus on the hard aspects of economics, government, politics, or international relations. This book takes a humanistic look at modern changes and examines how Chinese intellectuals and artists experienced trauma, social upheavals, and transformations. Drawing on a wide array of sources in political and aesthetic writings, literature, film, and public discourse, the author has portrayed the unique ways the Chinese imagine and portray their own historical destiny in the midst of trauma, catastrophe, and runaway globalization.
Illuminations of the Everyday: Philosophical and Cultural Expressions of Redemption in Weimar Germany
Author: Madeleine Claire Hall
language: en
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
Release Date: 2011-03-16
Benjamin's work has been classified either according to the principles of historical materialism, or according to the principles of metaphysics. This fragmentation of his ideas, however, obscures the real impetus of his oeuvre, particularly in the interpretation of his central notion of redemption. If instead one considers Benjamin as a critic of the everyday in search of a mechanism for change, influenced by the historical condition and his intellectual contemporaries, then we are able better to understand his narrative. The Weimar Republic was a period dominated by the dialectic between hope and despair. The intellectual sphere of Critical Theory attempted to understand their condition of alienation and establish a solution. Redemption is key to Benjamin's approach. Redemption carries the stigma of theology and has therefore been dismissed because, unlike revolution, it has no historical precedent and appears to have limited value. In common with the other Critical Theorists, for Benjamin the conditions of alienation as well as the structure of its solution were in the everyday. Through the concepts of the dialectical image and now-time, Benjamin readdresses the question of revolution, which he finds to be limited by its maintenance of linear historic time. Benjamin's redemption is an amalgam of the historic and the metaphysical and represents a powerful social critique, propelled by revolutionary rhetoric.
Old Stories Retold
Old Stories Retold delves into intertextual resonances cultivated with traditional literature in modern Chinese fiction from both the mainland and Taiwan. These resonances develop alternative historical sensibilities which reveal the effects of modernization on Chinese culture.