Enchantment and Disenchantment

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400863325
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Enchantment and Disenchantment by : Wai-yee Li

Download or read book Enchantment and Disenchantment written by Wai-yee Li and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a famous episode of the eighteenth-century masterpiece The Dream of the Red Chamber, the goddess Disenchantment introduces the hero, Pao-yü, to the splendors and dangers of the Illusory Realm of Great Void. The goddess, one of the divine women in Chinese literature who inspire contradictory impulses of attachment and detachment, tells Pao-yü that the purpose of his dream visit is "disenchantment through enchantment," or "enlightenment through love." Examining a range of genres from different periods, Wai-yee Li reveals the persistence of the dialectic embodied by the goddess: while illusion originates in love and desire, it is only through love and desire that illusion can be transcended. Li begins by defining the context of these issues through the study of an entire poetic tradition, placing special emphasis on the role of language and of the feminine element. Then, focusing on the "dream plays" by T'ang Hsien-tsu, she turns to the late Ming, an age which discovers radical subjectivity, and goes on to explore a seventeenth-century collection of classical tales, Records of the Strange from the Liao-chai Studio by P'u Sung-ling. The latter half of the book is devoted to a thorough analysis of The Dream of the Red Chamber, the most profound treatment of the dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment, love and enlightenment, illusion and reality. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Enchantment and Disenchantment

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780691632902
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (329 download)

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Book Synopsis Enchantment and Disenchantment by : Wai-yee Li

Download or read book Enchantment and Disenchantment written by Wai-yee Li and published by . This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a famous episode of the eighteenth-century masterpiece The Dream of the Red Chamber, the goddess Disenchantment introduces the hero, Pao-y , to the splendors and dangers of the Illusory Realm of Great Void. The goddess, one of the divine women in Chinese literature who inspire contradictory impulses of attachment and detachment, tells Pao-y that the purpose of his dream visit is "disenchantment through enchantment," or "enlightenment through love." Examining a range of genres from different periods, Wai-yee Li reveals the persistence of the dialectic embodied by the goddess: while illusion originates in love and desire, it is only through love and desire that illusion can be transcended. Li begins by defining the context of these issues through the study of an entire poetic tradition, placing special emphasis on the role of language and of the feminine element. Then, focusing on the "dream plays" by T'ang Hsien-tsu, she turns to the late Ming, an age which discovers radical subjectivity, and goes on to explore a seventeenth-century collection of classical tales, Records of the Strange from the Liao-chai Studio by P'u Sung-ling. The latter half of the book is devoted to a thorough analysis of The Dream of the Red Chamber, the most profound treatment of the dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment, love and enlightenment, illusion and reality. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Myth of Disenchantment

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Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022640336X
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis The Myth of Disenchantment by : Jason Ananda Josephson Storm

Download or read book The Myth of Disenchantment written by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

The Enchantment of Modern Life

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400884535
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis The Enchantment of Modern Life by : Jane Bennett

Download or read book The Enchantment of Modern Life written by Jane Bennett and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

Sacral Kingship Between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment

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Author :
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1782383573
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (823 download)

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Book Synopsis Sacral Kingship Between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment by : Ronald G. Asch

Download or read book Sacral Kingship Between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment written by Ronald G. Asch and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: France and England are often seen as monarchies standing at opposite ends of the spectrum of seventeenth-century European political culture. On the one hand the Bourbon monarchy took the high road to absolutism, while on the other the Stuarts never quite recovered from the diminution of their royal authority following the regicide of Charles I in 1649. However, both monarchies shared a common medieval heritage of sacral kingship, and their histories remained deeply entangled throughout the century. This study focuses on the interaction between ideas of monarchy and images of power in the two countries between the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the Glorious Revolution. It demonstrates that even in periods when politics were seemingly secularized, as in France at the end of the Wars of Religion, and in latter seventeenth- century England, the appeal to religious images and values still lent legitimacy to royal authority by emphasizing the sacral aura or providential role which church and religion conferred on monarchs.

The Enchantments of Mammon

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674242777
Total Pages : 817 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Enchantments of Mammon by : Eugene McCarraher

Download or read book The Enchantments of Mammon written by Eugene McCarraher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century

Temiar Religion, 1964-2012

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Publisher : NUS Press
ISBN 13 : 9971697068
Total Pages : 472 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (716 download)

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Book Synopsis Temiar Religion, 1964-2012 by : Geoffrey Benjamin

Download or read book Temiar Religion, 1964-2012 written by Geoffrey Benjamin and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2014-09-12 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Temiars, a Mon-Khmer-speaking Orang Asli society living in the uplands of northern Peninsular Malaysia, have long attracted popular attention in the West for reports that ascribed to them the special psychotherapeutic technique known as ‘Senoi Dreamwork’. However, the reality of Temiar religion and society, as studied and recorded by Geoffrey Benjamin, is even more fascinating than that popular portrayal—which he shows to be based on a serious misrepresentation of Temiar practice. When Benjamin first lived in the isolated villages of the Temiars between 1964 and 1965, he encountered a people who lived by swidden farming supplemented by hunting and fishing. They practised their own localised animistic religion in an area where the main religion was once Mahayana Buddhism and is now Islam. Half a century later, the Temiars have become much more deeply embedded in broader Malaysian society, while retaining their distinctive way of life and maintaining their complex animistic religious beliefs. Benjamin’s ongoing fieldwork in the 1970s, 1990s and 2000s followed the Temiars through processes of religious disenchantment and re-enchantment, as they reacted in various ways to the advent of Baha’i, Islam and Christianity. Some Temiars even developed a new religion of their own. In addition to its rich ethnographic reportage, the book proposes a novel theory of religion, and in the process develops a deeply insightful account of the changing intellectual framework of anthropology over the past half-century.

The Problem of Disenchantment

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Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 1438469926
Total Pages : 662 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis The Problem of Disenchantment by : Egil Asprem

Download or read book The Problem of Disenchantment written by Egil Asprem and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the conventional view of a “disenchanted” and secular modernity, and recovers the complex relation that exists between science, religion, and esotericism in the modern world. Max Weber famously characterized the ongoing process of intellectualization and rationalization that separates the natural world from the divine (by excluding magic and value from the realm of science, and reason and fact from the realm of religion) as the “disenchantment of the world.” Egil Asprem argues for a conceptual shift in how we view this key narrative of modernity. Instead of a sociohistorical process of disenchantment that produces increasingly rational minds, Asprem maintains that the continued presence of “magic” and “enchantment” in people’s everyday experience of the world created an intellectual problem for those few who were socialized to believe that nature should contain no such incalculable mysteries. Drawing on a wide range of early twentieth-century primary sources from theoretical physics, occultism, embryology, radioactivity, psychical research, and other fields, Asprem casts the intellectual life of high modernity as a synchronic struggle across conspicuously different fields that shared surprisingly similar intellectual problems about value, meaning, and the limits of knowledge. “The Problem of Disenchantment is, in its entirety, extraordinarily well researched, argued, and written—representing at once the most complete and nuanced treatment of the notion of disenchantment within this network of scientific, religious, philosophical, and esoteric discourses and currents.” — Nova Religio

The Re-enchantment of the World

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis The Re-enchantment of the World by : Joshua Landy

Download or read book The Re-enchantment of the World written by Joshua Landy and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"--or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.

Enchanting a Disenchanted World

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Publisher : Pine Forge Press
ISBN 13 : 1412975816
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (129 download)

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Book Synopsis Enchanting a Disenchanted World by : George Ritzer

Download or read book Enchanting a Disenchanted World written by George Ritzer and published by Pine Forge Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is about Disney, malls, cruise lines, Las Vegas, the World Wide Web, Planet Hollywood, credit cards, and all other ways we now consume. It discusses the fundamental change that our society has undergone because of the way and the level at which we consume.

Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures

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Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1681373890
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (813 download)

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Book Synopsis Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures by : Max Weber

Download or read book Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures written by Max Weber and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new translation of two celebrated lectures on politics, academia, and the disenchantment of the world. The German sociologist Max Weber is one of the most venturesome, stimulating, and influential theorists of the modern condition. Among his most significant works are the so-called vocation lectures, published shortly after the end of World War I and delivered at the invitation of a group of student activists. The question the students asked Weber to address was simple and haunting: In a modern world characterized by the division of labor, economic expansion, and unrelenting change, was it still possible to consider an academic or political career as a genuine calling? In response Weber offered his famous diagnosis of “the disenchantment of the world,” along with a challenging account of the place of morality in the classroom and in research. In his second lecture he introduced the notion of political charisma, assigning it a central role in the modern state, even as he recognized that politics is more than anything “a slow and difficult drilling of holes into hard boards.” Damion Searls’s new translation brings out the power and nuance of these celebrated lectures. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s introduction describes their historical and biographical background, reception, and influence. Weber’s effort to rethink the idea of a public calling at the start of the tumultuous twentieth century is revealed to be as timely and stirring as ever.

Re-Enchantment

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135902321
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (359 download)

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Book Synopsis Re-Enchantment by : James Elkins

Download or read book Re-Enchantment written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-01-13 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes an introduction and two final, synoptic essays, as well as contributions from some of the most prominent thinkers on religion and art including Thierry De Duve, Georges Didi-Huberman, Gerhard Wolff, Jack Caputo and Jean-Luc Marion.

Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317290674
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama by : Nandini Das

Download or read book Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama written by Nandini Das and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Hunting Magic Eels

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Author :
Publisher : Broadleaf Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (898 download)

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Book Synopsis Hunting Magic Eels by : Richard Beck

Download or read book Hunting Magic Eels written by Richard Beck and published by Broadleaf Books . This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a secular age, a world dominated by science and technology. Increasing numbers of us don't believe in God anymore. We don't expect miracles. We've grown up and left those fairy tales behind, culturally and personally. Yet five hundred years ago the world was very much enchanted. It was a world where God existed and the devil was real. It was a world full of angels and demons. It was a world of holy wells and magical eels. But since the Protestant Reformation and the beginning of the Enlightenment, the world--in the West, at least--has become increasingly disenchanted. While this might be taken as evidence of a crisis of belief, Richard Beck argues that it's actually a crisis of attention. God hasn't gone anywhere, but we've lost our capacity to see God. The rising tide of disenchantment has profoundly changed our religious imaginations and led to a loss of the holy expectation that we can be interrupted by the sacred and divine. But it doesn't have to be this way. Hunting Magic Eels shows us that with attention and an intentional, cultivated capacity to experience God as a living, vital presence in our lives, we can cultivate an enchanted faith in a skeptical age. This new paperback edition includes a foreword from Sean Palmer as well as four new, additional chapters, including "Why Good People Need God," "Live Your Beautiful Life," and "The Primacy of the Invisible."

Land of Disenchantment

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Publisher : UNM Press
ISBN 13 : 0826347371
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis Land of Disenchantment by : Michael L. Trujillo

Download or read book Land of Disenchantment written by Michael L. Trujillo and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2010-03-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Mexico's Española Valley is situated in the northern part of the state between the fabled Sangre de Cristo and Jemez Mountains. Many of the Valley’s communities have roots in the Spanish and Mexican periods of colonization, while the Native American Pueblos of Ohkay Owingeh and Santa Clara are far older. The Valley's residents include a large Native American population, an influential "Anglo" or "non-Hispanic white" minority, and a growing Mexican immigrant community. In spite of the varied populace, native New Mexican Latinos, or Nuevomexicanos, remain the majority and retain control of area politics. In this experimental ethnography, Michael Trujillo presents a vision of Española that addresses its denigration by neighbors--and some of its residents--because it represents the antithesis of the positive narrative of New Mexico. Contradicting the popular notion of New Mexico as the "Land of Enchantment," a fusion of race, landscape, architecture, and food into a romanticized commodity, Trujillo probes beneath the surface to reveal the causes of social dysfunction brought about by colonization and te transition from a pastoral to an urban economy.

Allegory and Enchantment

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191092118
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Allegory and Enchantment by : Jason Crawford

Download or read book Allegory and Enchantment written by Jason Crawford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory. In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.

Explorations in the Sociology of Consumption

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Author :
Publisher : SAGE
ISBN 13 : 9780761971207
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (712 download)

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Book Synopsis Explorations in the Sociology of Consumption by : George Ritzer

Download or read book Explorations in the Sociology of Consumption written by George Ritzer and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2001-06-04 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, one of the leading social theorists and cultural commentators of modern times, turns his gaze on consumption. George Ritzer, author of the famous McDonaldization Thesis, demonstrates the irrational consequences of the rational desire to consume and commodify. He examines how McDonaldization might be resisted, and situates the reader in the new cultural spaces that are emerging in society: shopping malls, casino hotels, Disneyfied theme parks and Las Vegas -- the new `cathedrals of consumption' as he calls them. The book shows how new processes of consumption relate to globalization theory. In illuminating discussions of the work of Thorstein Veblen and the French situationists, Ritzer unearths the roots of problems of consumption in older sociological traditions. He indicates how transgression is bound up with consumption, through an investigation of the obscene in popular and postmodern culture.