Intellectual Trajectories in the Twentieth Century: Circles, Lines and Detours

2003 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-371
Author(s):  
EMMANUELLE LOYER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
History Of

The history of intellectuals, as developed in France, is now venerable enough to have a history of its own. From the early 1980s its development signalled the end of the heroic age of the French intellectual and the beginning of a critical review of French intellectual practice, hitherto overshadowed by a ‘history of ideas’ stigmatised as inclining towards abstraction and idealism. Debray, Bourdieu, Hamon, Rotman and others have variously rhapsodised over the beauty of the intellectual ‘corpse’. At the beginning of the decade the tragic fading of the revolutionary adventure, the bitter retreat into a recrudescent professionalism and the surrender to the perceived invasion of mass culture were together bringing about fundamental changes in intellectual attitudes and created a new set of circumstances which the optimistic could interpret as a redefinition, and the pessimists as a laying to rest, of the function and figure of the intellectual.

Die Macht der Institution

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The State ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War

This volume examines Arnold Gehlen’s theory of the state from his philosophy of the state in the 1920s via his political and cultural anthropology to his impressive critique of the post-war welfare state. The systematic analyses the book contains by leading scholars in the social sciences and the humanities examine the interplay between the theory and history of the state with reference to the broader context of the history of ideas. Students and researchers as well as other readers interested in this subject will find this book offers an informative overview of how one of the most wide-ranging and profound thinkers of the twentieth century understands the state. With contributions by Oliver Agard, Heike Delitz, Joachim Fischer, Andreas Höntsch, Tim Huyeng, Rastko Jovanov, Frank Kannetzky, Christine Magerski, Zeljko Radinkovic, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Christian Steuerwald.

Medieval contexts and modern realities of a Genocide-survivor artwork

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-130
Author(s):  
Gohar Grigoryan Savary
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Exhibition History ◽  
Cultural Genocide ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Difference Of Opinion ◽  
Miniature Painting ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article is a critical review of Heghnar Watenpaugh’s monograph The Missing Pages, which traces the history of the thirteenth-century Zeytun Gospels from its creation to the 2010s, when several of the manuscript’s illustrated folios became subject to a restitution claim through a lawsuit filed by the Armenian Church against the Getty Museum. It highlights the importance of Watenpaugh’s publication on assembling and clarifying the impressive itinerary of the Zeytun Gospels, the manuscript’s sociocultural functions, as well as the historiographic research on Cilician miniature painting conducted by the author in the framework of this book. In the present article, several issues raised in the book are critically explored from different angles, expressing a partial or significant difference of opinion when it comes to some of the interpretations and contextualizations proposed by Watenpaugh. These include: Watenpaugh’s nonexhaustive consideration of the Zeytun Gospels’ colophons, which stand as the most authentic documentations on the manuscript’s history prior to the twentieth century; her tracing of parallel examples of artifacts that survived the Genocide based not on scholarly research but on popular narratives (and on contemporary literary writings); the discussion of bilingual coins minted by the Armenian king Hetum I and the Seljuk sultan Kaykhusraw II as cases of “complex identities of the period”, without delving into these complexities, and, thus, not doing justice to the nuances of the medieval context of their rule; some aspects of the history of scholarship on Cilician miniature painting; and the way Watenpaugh presents two of the most prominent historians of Armenian art, Sirarpie Der Nersessian and Karekin Hovsepian, and their attitudes toward the ownership and acquisition of Armenian cultural heritage by western art institutions, which appear to be less than balanced in The Missing Pages. Finally, some reflections on contemporary exhibition practices of survivor artifacts, whose current locations of preservation are often a consequence of (cultural) genocide and dubious acquisition practices, require clearer and more in-depth presentation, at least as far as the exhibition history of the Zeytun Gospels and its separated folios is concerned.

Pulp Catholicism: Catholics in American Popular Film

2019 ◽  
pp. 193-216
Author(s):  
Anthony Burke Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Popular Film ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Original Production ◽  
The Church

This chapter assays some of the roles that Catholics played in the art form/industry that shared with jazz music a distinction as the most influential American cultural product of the twentieth century. It uncovers a rich, nearly lost history of apostolic film production—launched prior to 1920—under the auspices of the Catholic Art Association. Catholic tastemakers' relatively sophisticated embrace of visual mass culture stood in marked contrast to the later heavy-handed censorship motive that was often ascribed to the church. The film industry's original production code was written in 1930 by the prominent film-friendly Jesuit and theatrical impresario Daniel Lord; in later incarnations a harsher code was enforced with gusto by a small group of highly influential laymen.

scholarly journals Technology and The North American Forest

2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-212
Author(s):  
Marian K. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
North American ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Pulp And Paper ◽  
History Of Technology ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of

ABSTRACT This paper is a critical review of recent historical literature relating to nineteenth and twentieth-century European-based technology in the North American forest. My discussion is limited to the industrial technologies of logging, sawmilling, pulp and paper milling, and forestry. These technologies will be discussed with reference to three issues in the history of technology: first, the nature of technological change; second, the environmental and social impacts of technology; and finally, the role of social values in determining choices of technology. Throughout, there will be an attempt to compare Canadian and American perspectives, when these diverge.

scholarly journals Tafuri on Hous-‘ing’: Housing History as City-making Praxis

2017 ◽  
pp. 36-51
Author(s):  
Irina Davidovici
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
European Cities ◽  
History Of

Manfredo Tafuri’s assessment of modernist housing projects as “islands of realised utopia” summarises dilemmas still faced in the production of European cities today. In his writings, Tafuri has consistently shown that housing is not only about industrial production but, fundamentally, social reproduction. Understood as a discursive practice, the history of housing as a history of ideas reveals fundamental mechanisms in the production of urban space. The historian’s perspective necessarily engages with cycles of cultural production and economic enterprise, intertwined in endless discourse.  On this basis, this article reviews the research methodologies distilled from Tafuri’s housing case studies in Berlin and Frankfurt, Vienna and Rome, in order to, firstly, re-evaluate the critical instruments of the housing historian, and secondly, trace their transformation as theoretical discourses into practices of city-making. Taking into account Tafuri’s notion of historical analysis as a contradictory, complex and constantly renewable operation, the paper proposes a revised understanding of twentieth-century housing history as a history of productive urban practices.

Divine Patterns: Louis Agassiz and American Men of Letters. Some Preliminary Explorations

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-381
Author(s):  
Ian F. A. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
History Of Biology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Historian ◽  
Louis Agassiz ◽  
Asa Gray ◽  
The Way

To arrive at Pound's Canto XXIII from Poe's ‘ Sonnet to Science ’ is a problematic task for more and less obvious reasons. Part of the way in which we may make the approach is through the resonances of certain figures prominent in the history of ideas; in particular to Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born geologist and natural historian who was a central personality in Cambridge circles from his arrival in America in 1846 until his death in 1873. Apart from Edward Lurie's excellent biography, Louis Agassiz, A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960), the twentieth century bears only scattered reference to him, whereas the latter half of the nineteenth century celebrated his work enthusiastically and prolifically. Part of the reason for his diminished presence after the turn of the century lies undoubtedly in his position outside the mainstream of contemporary biological thinking, particularly as a result of his quarrel with Asa Gray during the 1850s; Agassiz was the only scientist of influential standing to oppose himself to the doctrine of Evolution. Consequently, he occupies a far less prominent place in the history of biology than he did in his own era.

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