8. Against universalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 110-124
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
American Thought

‘Against universalism’ explores the myriad challenges to universalism—in philosophy, social and political theory, and the arts—during the late twentieth century. It opens with a new view of 1960s radicalism, showing how its various quests for liberation radiated out into all arenas of American thought. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) helped pave the way for the fire and fury of postmodernism, though many of the antiessentialist ideas of postmodernism were already present in early twentieth-century was rooting in dramatic transformations of thought. The 1980s and 1990s gave rise to identity politics and the culture wars, further challenging the notion of unified American ideals and identity.

Closer Still: The Total Artwork

Lyric Cousins ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter considers the Gesamtkunstwerk, which English musicologists translate as ‘total artwork’. Richard Wagner had used the expression to characterise his operas, though he had only ever used the term in two essays, both published in 1849: ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘The Artwork of the Future’. Moreover, the term did not originate from Wagner himself, and he did not even spell it in the conventional way. Since the late twentieth century ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has been applied to other artforms, particularly architecture, which like opera can unite a number of elements. (Architecture, for example, marries engineering, landscaping and interior decoration, among others.) But the term's origins are in the late eighteenth-century notion that all the arts could be unified in poetry.

Architecture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Smithey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Managerial Practices ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article examines how decadence inflected modern architectural thought from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, starting with the polemical writings of the French architect Charles-François Viel, who dismissed scientific methods and engineering techniques as inferior to classical tradition. Later, decadence played a part in the Arts and Crafts critique of mechanized industrial production as well as twentieth-century condemnations of the managerial practices of late capitalism. Nevertheless, fin-de-siècle decadent culture also influenced architectural designers and theorists, exemplified by the art nouveau stylings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the theoretical writings of Ralph Adams Cram and Geoffrey Scott. From concerns about the sources and causes of social decadence to the aesthetic influence of decadent culture, the works explored here trace interchanges between decadence and modern conceptions of architecture.

scholarly journals The Postcolonial Crescent

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-150
Author(s):  
Deonna Kelli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Islamic Identity ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Identity politics has become the catch phrase of the postmodern age. Withconcepts such as "exile," "migrancy," and "hybridity" acquiring unprecedentedcultural significance in the late twentieth century, the postcolonial age givesway to new identities, fractured modes of living, and new conditions of humanity.Literature is a powerful tool to explore such issues in an era where a greatdeal of the world is displaced, and the idea of a homeland becomes a disrupted,remote possibility. The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact onContemporary Literature, is an attempt to discuss how Muslims negotiateidentity at a time of rapid and spiritually challenging transculturation. The bookuses fiction written by Muslims to critique the effects of colonialism, counteractmodernity, and question the status of Islamic identity in the contemporaryworld. It also can be considered as the primary introduction of contemporaryIslamic literature into the postcolonial genre. Muslim writers have yet to submit a unique and powerful commentary on postcolonial and cultural studies;this work at least softens that absence.The Postcolonial Crescent was conceived as a response to The SatanicVerses controversy. Therefore, it is “intimately involved in the interchangebetween religion and the state, and demonstrates that the roles Islam is playingin postcolonial nation-building is especially contested in the absence of broadlyacceptable models” (p. 4). Conflicting issues of identity are approached byinterrogating the authority to define a “correct” Islamic identity, the role ofindividual rights, and the “variegation of Islamic expression within specificcultural settings, suggesting through the national self-definitions the many concernsthat the Islamic world shares with global postcoloniality” (p. 7) ...

Introduction: The Secret of Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Clare Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Biological Account

This chapter outlines the debates over the genetic origins of human nature which form the wider context of the literature discussed in this book. It traces the rise of gene-centric neo-Darwinism in the late twentieth century and its mediation by popular science books which made claims about the causes of human behaviour which directly challenged humanistic values. It explores the ways in which novelists responded to this challenge, at a time when the arts and social sciences espoused social constructivism and were opposed to any biological account of human nature. It then considers the factors which have brought about a rapprochement between literature and biology, as genetic determinism has been supplanted by a post-genomic perspective which emphasizes the openness of the genome to environmental factors, while twenty-first century writers and philosophers increasingly represent humans and the environment as mutually constitutive.

Attempts to Define Security

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-61
Author(s):  
Rhonda Powell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Chapter 2 reviews conceptual discussions and common understandings of security. The first section focuses on early usage of security in legal and political theory in order to identify the antecedents to common understandings of the concept of security. The second section focuses upon attempts to define or redefine security since the late twentieth century. It is argued that a satisfactory conceptual analysis, which applies to all contexts but avoids the temptation to admit that security has many meanings or is some sort of umbrella term, has not been developed. This is despite extensive scholarly discourse in a number of disciplines. Nevertheless, the literature provides tools to fill the gap.

The Multicultural Cringe

2021 ◽  
pp. 70-113
Author(s):  
Timothy Yu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
North American ◽  
English Language ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Asian Immigration ◽  
White Writers ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The category of the “Asian Australian” has emerged only in recent years, as the exclusionary “White Australia” policy gave way in the late-twentieth century to substantial waves of Asian immigration. Journals and anthologies from the mid-2000s onward have employed the idea of “Asian” identification with an eye on North American examples and shared history, but also with a discomfort with US-style “identity politics.” Ouyang Yu, among the first and best-known Asian Australian poets, is harshly critical of Australian multiculturalism, seeing it as a means of continuing to exclude non-white writers from Australian writing; remaining suspicious of any notion of belonging, his work instead presents itself as a kind of “invasion literature” that seeks to disrupt the English language.

scholarly journals Representations of female obesity in contemporary cinema

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Drummond
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Fat Body ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This essay will look at a particular aspect of the ongoing identity politics surrounding the representation of women and how fat females are commonly represented in Hollywood film in the late twentieth century. Although films are constructions that aim to reflect or depict reality, they often provide flattened characterizations of fat people, particularly fat women. Because no artistic production can escape the culture within which it is made, Hollywood movies, as well as independently funded and distributed "art house" films, often embed popular stereotypes or misconceptions in the characterization of marginalized people, including the obese. There are many ways to "represent" fatness in film: through the script, cinematography, plot, and the whether it uses a real fat body or a rubber suit. This paper will investigate how one might negotiate representations of obesity in a society that perceives fat as a social evil and fat individuals as "agents of abhorrence and disgust" (LeBesco, 2004, p. 1). -- Page 7.

scholarly journals Representations of female obesity in contemporary cinema

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Drummond
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Fat Body ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This essay will look at a particular aspect of the ongoing identity politics surrounding the representation of women and how fat females are commonly represented in Hollywood film in the late twentieth century. Although films are constructions that aim to reflect or depict reality, they often provide flattened characterizations of fat people, particularly fat women. Because no artistic production can escape the culture within which it is made, Hollywood movies, as well as independently funded and distributed "art house" films, often embed popular stereotypes or misconceptions in the characterization of marginalized people, including the obese. There are many ways to "represent" fatness in film: through the script, cinematography, plot, and the whether it uses a real fat body or a rubber suit. This paper will investigate how one might negotiate representations of obesity in a society that perceives fat as a social evil and fat individuals as "agents of abhorrence and disgust" (LeBesco, 2004, p. 1). -- Page 7.

The Pathway Between Art and Science: One Painter's Metaphorical Journey

Leonardo ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-196
Author(s):  
Guy Levrier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Art And Science ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The author describes his un-derstanding of the place and pur-pose of his art in the context of our late twentieth century: as an artist, he does not accept a place in the current “death of art” situa-tion. He agrees that abstract art is not self-explanatory although its meaning exists in the collective unconscious. To explain his effort, he has found metaphors in quan-tum physics that enable him to link his artistic process to the dy-namics of progress found in sci-ence rather than to those of re-gression found in the arts.

Trashing Identity Politics: Does It Really Get Us Back to Class?

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 42-49
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Us ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Verity Burgmann creates an unnecessary and ahistorical distinction between the politics of class and that of the various identities through which the contemporary working class defines itself. Indeed, her vision of a self-conscious proletariat seems too male and too musty. Racial and gender identities have achieved a privileged status, compared to that of class, but this has less to do with the outlook of the left-wing academy than with the late twentieth-century transformation of law, politics, and social policy, both in the US and other multicultural nations.

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