Intersections

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Gikandi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Culture Of Consumption ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Modern Identity

This chapter moves beyond the critical debates raised in Chapter 1 to provide a more concrete narrative of the coexistence of taste and slavery as aesthetic objects and products of everyday life in the modern world. It explores the link between slavery, consumption, and the culture of taste, all-important conduits for understanding modern identity. With a particular emphasis on changing theories of taste in eighteenth-century Britain, it provides an analysis or reading of the troubled relation between race, ideologies of taste, and the culture of consumption. It examines how slavery enabled the moment of taste; led to fundamental transformations in the self-understanding of modern subjects; and, consequently, resulted in a redefinition of notions of freedom, selfhood, and representation.

Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China? A Review of Kenneth Pomeranz'sThe Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 501-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip C. C. Huang
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
New World ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Population History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Delta Area ◽  
Coal Resources ◽  
Great Divergence ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain

Kenneth pomeranz argues that “the great divergence” between development and involution in Europe and China did not occur until after 1800. Until then, Europe and China were comparable in population history, agriculture, handicraft industry, income, and consumption. Europe before 1800, in other words, was much less developed than the last two decades of scholarship have led us to believe, while China before 1800 was much less involuted. To make his case, Pomeranz spotlights England, the most advanced part of Europe, and the Yangzi delta area, the most advanced part of China. They diverged only after 1800, mainly because of the lucky availability of coal resources for England, and also of other raw materials from the New World.

Democracy and Everyday Life

2015 ◽  
pp. 6-41
Author(s):  
Leszek Koczanowicz
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
The Self ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
National Community ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Way

In chapter 1, democracy is analyzed as everyday life practices. American pragmatism provides theoretical underpinnings for my approach. George Herbert Mead’s and John Dewey’s political concepts are interpreted as showing a passage from everyday life to politics. While G.H. Mead depicts how communication creates the self and, consequently, how politics can be treated as a universalization of everyday life practices, John Dewey describes the way in which democracy becomes a community’s form of life. Both show that community is not inevitably hostile to liberalism, but it can enhance liberal ideals of individual freedom and autonomy Therefore, the pragmatist concept of community is relevant to contemporary discussions on the relationships between community, especially the national community, and democracy, because it transcends the communitarian liberal debate.

After Injury

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashraf H.A. Rushdy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Study ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Public Apologies

After Injury explores the practices of forgiveness, resentment, and apology in three key moments when they were undergoing a dramatic change: early Christian history (for forgiveness), the shift from British eighteenth-century to Continental nineteenth-century philosophers (for resentment), and the moment in the 1950s postwar world in which ordinary language philosophers and sociologists of everyday life theorized what it means to express or perform an apology. The debates in those key moments have largely defined the contemporary study of these practices. The first premise of this book is that because these three practices are interlinked—forgiveness is commonly defined as a forswearing of resentment in response to an apology—it makes sense to study these practices together. The second premise is that each practice has a different historical evolution. It thus makes sense to identify a key moment to examine what is arguably the most important mutation in the evolution of each practice. After looking at the debates in those three key moments, After Injury takes up the important contemporary questions about each of the practices. For the practice of forgiveness, those questions center on whether forgiveness is possible, and what place it occupies in relation to retribution. For resentment, the questions involve the value and risks of holding on to what is admittedly the disabling emotion of resentment in order to affirm the injustice of the past. For the practice of apology, a key question is what to make of a shift from personal to collective, from private to public apologies.

Surface Selves: Médée, 1634

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-93
Author(s):  
Juliette Cherbuliez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other

Chapter 1 serves as the cornerstone of this book, against which all the other chapters can be read. It explores a singular play, Pierre Corneille’s 1634 Médée. Often read as generic precursor or holdover, as failed experiment or primitive attempt, Médée is utterly unique for its era in its subject matter and politics. This chapter shows how its Médée is framed not by excess, passion, or inconstancy, but by moderation, knowledge, and attachment, in both positive and negative forms. Médée’s own “self” is a surface self, existing in counter-distinction to the complex self-possessed individual grounded in an interior, the hallmark of the eighteenth century. The contrast between the Medean surface self and the Medean art of destruction as one of cleaving to and cleaving from compels a meditation on how the self emerges in relation to others and what is sacrificed when we see the self as autonomous. Analogously, instead of seeing Médée as Corneille’s first tragedy, and so a primitive or premature form of what will come after it, this reading positions it at the undisclosed heart of the tragic project, as it reverberates in both its past and its future.

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

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