Overview
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (8 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Modernity theory approaches modern experience as it incorporates a sense of itself as ‘modern’ (modernity), along with the possibilities and limitations of representing this in the arts and culture generally (modernism). The book interrogates modernity in the name of a fluid, unsettled, unsettling modernism.
As the offspring of the Enlightenment and the Age of Sensibility, modernity is framed here through a cultural aesthetics that highlights not just an instrumental, exploitative approach to the world but the distinctive configuration of embodiment, feeling, and imagination, that we refer to as ‘civilization’, in turn both explored and subverted through modernist experimentalism and reflexive thinking in culture and the arts. This discloses the rationalizing pretensions that underlie the modern project and have resulted in the sensationalist, melodramatic conflicts of good and evil that traverse our contemporary world of politics and popular culture alike. This innovative approach permits modernity theory to link otherwise fragmented insights of separate humanities disciplines, aspects of sociology, and cultural studies, by identifying and contributing to a central strand of modern thought running from Kant through Benjamin to the present. One aspect of modernity theory that results is that it cannot escape the paradoxes inherent in reflexive involvement in its own history.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
John Jervis is research fellow in cultural studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. This book is the culmination of a series of historical and theoretical studies of modern western culture and civilization: Sensational Subjects (2015), Sympathetic Sentiments (2015), Uncanny Modernity (co-edited, Palgrave, 2008), Transgressing the Modern (2000), Exploring the Modern (1998).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Modernity Theory
Book Subtitle: Modern Experience, Modernist Consciousness, Reflexive Thinking
Authors: John Jervis
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49676-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-49675-1Published: 10 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-49676-8Published: 29 December 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 166
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Literary Theory