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Author: Haomin Gong Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824860403 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 201
Book Description
Postsocialist China is marked by paradoxes: economic boom, political conservatism, cultural complexity. Haomin Gong’s dynamic study of these paradoxes, or “unevenness,” provides a unique and seminal approach to contemporary China. Reading unevenness as a problem and an opportunity simultaneously, Gong investigates how this dialectical social situation shapes cultural production. He begins his investigation of “uneven modernity” in China by constructing a critical framework of unevenness among different theoretical schools and expounding on how dialectical thinking points to a metaphysical paradox in capitalism and modernity: the inevitable tension between a constant pursuit of infinite fullness and a break of fullness (unevenness) as the means of this pursuit. In the Chinese context, this paradox is created in the “uneven developmentalism” that most manifestly characterizes the postsocialist period. Gong goes on to investigate manifestations of the dialectics of unevenness in specific cultural events. Four case studies address respectively but not exclusively literature (the prose of Yu Qiuyu), popular fiction (Chi Li’s neorealist fiction), commercial cinema (the movies of Feng Xiaogang), and art-house cinema (Wang Xiaoshuai’s filmmaking). Representing different aspects of cultural production in postsocialist China, these writers and directors deal with the same social condition of uneven development, and their works clearly exhibit the problematics of this age. Uneven Modernity makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of China studies as well as the study of uneven development in general. It addresses some of the most popular, yet understudied, cultural phenomena in contemporary China. Specialists and students will find its insights admirable and its style accessible.
Author: Haomin Gong Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824860403 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 201
Book Description
Postsocialist China is marked by paradoxes: economic boom, political conservatism, cultural complexity. Haomin Gong’s dynamic study of these paradoxes, or “unevenness,” provides a unique and seminal approach to contemporary China. Reading unevenness as a problem and an opportunity simultaneously, Gong investigates how this dialectical social situation shapes cultural production. He begins his investigation of “uneven modernity” in China by constructing a critical framework of unevenness among different theoretical schools and expounding on how dialectical thinking points to a metaphysical paradox in capitalism and modernity: the inevitable tension between a constant pursuit of infinite fullness and a break of fullness (unevenness) as the means of this pursuit. In the Chinese context, this paradox is created in the “uneven developmentalism” that most manifestly characterizes the postsocialist period. Gong goes on to investigate manifestations of the dialectics of unevenness in specific cultural events. Four case studies address respectively but not exclusively literature (the prose of Yu Qiuyu), popular fiction (Chi Li’s neorealist fiction), commercial cinema (the movies of Feng Xiaogang), and art-house cinema (Wang Xiaoshuai’s filmmaking). Representing different aspects of cultural production in postsocialist China, these writers and directors deal with the same social condition of uneven development, and their works clearly exhibit the problematics of this age. Uneven Modernity makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of China studies as well as the study of uneven development in general. It addresses some of the most popular, yet understudied, cultural phenomena in contemporary China. Specialists and students will find its insights admirable and its style accessible.
Author: Haomin Gong Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
This book makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of Chinese studies as well as the study of uneven development in general.
Author: Warwick Research Collective Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 1781381895 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
The ambition of this book is to resituate the problem of 'world literature', considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. This theory has a long pedigree in the social sciences, where it continues to stimulate debate. But its implications for cultural analysis have received less attention, even though the theory might be said to draw attention to a central -perhaps the central - arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development, on the one hand, and the recently interrogated and expanded categories of 'world literature' and 'modernism', on the other, that this book looks for its specific contours. In the two theoretical chapters that frame the book, the authors argue for a single, but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature. In the four substantive chapters that then follow, the authors explore a selection of modern-era fictions in which the potential of their method of comparativism seems to be most dramatically highlighted. They treat the novel paradigmatically, not exemplarily, as a literary form in which combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies as a 'modernising' import. The peculiar plasticity and hybridity of the novel form enables it to incorporate not only multiple literary levels, genres and modes, but also other non-literary and archaic cultural forms - so that, for example, realist elements might be mixed with more experimental modes of narration, or older literary devices might be reactivated in juxtaposition with more contemporary frames.
Author: Sheldon H. Lu Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824861868 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level. Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term "postsocialism" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004384731 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 397
Book Description
Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development seeks to explore and develop Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development. In particular, it aims to adapt the political and historical analysis which originated in Trotsky’s Russia for use within the contemporary field of world literature. As such, it draws together the work of scholars from both the field of international relations and the field of literature and the arts. This collection will therefore be of particular interest to anyone who is interested in new ways of understanding world literary texts, or interested in new ways of applying Trotsky’s revolutionary politics to the contemporary world order. Contributors: Alexander Anievas, Gail Day, James Christie, Kamran Matin, Kerem Nisancioglu, Luke Cooper, Michael Niblett, Neil Davidson, Nesrin Degirmencioglu, Robert Spencer, Steve Edwards.
Author: Harry Harootunian Publisher: Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture ISBN: 9780231190206 Category : HISTORY Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
Few scholars have done more than Harry Harootunian to shape the study of modern Japan. Uneven Moments presents a selection of Harootunian's essays on Japan's intellectual and cultural history from the late Tokugawa period to the present that span the many phases of his distinguished career and point to new directions for Japanese studies.
Author: Ronald D. Eller Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813138639 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 492
Book Description
This award-winning history examines the politics of progress in America through a close look at industrial development in Appalachia since WWII. Appalachia has played a complex role in the unfolding of American history. Early-twentieth-century critics of modernity saw the region as a remnant of frontier life that should be preserved and protected. However, supporters of material production and technology decried what they saw as a the isolation and backwardness of the region and sought to “uplift” its people through education and industrialization. In Uneven Ground, Ronald D. Eller examines the politics of development in Appalachia while exploring the idea of progress as it has evolved in America. “Passionate, clear, concise, and at times profound,” this volume demonstrates that Appalachia's struggle to overcome poverty, to live in harmony with the land, and to respect the value of community is a truly American story (Chad Berry, author of Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles). Winner of the Appalachian Studies Association’s Weatherford Award and the Southern Political Science Association’s V.O. Key Award
Author: James Ferguson Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 052092228X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline." Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives—the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies. Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.
Author: Alex Davis Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139827642 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
This Companion offers the most comprehensive overview available of modernist poetry, its forms, its major authors and its contexts. The first part explores the historical and cultural contexts and sexual politics of literary modernism and the avant garde. The chapters in the second part concentrate on individual authors and movements, while the concluding part offers a comprehensive overview of the early reception and subsequent canonisation of modernist poetry. As well as insightful readings of canonical poets, the Companion features extended discussions of poets whose importance is now being increasingly recognised, such as Mina Loy, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and postcolonial poets in the Caribbean, Africa and India. While modernist poets are often thought of as difficult, these essays will help students to understand and enjoy their experimental, playful and fascinating responses to contemporary social and cultural change and their dialogue with the arts and with each other.
Author: Azariah Alfante Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 1684484979 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
In this elegantly written study, Alfante explores the work of select nineteenth-century writers, intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and clergy who responded to cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the movement toward secularization in Spain. Focusing on the social experience, this book probes the tensions between traditionalism and liberalism that influenced public opinion of the clergy, sacred buildings, and religious orders. The writings of Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Fernán Caballero), Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Benito Pérez Galdós, and José María de Pereda addressed conflicts between modernizing forces and the Catholic Church about the place of religion and its signifiers in Spanish society. Foregrounding expropriation (government confiscation of civil and ecclesiastical property) and exclaustration (the expulsion of religious communities), and drawing on archival research, the history of disentailment, cultural theory, memory studies, and sociology, Alfante demonstrates how Spain’s liberalizing movement profoundly influenced class mobility and faith among the populace.
Author: Haomin Gong
Author: Haomin Gong
Author: Haomin Gong
Author: Warwick Research Collective
Author: Sheldon H. Lu
Author: 
Author: Harry Harootunian
Author: Ronald D. Eller
Author: James Ferguson
Author: Alex Davis
Author: Azariah Alfante