Lawrence A. Scaff
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691147796
- eISBN:
- 9781400836710
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691147796.003.0010
- Subject:
- Sociology, Population and Demography
This chapter examines Max Weber's thoughts on American modernity based on his observations during his trip to New York City. It first considers Max and Marianne Weber's experience with religious ...
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This chapter examines Max Weber's thoughts on American modernity based on his observations during his trip to New York City. It first considers Max and Marianne Weber's experience with religious services in New York, including a Presbyterian service at the Marble Collegiate Church, the service of the First Church of Christ Scientist, and the service of the Ethical Culture Society. It then discusses Max's views about the social implications of religious faith and social capital, as well as Marianne's thoughts about Americanization. It also analyzes Weber's account of the “cool objectivity of sociation” and his ideas on the issues of class, race, and gender; the relationship between religious ethics and economic action; and cultural pluralism.Less
This chapter examines Max Weber's thoughts on American modernity based on his observations during his trip to New York City. It first considers Max and Marianne Weber's experience with religious services in New York, including a Presbyterian service at the Marble Collegiate Church, the service of the First Church of Christ Scientist, and the service of the Ethical Culture Society. It then discusses Max's views about the social implications of religious faith and social capital, as well as Marianne's thoughts about Americanization. It also analyzes Weber's account of the “cool objectivity of sociation” and his ideas on the issues of class, race, and gender; the relationship between religious ethics and economic action; and cultural pluralism.
Jorge Larrain
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846310195
- eISBN:
- 9781781380857
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846314346.003
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This chapter examines the historical transformations of Latin American modernity, highlighting the historically variable ambivalence between democratic self–constitution and the attempt to create a ...
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This chapter examines the historical transformations of Latin American modernity, highlighting the historically variable ambivalence between democratic self–constitution and the attempt to create a self–sustained model of economic organization. Through the need to arrive at an interpretation of this ambivalence that is adequate to Latin America, Europe and the US have served as points of orientation, with the US now sometimes seen as an imposed model and Europe in terms of the hope for an alternative to the US.Less
This chapter examines the historical transformations of Latin American modernity, highlighting the historically variable ambivalence between democratic self–constitution and the attempt to create a self–sustained model of economic organization. Through the need to arrive at an interpretation of this ambivalence that is adequate to Latin America, Europe and the US have served as points of orientation, with the US now sometimes seen as an imposed model and Europe in terms of the hope for an alternative to the US.
Aldo J. Regalado
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781628462210
- eISBN:
- 9781626746183
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628462210.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
This introductory chapter discusses how understanding modernity is essential in identifying the cultural significance of the American superhero. At their genesis, superheroes are cultural responses ...
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This introductory chapter discusses how understanding modernity is essential in identifying the cultural significance of the American superhero. At their genesis, superheroes are cultural responses to American modernity. Indeed, Americans had been employing heroic fiction as a means of navigating modernity's challenges as early as the nineteenth century. The work of authors writing in the genre during the early national period is rife with considerations of how democracy, capitalism, slavery, westward expansion, immigration, urbanization, technological innovation, and increased mobility shaped the nation's character. Initially written and distributed by people of privilege, these stories too often served to underpin the power of traditional elites at the expense of those marginalized by ethnicity, race, class, or gender. Such categories, therefore, became significant for defining the contours of modernity.Less
This introductory chapter discusses how understanding modernity is essential in identifying the cultural significance of the American superhero. At their genesis, superheroes are cultural responses to American modernity. Indeed, Americans had been employing heroic fiction as a means of navigating modernity's challenges as early as the nineteenth century. The work of authors writing in the genre during the early national period is rife with considerations of how democracy, capitalism, slavery, westward expansion, immigration, urbanization, technological innovation, and increased mobility shaped the nation's character. Initially written and distributed by people of privilege, these stories too often served to underpin the power of traditional elites at the expense of those marginalized by ethnicity, race, class, or gender. Such categories, therefore, became significant for defining the contours of modernity.
David Gilbert
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469622699
- eISBN:
- 9781469622712
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469622699.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter examines the American cultural revolution brought about by the ragtime operetta, Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, and how it initiated a reevaluation of Negro music and its ...
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This chapter examines the American cultural revolution brought about by the ragtime operetta, Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, and how it initiated a reevaluation of Negro music and its place within a cultural market dominated by white ideologies and sensibilities. In their performance, Will Marion Cook and Ernest Hogan inaugurated new considerations of Negro music, by disrupting many of the rigid distinctions African American intellectuals held between folk/formal and high/low (and many others). Most significantly, the duo called attention to a historical process that turned the folk music of the American slave into the sound of modern America. In the first and second decades of the twentieth century, Negro music resounded as a rhythmic dance music representing not only African American modernity, but U.S. modernity more broadly.Less
This chapter examines the American cultural revolution brought about by the ragtime operetta, Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, and how it initiated a reevaluation of Negro music and its place within a cultural market dominated by white ideologies and sensibilities. In their performance, Will Marion Cook and Ernest Hogan inaugurated new considerations of Negro music, by disrupting many of the rigid distinctions African American intellectuals held between folk/formal and high/low (and many others). Most significantly, the duo called attention to a historical process that turned the folk music of the American slave into the sound of modern America. In the first and second decades of the twentieth century, Negro music resounded as a rhythmic dance music representing not only African American modernity, but U.S. modernity more broadly.
Andrew Lyndon Knighton
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814748909
- eISBN:
- 9780814748916
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814748909.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of writing about unproductivity, with the exploits of various idlers, loafers, and “gentlemen of refinement” capturing the imagination of a country that ...
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The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of writing about unproductivity, with the exploits of various idlers, loafers, and “gentlemen of refinement” capturing the imagination of a country that was deeply ambivalent about its work ethic. This book documents this American obsession with unproductivity and its potentials, while offering an explanation of the profound significance of idle practices for literary and cultural production. While this fascination with unproductivity memorably defined literary characters from Rip Van Winkle to Bartleby to George Hurstwood, it also reverberated deeply through the entire American culture, both as a seductive ideal and as a potentially corrosive threat to upright, industrious American men. The book connects the question of unproductivity to other discourses concerning manhood, the value of art, the allure of frontier lands, the usefulness of knowledge, the meaning of individuality, and the experience of time, space, and history. It offers a new way of thinking about the largely unacknowledged “productivity of the unproductive,” revealing the incalculable and sometimes surprising ways in which American modernity transformed the relationship between subjects and that which is most intimate to them: their own activity.Less
The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of writing about unproductivity, with the exploits of various idlers, loafers, and “gentlemen of refinement” capturing the imagination of a country that was deeply ambivalent about its work ethic. This book documents this American obsession with unproductivity and its potentials, while offering an explanation of the profound significance of idle practices for literary and cultural production. While this fascination with unproductivity memorably defined literary characters from Rip Van Winkle to Bartleby to George Hurstwood, it also reverberated deeply through the entire American culture, both as a seductive ideal and as a potentially corrosive threat to upright, industrious American men. The book connects the question of unproductivity to other discourses concerning manhood, the value of art, the allure of frontier lands, the usefulness of knowledge, the meaning of individuality, and the experience of time, space, and history. It offers a new way of thinking about the largely unacknowledged “productivity of the unproductive,” revealing the incalculable and sometimes surprising ways in which American modernity transformed the relationship between subjects and that which is most intimate to them: their own activity.
Aldo J. Regalado
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781628462210
- eISBN:
- 9781626746183
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628462210.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
This chapter focuses on the creation of Superman. As second-generation Jewish immigrants, Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's experiences in America differed from that of men like ...
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This chapter focuses on the creation of Superman. As second-generation Jewish immigrants, Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's experiences in America differed from that of men like Burroughs and Lovecraft, combining the realities of urban living, the consequences of the Great Depression, America's entry into World War II, the pervasiveness of ethnic and racial discrimination, and the formidable challenges of acculturating to a society that was violent, oppressive, and culturally distant for their parents. Responding to these realities, Siegel and Shuster engaged the fiction of previous authors in the spirit of appropriation, renegotiating its meanings and employing its forms to express distinctly different ethnic, masculine, and national identities suited to navigating their own particular encounters with American modernity. As the ultimate product of his authors' creative endeavors, therefore, Superman worked towards redefining the ethnic and class requirements of masculinity in America.Less
This chapter focuses on the creation of Superman. As second-generation Jewish immigrants, Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's experiences in America differed from that of men like Burroughs and Lovecraft, combining the realities of urban living, the consequences of the Great Depression, America's entry into World War II, the pervasiveness of ethnic and racial discrimination, and the formidable challenges of acculturating to a society that was violent, oppressive, and culturally distant for their parents. Responding to these realities, Siegel and Shuster engaged the fiction of previous authors in the spirit of appropriation, renegotiating its meanings and employing its forms to express distinctly different ethnic, masculine, and national identities suited to navigating their own particular encounters with American modernity. As the ultimate product of his authors' creative endeavors, therefore, Superman worked towards redefining the ethnic and class requirements of masculinity in America.
James Smethurst
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834633
- eISBN:
- 9781469603100
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807878088_smethurst
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, the author ...
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The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, the author of this book reveals, but instead a time of profound response from African American intellectuals. The book explores how the Jim Crow system triggered significant artistic and intellectual responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, ultimately, notions of American modernity. In identifying the Jim Crow period with the coming of modernity, the author upsets the customary assessment of the Harlem Renaissance as the first nationally significant black arts movement, showing how artists reacted to Jim Crow with migration narratives, poetry about the black experience, black performance of popular culture forms, and more. He introduces a whole cast of characters, including understudied figures such as William Stanley Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, and more familiar authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. By considering the legacy of writers and artists active between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, the author illuminates their influence on the black and white U.S. modernists who followed.Less
The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, the author of this book reveals, but instead a time of profound response from African American intellectuals. The book explores how the Jim Crow system triggered significant artistic and intellectual responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, ultimately, notions of American modernity. In identifying the Jim Crow period with the coming of modernity, the author upsets the customary assessment of the Harlem Renaissance as the first nationally significant black arts movement, showing how artists reacted to Jim Crow with migration narratives, poetry about the black experience, black performance of popular culture forms, and more. He introduces a whole cast of characters, including understudied figures such as William Stanley Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, and more familiar authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. By considering the legacy of writers and artists active between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, the author illuminates their influence on the black and white U.S. modernists who followed.
Lindon Barrett
Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. Mcbride, and John Carlos Rowe (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252038006
- eISBN:
- 9780252095290
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252038006.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter focuses on the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa (1745?–1801), the African captured by slave traders in the Niger River region when he was ten years old, taken to the U.S. ...
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This chapter focuses on the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa (1745?–1801), the African captured by slave traders in the Niger River region when he was ten years old, taken to the U.S. South, sold to a West Indian planter, who then worked aboard slave ships sailing between the Caribbean and England until he was nineteen. Buying his freedom, he continued his life as a merchant seaman and quartermaster for many years, working vigorously for the abolition of slavery, marrying an English woman, and serving as Commissary of Stores for freed slaves returning to Sierra Leone. The chapter demonstrates how Equiano/Vassa's “binomial being” elaborates the social and psychological consequences of the Euro-American political economy of modernity outlined in the first chapter.Less
This chapter focuses on the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa (1745?–1801), the African captured by slave traders in the Niger River region when he was ten years old, taken to the U.S. South, sold to a West Indian planter, who then worked aboard slave ships sailing between the Caribbean and England until he was nineteen. Buying his freedom, he continued his life as a merchant seaman and quartermaster for many years, working vigorously for the abolition of slavery, marrying an English woman, and serving as Commissary of Stores for freed slaves returning to Sierra Leone. The chapter demonstrates how Equiano/Vassa's “binomial being” elaborates the social and psychological consequences of the Euro-American political economy of modernity outlined in the first chapter.
Joshua O. Reno
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780520288935
- eISBN:
- 9780520963771
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520288935.003.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, American and Canadian Cultural Anthropology
Waste is a general outcome of processes of formation, but it assumes a distinct character in North American modernity. If forms can last only by releasing transient materials, then their relative ...
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Waste is a general outcome of processes of formation, but it assumes a distinct character in North American modernity. If forms can last only by releasing transient materials, then their relative durability is reliant on the constitutive absence of wastes. North American moderns manage wastes in a way that further transforms their imaginations and social relations. Mass waste is the anonymous and indeterminate by-product of modern life that requires management by someone else somewhere else. Landfilling disposes of mass waste so efficiently and cheaply that more disposability is introduced and bigger landfills are required at greater distances from our everyday lives. Examining how people live with the mass waste of other people and places at one landfill makes this clear.Less
Waste is a general outcome of processes of formation, but it assumes a distinct character in North American modernity. If forms can last only by releasing transient materials, then their relative durability is reliant on the constitutive absence of wastes. North American moderns manage wastes in a way that further transforms their imaginations and social relations. Mass waste is the anonymous and indeterminate by-product of modern life that requires management by someone else somewhere else. Landfilling disposes of mass waste so efficiently and cheaply that more disposability is introduced and bigger landfills are required at greater distances from our everyday lives. Examining how people live with the mass waste of other people and places at one landfill makes this clear.
