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Though long associated with a small group of coffeehouse elites around the turn of the twentieth century, Viennese “modernist” culture had roots that reached much further back and beyond the rarefied sphere of high culture. In Comical Modernity, Heidi Hakkarainen looks at Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of dramatic urban renewal during which the city’s rapidly changing face was a mainstay of humorous magazines, books, and other publications aimed at middle-class audiences. As she shows, humor provided a widely accessible means of negotiating an era of radical change.
Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity by Anonim Pdf
Baudelaire's essays on caricature offered the first sustained defense of the value of caricature as a serious art, worthy of study in its own right. This book argues for the crucial importance of the essays for his conception of modernity, so fundamental to the subsequent history of modernism. From the theory of the comic formulated in De l'essence du rire to his discussions of Daumier, Goya, Hogarth, Cruikshank, Bruegel, Grandville, Gavarni, Charlet, and many others, Baudelaire develops not only an aesthetic of caricature but also a caricatural aesthetic--dual and contradictory, grotesque, ironic, violent, farcical, fantastic, and fleeting--that defines an art of modern life. In particular, Baudelaire's insistence on the dualism and ambiguity of laughter has radical implications for such emblems of modernity as the city and the flâneur who roams the streets. The modern city is the space of the comic, a kind of caricature, presenting the flâneur with an image of dualism, one's position as subject and object, implicated in the same urban experiences one seems to control. The theory of the comic invests the idea of modernity with reciprocity, one's status as laughter and object of laughter, thus preventing the subjective construction and appropriation of the world that has so often been linked with the project of modernism. Comic art reflects what Walter Benjamin later defined as Baudelairean allegory, at once representing and revealing the alienation of modern experience. But Baudelaire also transforms the dualism of the comic into a peculiarly modern unity-- the doubling of the comic artist enacted for the benefit of the audience, the self-generating and self-reflexive experience of the flâneur in a "communion" with the crowd. This study examines his views in the context of the history of comic theory and contemporary accounts of the individual artists. Complete with illustrations of the many works discussed, it illuminates the history and theory of caricature, the comic, and the grotesque, and adds to our understanding of modernism in literature and the visual arts.
The question of how seriously to take literature has vexed philosophers throughout the centuries. Are the stories we write merely noble lies told to hold society together? A means of comic detachment from a tragic world? Mimicry of transcendent truths? Potent acts of self-realization? From the Socratics to the Romantics, all of these opinions and more have been offered. In a pop-culture age in which we live out of the stories we tell, our culture needs a clear answer. In this masterful overview of the Western literary tradition, Patrick Downey traces how seriously philosophers and writers across the centuries, from Plato to Kierkegaard, have taken humanity’s attempts at self-authorship in tragedy and comedy. These attempts, Downey argues, only find resolution in history’s most significant work of literature: the Bible. Setting all other literature in its right place, the Bible and the gospel it proclaims take us beyond literature to the true story of reality, providing what the philosophers and poets have sought for all along: a serious comedy.
In nineteenth century Cisleithanian Austria, poor, working-class women underwent mass migrations from the countryside to urban centers for menial or unskilled labor jobs. Through legal provisions on women’s work in the Habsburg Empire, there was an increase in the policing and surveillance of what was previously a gender-neutral career, turning it into one dominated by thousands of female rural migrants. Servants of Culture provides an account of Habsburg servant law since the eighteenth century and uncovers the paternalistic and maternalistic assumptions and anxieties which turned the interest of socio-political players in improving poor living and working conditions into practices that created restrictive gender and class hierarchies. Through pioneering analysis of the agendas of medical experts, police, socialists, feminists, legal reformers, and even serial killers, this volume puts forth a neglected history of the state of domestic service discourse at the turn of the 19th century and how it shaped and continues to shape the surveillance of women.
Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648–1920 by Deborah Simonton,Hannu Salmi Pdf
As Enlightenment notions of predictability, progress and the sense that humans could control and shape their environments informed European thought, catastrophes shook many towns to the core, challenging the new world view with dramatic impact. This book concentrates on a period marked by passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional village life to new bourgeois and even individualistic urbanism. The volume employs a broad definition of catastrophe, as it examines how urban communities conceived, adapted to, and were transformed by catastrophes, both natural and human-made. Competing views of gender figure in the telling and retelling of these analyses: women as scapegoats, as vulnerable, as victims, even as cannibals or conversely as defenders, organizers of assistance, inspirers of men; and men in varied guises as protectors, governors and police, heroes, leaders, negotiators and honorable men. Gender is also deployed linguistically to feminize activities or even countries. Inevitably, however, these tragedies are mediated by myth and memory. They are not neutral events whose retelling is a simple narrative. Through a varied array of urban catastrophes, this book is a nuanced account that physically and metaphorically maps men and women into the urban landscape and the worlds of catastrophe.
Egon Schiele and the Art of Popular Illustration by Claude Cernuschi Pdf
Presenting a radically different picture of Egon Schiele’s work, this study documents (in one-to-one comparisons) the extent of the artist’s visual borrowings from the Viennese humoristic journal, Die Muskete. Claude Cernuschi analyzes each comparison on a case-by-case basis, primarily because the interpretation of cartoons and caricatures is highly contingent on their specific historical and cultural context. Although this connection has gone unnoticed in the literature, in retrospect, this correlation makes perfect sense. Not only was Schiele’s artistic production frequently compared to caricature (and derided for being “grotesque”), but Expressionism and caricature are natural allies. One may belong to “high” art and the other to “popular” culture, yet both presuppose similar assumptions and deploy a similar rhetorical position: namely, that the exaggeration of human physiognomy allows deeper psychological “truths” to emerge. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, popular culture, and politics.
While a large amount of scholarship about Milan Kundera's work exists, in Liisa Steinby's opinion his work has not been studied within the context of (European) modernity as a sociohistorical and a cultural concept. Of course, he is considered to be a modernist writer (some call him even a postmodernist), but what the broader concept of modernity intellectually, historically, socially, and culturally means for him and how this is expressed in his texts has not been thoroughly examined. Steinby's book fills this vacuum by analyzing Kundera's novels from the viewpoint of his understanding of the existential problems in the culture of modernity. In addition, his relation to those modernist novelists from the first half of the twentieth century who are most important for him is scrutinized in detail. Steinby's Kundera and Modernity is intended for students of modernism in literary and (comparative) cultural studies, as well as those interested in European and Central European studies.
The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History by Lieven Ameel,Jason Finch,Silja Laine,Richard Dennis Pdf
The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History explores a variety of geographical and cultural contexts to examine what literary texts, grasped as material objects and reflections on urban materialities, have to offer for urban history. The contributing writers’ approach to literary narratives and materialities in urban history is summarised within the conceptualisation ‘materiality in/of literature’: the way in which literary narratives at once refer to the material world and actively partake in the material construction of the world. This book takes a geographically multipolar and multidisciplinary approach to discuss cities in the UK, the US, India, South Africa, Finland, and France whilst examining a wide range of textual genres from the novel to cartoons, advertising copy, architecture and urban planning, and archaeological writing. In the process, attention is drawn to narrative complexities embedded within literary fiction and to the dialogue between narratives and historical change. The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History has three areas of focus: literary fiction as form of urban materiality, literary narratives as social investigations of the material city, and the narrating of silenced material lives as witnessed in various narrative sources.
Studies in the Comic Spirit in Modern Japanese Fiction by Joel R. Cohn Pdf
Unlike traditional Japanese literature, which has a rich tradition of comedy, modern Japanese literature is commonly associated with a high seriousness of purpose. In this pathbreaking study, Joel R. Cohn analyzes works by three writers—Ibuse Masuji (1898–1993), Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), and Inoue Hisashi (1934– )—whose works constitute a relentless assault on the notion that comedy cannot be part of serious literature. Cohn focuses on thematic, structural, and stylistic elements in the works of these writers to show that modern Japanese comedic literature is a product of a particular set of historical, social, and cultural experiences. Cohn finds that cultural and social forces in modern Japan have led to the creation of comic literature that tends to deflect attention away from a human other and turn in on itself in different forms.
The Routledge History of Loneliness by Katie Barclay,Elaine Chalus,Deborah Simonton Pdf
The Routledge History of Loneliness takes a multidisciplinary approach to the history of a modern emotion, exploring its form and development across cultures from the seventeenth century to the present. Bringing together thirty scholars from various disciplines, including history, anthropology, philosophy, literature and art history, the volume considers how loneliness was represented in art and literature, conceptualised by philosophers and writers and described by people in their personal narratives. It considers loneliness as a feeling so often defined in contrast to sociability and affective connections, particularly attending to loneliness in relation to the family, household and community. Acknowledging that loneliness is a relatively novel term in English, the book explores its precedents in ideas about solitude, melancholy and nostalgia, as well as how it might be considered in cross-cultural perspectives. With wide appeal to students and researchers in a variety of subjects, including the history of emotions, social sciences and literature, this volume brings a critical historical perspective to an emotion with contemporary significance.
The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna by David Wyn Jones Pdf
The music of the Strauss family – Johann and his three sons, Johann, Josef and Eduard – enjoys enormous popular appeal. Yet existing biographies have failed to do justice to the family's true significance in nineteenth and early twentieth-century musical history. David Wyn Jones addresses this deficiency, engagingly showing that – from Johann's first engagements in the mid-1820s to the death of Eduard in 1916 – the music making of the family was at the centre of Habsburg Viennese society as it moved between dance hall, concert hall and theatre. The Strauss industry at its height was, he demonstrates, greater than any one of the individuals, with serious personal and domestic consequences including affairs, illness, rivalry and fraud. This zesty biography, spanning over a hundred years of history, brings the dynasty brilliantly to life across a large canvas as it offers fresh and revealing insights into the cultural life of Vienna as a whole.
Presenting a cultural and interdisciplinary study of humor in Spain from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book examines how humour entered public life, how it attained a legitimacy to communicate ‘serious’ ideas in the Enlightenment and how this set the seed for the key position that humor occupies in society today. Through a range of case studies that run from Goya’s paintings, humor, and gender representations in radio programmes during the first Franco regime, developmentalist cinema of the sixties and seventies, to the transformation of female humor in social media, the book traces the core role that the comical has played in the public sphere. The contributors to this volume represent a wide range of disciplines including gender studies, humour studies and Hispanic studies and offer international perspectives on Spanish laughter.
Focused on the German-speaking parts of the former Habsburg Empire, and on present-day Austria in particular, this book offers a series of highly innovative analyses of the interplay of nationalism’s discursive and institutional facets. Here, Christian Karner develops a distinctive perspective on Austrian nationalism over the longue durée, tracing nationalistic ways of thinking and mobilizing from the late eighteenth century to the present. Through close analyses of key texts representing diverse settings and historical episodes, this book traces the connections, continuities and ruptures that have characterized the varieties of Austrian nationalism.
Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe by František Šístek Pdf
As a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. To a significant degree, the wider representations and perceptions of this population can be traced to the reports of Central European—and especially Habsburg—diplomats, scholars, journalists, tourists, and other observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary scholars to examine the political, social, and discursive dimensions of Bosnian Muslims’ encounters with the West since the nineteenth century.
