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At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the
forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms,
and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the
condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to
the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and
contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the
specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for
cultural production; the relationship between politics and the
category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and
contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of
medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums,
disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the
foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary
moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the
economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and transform
each other? What is modernism's logic of time and contemporaneity,
and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty,
or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of
neo-liberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history?
The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what
modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for
the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism's
afterlives and reverberations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The
volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology,
philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture,
television, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most
recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents
a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture
in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be
of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media
studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and
twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.
At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the
forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms,
and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the
condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to
the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and
contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the
specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for
cultural production; the relationship between politics and the
category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and
contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of
medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums,
disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the
foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary
moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the
economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and transform
each other? What is modernism's logic of time and contemporaneity,
and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty,
or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of
neo-liberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history?
The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what
modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for
the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism's
afterlives and reverberations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The
volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology,
philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture,
television, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most
recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents
a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture
in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be
of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media
studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and
twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.
This book attempts to understand what 'contemporary' has meant, and
should mean, for literary studies. The essays in this volume
suggest that an attentive reading of recent global literatures
challenges the idea that our contemporary moment is best
characterized as a timeless, instantaneous 'now'. The contributors
to this book argue that global literatures help us to conceive of
the contemporary as an always plural, heterogeneous, and contested
temporality. Far from suggesting that we replace theories of an
omnipresent 'end of history' with a traditional, single, diachronic
timeline, this book encourages the development of such a timeline's
rigorous inverse: a synchronic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal
history of the contemporary in literature, and thus of contemporary
global literatures. It opens up the concept of the contemporary for
comparative study by unlocking its temporal, logical, political,
and ultimately aesthetic and literary complexity.
This book attempts to understand what 'contemporary' has meant, and
should mean, for literary studies. The essays in this volume
suggest that an attentive reading of recent global literatures
challenges the idea that our contemporary moment is best
characterized as a timeless, instantaneous 'now'. The contributors
to this book argue that global literatures help us to conceive of
the contemporary as an always plural, heterogeneous, and contested
temporality. Far from suggesting that we replace theories of an
omnipresent 'end of history' with a traditional, single, diachronic
timeline, this book encourages the development of such a timeline's
rigorous inverse: a synchronic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal
history of the contemporary in literature, and thus of contemporary
global literatures. It opens up the concept of the contemporary for
comparative study by unlocking its temporal, logical, political,
and ultimately aesthetic and literary complexity.
Commentators across the political spectrum have argued that the
future has been absorbed by an ever-expanding present to which we
cannot imagine alternatives. The notion that we have lost the
ability to imagine change-culturally, socially, and politically-has
become one of the defining problems of our time. But what is the
difference between the populist narratives of those who promise to
solve this problem by returning us to a glorious past and those who
promise to lead us into a glorious future? Often, this book argues,
not very much at all. Revealing neo-authoritarianism and capitalist
hyper-innovation as two sides of the same coin, Mathias Nilges
shows that today's reactionaries and futurists both harness and
profit from the same temporal crises of our present. Looking to
design, popular culture, literature, and recent theoretical and
political discussions, Nilges offers ways of understanding the
re-emergence of familiar and disturbing forms of right-wing
politics and culture (authoritarianism, paternalism, fascism) not
as historical repetition but as dangerous consequences of the
contradictions of capitalism today. Using critical theory, in
particular the work of Ernst Bloch, this book recovers a politics
and culture of hope, which it locates beyond a future that is
colonized by capitalism and a past that becomes the mystical
playground for the new Right:in that which was never allowed to be
and thus demands realization.
"Marxism and the Critique of Value" aims to complete the critique
of the value-form that was initiated by Marx. While Marx's
"esoteric" critique of value has been rediscovered from time to
time by post-Marxists who know they've found something interesting
but don't quite know which end is the handle, Anglophone Marxism
has tended to bury this esoteric critique beneath a more
redistributionist understanding of Marx. The essays in this volume
attempt to think the critique of value through to the end, and to
draw out its implications for the current economic crisis; for
violence, Islamism, gender relations, masculinity, and the concept
of class; for revolutionary practice and agency; for the role of
the state and the future of the commons; for the concepts that come
down to us from Enlightenment thought: indeed, for the manifold
phenomena that characterize contemporary society under a capitalism
in crisis.
Commentators across the political spectrum have argued that the
future has been absorbed by an ever-expanding present to which we
cannot imagine alternatives. The notion that we have lost the
ability to imagine change-culturally, socially, and politically-has
become one of the defining problems of our time. But what is the
difference between the populist narratives of those who promise to
solve this problem by returning us to a glorious past and those who
promise to lead us into a glorious future? Often, this book argues,
not very much at all. Revealing neo-authoritarianism and capitalist
hyper-innovation as two sides of the same coin, Mathias Nilges
shows that today's reactionaries and futurists both harness and
profit from the same temporal crises of our present. Looking to
design, popular culture, literature, and recent theoretical and
political discussions, Nilges offers ways of understanding the
re-emergence of familiar and disturbing forms of right-wing
politics and culture (authoritarianism, paternalism, fascism) not
as historical repetition but as dangerous consequences of the
contradictions of capitalism today. Using critical theory, in
particular the work of Ernst Bloch, this book recovers a politics
and culture of hope, which it locates beyond a future that is
colonized by capitalism and a past that becomes the mystical
playground for the new Right:in that which was never allowed to be
and thus demands realization.
William Gibson is frequently described as one of the most
influential writers of the past few decades, yet his body of work
has only been studied partially and without full recognition of its
implications for literature and culture beyond science fiction. It
is high time for a book that explores the significance and
wide-ranging impact of Gibson's fiction. In the 1970s and 80s,
Gibson, the 'Godfather of Cyberpunk,' rejuvenated science fiction.
In groundbreaking works such as Neuromancer, which changed science
fiction as we knew it, Gibson provided us with a language and
imaginary through which it became possible to make sense of the
newly emerging world of globalization and the digital and media
age. Ever since, Gibson's reformulation of science fiction has
provided us not just with radically innovative visions of the
future but indeed with trenchant analyses of our historical present
and of the emergence and exhaustion of possible futures.
Contributors: Maria Alberto, Andrew M. Butler, Amy J. Elias,
Christian Haines, Kylie Korsnack, Mathias Nilges, Malka Older, Aron
Pease, Lisa Swanstrom, Takayuki Tatsumi, Sherryl Vint, Phillip E.
Wegner, Roger Whitson, Charles Yu
In How to Read a Moment, Mathias Nilges shows that time is
inseparable from the stories we tell about it, demonstrating that
the contemporary American novel offers new ways to make sense of
the temporality that governs our present. "Time is a thing that
grows scarcer every day," observes one of Don DeLillo's characters.
"The future is gone," The Baffler argues. "Where's my hoverboard!?"
a meme demands. Contemporary capitalism, a system that insists that
everything happen at once, creates problems for social thought and
narrative alike. After all, how does one tell the time of
instantaneity? In this moment of on-demand service and instant
trading, it has become difficult to imagine the future. The novel
emerged as the art form of a rapidly changing modern world, a way
of telling time in its progress. Nilges argues that this historical
mission is renewed today through works that understand
contemporaneity as a form of time shaping that props up our
material world and cultural imagination. But the contemporary
American novel does not simply associate our present with a crisis
of futurity. Through analyses of works by authors such as DeLillo,
Jennifer Egan, Charles Yu, and Colson Whitehead, Nilges illustrates
that the novel presents ways to make sense of the temporality that
controls our purportedly fully contemporary world. In so doing, the
novel recovers a sense of possibility and hope, forwarding a
dazzling argument for its own importance today.
In How to Read a Moment, Mathias Nilges shows that time is
inseparable from the stories we tell about it, demonstrating that
the contemporary American novel offers new ways to make sense of
the temporality that governs our present. “Time is a thing that
grows scarcer every day,” observes one of Don DeLillo’s
characters. “The future is gone,” The Baffler argues.
“Where’s my hoverboard!?” a meme demands. Contemporary
capitalism, a system that insists that everything happen at once,
creates problems for social thought and narrative alike. After all,
how does one tell the time of instantaneity? In this moment of
on-demand service and instant trading, it has become difficult to
imagine the future. The novel emerged as the art form of a rapidly
changing modern world, a way of telling time in its progress.
Nilges argues that this historical mission is renewed today through
works that understand contemporaneity as a form of time shaping
that props up our material world and cultural imagination. But the
contemporary American novel does not simply associate our present
with a crisis of futurity. Through analyses of works by authors
such as DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Charles Yu, and Colson Whitehead,
Nilges illustrates that the novel presents ways to make sense of
the temporality that controls our purportedly fully contemporary
world. In so doing, the novel recovers a sense of possibility and
hope, forwarding a dazzling argument for its own importance today.
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