Tag: Modernity

Free Download Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action by Morgan G. Ames, Massimo Mazzotti
English | March 24, 2023 | ISBN: 0197502423 | 321 pages | PDF | 8.84 Mb
Algorithms have been transforming human society long before the advent of computing. Yet they continue to exist in relative invisibility despite their presence behind many of our modern social interactions. The rhetoric of algorithmic neutrality is more alive than ever, and algorithms are often depicted as obvious and unproblematic-without context and without history.

Free Download Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal By Rochona Majumdar
2009 | 360 Pages | ISBN: 0822344629 | PDF | 5 MB
An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, "ancient" social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an "Indian" tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced "traditions"―the extended family and arranged marriage―entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new "marketplace" for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India. Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.

Free Download Katherine Giuffre, "Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity"
English | ISBN: 150363535X | 2023 | 210 pages | PDF | 1429 KB
A cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution. Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, the book examines in depth six of the cultural "battles" that were key parts of this revolution: the novels of the Brontë sisters, the paintings of the Impressionists, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the Ballets Russes production of

Free Download Matt Matravers, "Managing Modernity: Politics and the Culture of Control"
English | 2005 | ISBN: 0415348056, 0415568285 | EPUB | pages: 202 | 0.6 mb
In the last thirty years, the USA and the UK have witnessed a profound change in the way in which we think about and respond to crime and social control. Crime has become part of everyday life as, for many citizens, has imprisonment.

Free Download The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive By Mary Ann Doane
2002 | 288 Pages | ISBN: 0674007298 | PDF | 50 MB
Hailed as the permanent record of fleeting moments, the cinema emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century as an unprecedented means of capturing time–and this at a moment when disciplines from physics to philosophy, and historical trends from industrialization to the expansion of capitalism, were transforming the very idea of time. In a work that itself captures and reconfigures the passing moments of art, history, and philosophy, Mary Ann Doane shows how the cinema, representing the singular instant of chance and ephemerality in the face of the increasing rationalization and standardization of the day, participated in the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity.At this book’s heart is the cinema’s essential paradox: temporal continuity conveyed through "stopped time," the rapid succession of still frames or frozen images. Doane explores the role of this paradox, and of notions of the temporal indeterminacy and instability of an image, in shaping not just cinematic time but also modern ideas about continuity and discontinuity, archivability, contingency and determinism, and temporal irreversibility. A compelling meditation on the status of cinematic knowledge, her book is also an inquiry into the very heart and soul of modernity.

Free Download Julia Moses, "Marriage, Law and Modernity: Global Histories"
English | ISBN: 1474276105 | 2017 | 288 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Marriage, Law and Modernity offers a global perspective on the modern history of marriage. Widespread recent debate has focused on the changing nature of families, characterized by both the rise of unmarried cohabitation and the legalization of same-sex marriage. However, historical understanding of these developments remains limited. How has marriage come to be the target of national legislation? Are recent policies on same-sex marriage part of a broader transformation? And, has marriage come to be similar across the globe despite claims about national, cultural and religious difference?

Free Download The Fetish of Theology: The Challenge of the Fetish-Object to Modernity (Radical Theologies and Philosophies) by Colby Dickinson
English | March 27, 2020 | ISBN: 3030407748 | 303 pages | PDF | 7.29 Mb
By delving into the history of the fetish-object among both modern and contemporary commentators, this book highlights the fetish-object’s role as a philosophical and religious concept of the highest significance. Historically, fetishes are implicated in specific struggles for sovereign (political) and/or religious (hierarchical) power, with their interwoven symbols defined as the primary location for transcendence in our world. This book defines the political consequences of fetish-objects within a western cultural, and primarily theological context through a comparative approach of various literatures on fetish-objects―anthropological to the psychological, Marxist to the theological. It reconceives of fetishes as a form of resistance to oppressive structures, something which motivated Christians themselves historically, and shaped our western understanding of the sacraments far more than has been acknowledged. Taking up this conversation likewise holds forth the possibility of reconceptualizing how fetish-objects and sacramental presences both speak profoundly to our late-modern selves.

Free Download J. P. S. Uberoi, "The European Modernity: Science, Truth, and Method"
English | 2002 | pages: 168 | ISBN: 0195655478 | PDF (scan) | 15,5 mb
This study examines the foundations of the European modernity in relation to the Hermetic tradition and its cosmological approach to life and knowledge. The symmetry of Dante, medicine of Paracelsus and science of Goethe form the background for this investigation of the modernist regime – its

Free Download Prof PP Raveendran, "Under the Bhasha Gaze: Modernity and Indian Literature"
English | ISBN: 0192871552 | 2023 | 368 pages | PDF | 2 MB
The book is a study of literature in India in the context of recent discussions on modernity and its theoretical extensions such as the everyday and the social imaginary. It is a critique of the aesthetics and politics of modernity as they are embodied in Indian bhasha literature of the past two centuries. The primary objective of the book is to explore the trajectory of modernity after Indian literature encountered colonialism in the early 19th century. The intricate ways in which the bhasha imagination negotiated questions around concepts such as colonialism, aesthetics, the literary, the historical, and the social, have received focused attention in the analysis. Although the study acknowledges the European provenance of modernity as a historical idea, it also recognizes the inherent complexity of the concept and its equivocal connotations when used with reference to the polyphonic bhasha communities in India. Theoretical issues debated in relation to modernity such as its

Free Download Utku Mogultay, "The Ruins of Urban Modernity: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day"
English | ISBN: 1501339508 | 2018 | 240 pages | PDF | 3 MB
The Ruins of Urban Modernity examines Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day through the critical lens of urban spatiality.