Author: Hauke Brunkhorst File Type: pdf This unique work analyzes the crisis in modern society, building on the ideas of the Frankfurt School thinkers. Emphasizing social evolution and learning processes, it argues that crisis is mediated by social class conflicts and collective learning, the results of which are embodied in constitutional and public law. First, the work outlines a new categorical framework of critical theory in which it is conceived as a theory of crisis. It shows that the Marxist focus on economy and on class struggle is too narrow to deal with the range of social conflicts within modern society, and posits that a crisis of legitimization is at the core of all crises. It then discusses the dialectic of revolutionary and evolutionary developmental processes of modern society and its legal system. This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society by a leading scholar in the field provides a new approach to critical theory that will appeal to anyone studying political sociology, political theory, and law.

Author: Brad Evans File Type: pdf div id=iframeContent dir=autoEmanating from the cabarets of modernist Paris, a short-lived vogue spread around the world for avant-garde journals known in English as ephemeral bibelots. For a time, it seemed that all the young bohemians passing through Paris started their own bibelots modeled on Le Chat Noir, the esoteric magazine of the famed Montmartre cabaret. These journals were recognizable for their decadence, campy queerness, astounding art nouveau illustrations, fin-de-siecle color schemes, innovative typefaces, and practiced bohemianism. In Ephemeral Bibelots, Brad Evans relays the untold story of this late-nineteenth-century craze for bibelots, dusting off a trove of periodicals largely untouched by digitization. In excavating this forgotten archive, Evans calls into question the prehistory of modernist little magazines as well as the history of American art and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Considering how artistic movements take shape, move, and disappear, the book is organized around three major themesvogue, ephemera, and obscuritywith authors and artists to match. A full-color insert reveals a glorious array of bibelot covers.This revisionary history of print culture incorporates discussions of pragmatist philosophy and relational aesthetics women writers like Juliet Wilbor Tompkins and Carolyn Wells the graphic artists Will Bradley, Louis Rhead, and John Sloan the dancer Loie Fuller and twentieth-century figures like H. L. Mencken, Amy Lowell, and Anita Loos. Bringing nineteenth-century American literature and culture into conversation with modern art movements from around the world, Ephemeral Bibelots provides new ways of thinking about the centrality of various media cultures to the attribution of aesthetic innovation and its staying power.ReviewWith delightful verve, Brad Evans gives us a whole new insight into the role of small magazines in the creation of modern literature. Arguing for the importance of circulation networks, Evans shows how ephemeral bibelotssmall format, short-lived journalscreated trends in modern literary production that grew out of dynamic social relations. Popular, faddish, and fashionable, these publications fostered the emergence of new concepts of gender, sexuality, and literary identity that then became part of mainstream literary modernism. By providing a vivid picture of these publication circuits, Evanss study shows how artificial it is to separate the canon of modern works from their distributed and complex conditions of reception and production. Wonderfully written and highly readable, this book embodies some of the feeling of fin-de-siecle flights of aesthetic fancy of the era on which it is focused. (Johanna Drucker, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Graphesis Visual Forms of Knowledge Production) Youve probably never heard of a bibelot before, but in this fascinating book on the subject, Brad Evans proves there are no more excuses. These playful, punchy periodicals, which numbered in the hundreds, were circulating avant-garde art and criticism in the 1890s before modernism arrived on the scene. And if they share the DNA of little magazines and other avant-garde publications, bibelots are a print medium in their own right with a unique story to tell about how networked literary and critical cultures take shape. By rescuing them from oblivion, Evans has rediscovered a lost corner of the literary ecosystemone that will continue to inform how we imagine, understand, and theorize the concept of ephemerality within literary cultures and across different media technologies far into the future. (Eric Bulson, Claremont Graduate University, author of Little Magazine, World Form) This books consideration of a minor fad makes major interventions in scholarship on both late nineteenth-century American literature and modernism. Evans produces a convincing and lucid account of the resistance of these magazines to the realismnaturalism of their cultural moment, recuperating forgotten literary figures and bringing fresh perspectives to familiar ones. His style, much like the bibelots he considers, will surprise and delight readers with its intellectual playfulness and dexterity. (Kirsten MacLeod, Newcastle University, author of American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siecle Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation) This accomplished book makes an original contribution to the long history of modernism, assembling a rich, fascinating archive of late nineteenth-century print culture and developing an inspired and persuasive argument about both its importance and its invisibility to literary and cultural history. Combining extraordinary research with terrific illustrations, witty writing, and skillful exposition, Evans brings this archive vividly to life, making learning about these ephemeral works exciting, suspenseful, and oddly moving. A genuine pleasure to read. (Thomas Augst, New York University, author of The Clerks Tale Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America)