Month: June 2011
Daily *ism: Romanticism
I’m a bit out of order on these. I suppose this post should have preceded the one on modernism, but at least I’m keeping on track with exploring relatively recent literary periods.
Romanticism (or the Romantic Era or the “‘Romantic Period”’) was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.[1] In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,[3] education[4] and natural history.[5]
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a “natural” epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.
Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococochinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the standard ways of contemporary society.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, “Realism” was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.[6] Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.
How to attract women: according to Disney.
Where “Non-profit” colleges hide the money
The Cato Institute has a report on federal higher education spending and policy showing how the favorable treatment of non-profit over for profit education hurts both students and taxpayers alike:
Undergraduate education is a highly profitable business for nonprofit colleges and universities. They do not show profits on their books, but instead take their profits in the form of spending on some combination of research, graduate education, low-demand majors, low faculty teaching loads, excess compensation, and featherbedding. The industry’s high profits come at the expense of students and taxpayer.
To lower the cost of education, federal government policies should encourage competition. Regulations should not favor nonprofits over for-profits. Further, the accreditation process should be reformed so that any qualified institution can easily enter the industry. The financial-aid process should be redesigned to remove the bargaining advantage that colleges currently hold over prospective students.
Daily *ism: Modernism
Here’s the second installment in my Daily *ism series. Although, very destructive in many ways to Western culture and tradition, it still was a the movement that paved the way (or was the creation of) many great works of literature that I admire. I find that modernism, as an artistic movement, did produce art that was in far better alignment with the society it inhabited than the romantic period that preceded it.
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism.[2][3][4] Arguably the most paradigmatic motive of modernism is the rejection of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.[5][6][7]Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking and also rejected the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God.[8][9]
In general, the term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the “traditional” forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound‘s 1934 injunction to “Make it new!” was paradigmatic of the movement’s approach towards the obsolete. Another paradigmatic exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, who, in the 1940s, challenged conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking.[10] A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness often led to experiments with form and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).[11]
The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term “avant-garde”, with which the movement was labeled until the word “modernism” prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in its original military and political context).[12]Surrealism gained fame among the public as being the most extreme form of modernism, or “the avant-garde of modernism”.[13]
Daily *ism: Individualism
This is the first post in a new series I’m starting on this blog. I call it the daily *ism. It’s going to be mostly information copied from Wikipedia, but each entry is going to feature another *ism.
Now *ism’s have a variety of meanings, but at their root, they indicate a belief or principle. Now, I suppose there can be as many systems of though and belief as there are thinkers and believers. However, the credibility of some *ism’s are stronger than others, and unless you are a subscriber to relativism you will agree that some are more valid than others.
You wouldn’t believe how many *ism’s there are. With a quick Wikipedia Wildcard search, I came up with thousands of *ism’s to explore, which means I could be at this for a while.
This series isn’t meant to promote one *ism over another or to give a reflection of the *isms I espouse (many of them I reject entirely), but I will gravitate towards ones I find interesting. Each *ism will also include links to other *ism’s to explore.
So without further introduction, here’s the first *ism, individualism, an *ism which I happen to be quite proud to hold.
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses “the moral worth of the individual”.[1] Individualists promote the exercise of one’s goals and desires and so independence and self-reliance[2] while opposing most external interference upon one’s own interests, whether by society, family or any other group or institution.[2]
Individualism makes the individual its focus[1] and so it starts “with the fundamental premise that the human individual is of primary importance in the struggle for liberation.” Classical liberalism (including libertarianism), existentialism and anarchism (especially individualist anarchism) are examples of movements that take the human individual as a central unit of analysis.[3]
It has also been used as a term denoting “The quality of being an individual; individuality”[2] related to possessing “An individual characteristic; a quirk.”[2] Individualism is thus also associated with artistic and bohemian interests and lifestyles where there is a tendency towards self creation and experimentation as opposed to tradition or popular mass opinions and behaviors[2][4] as so also with humanist philosophical positions and ethics.[5][6]
Lady or not: very true.
The 100 greatest non-fiction books
The 100 greatest non-fiction books
UK Guardian has a list of the top 100 non-fiction books of all time. It’s organized by category, then date, so you can track down the subjects that interest you rather than scrolling through a huge list.
Also, many of these books are old and now in the public domain, meaning you can probably find free e-book versions to download with a couple of Google Searches.
(via http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/14/100-greatest-non-fiction-books)