Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life

History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life

Harootunian, Harry

Paperback

Series: Wellek Library Lectures

Literary CriticismGeneral Asian HistoryGeneral World History

ISBN10: 0231117957
ISBN13: 9780231117951
Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
Published: Mar 8 2002
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.47 Width: 5.92 Depth: 8.78
Language: English

Acclaimed historian Harry Harootunian calls attention to the boundaries, real and theoretical, that compartmentalize the world around us. In one of the first works to explore on equal footing European and Japanese conceptions of modernity--as imagined in the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, as well as ethnologist Yanagita Kunio and Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun--Harootunian seeks to expose the problematic nature of scholarly categories. In doing so, History's Disquiet presents intellectual genealogies of such orthodox notions as field and modernity and other concepts intellectuals in the East and West have used to understand the changing world around them. Contrasting reflections on everyday life in Japan and Europe, Harootunian shows how responses to capitalist society were expressed in similar ways: social critics in both regions alleged a broad sense of alienation, particularly among the middle class. However, he also points out that Japanese critics viewed modernity as a condition in which Japan--without the lengthy period of capitalist modernization that characterized Europe and America--was either catching up with those regions or copying them.

As elegantly written as it is controversial, this book is both an invitation for rethinking intellectual boundaries and an invigorating affirmation that such boundaries can indeed be broken down.

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