Feeling Modern


Book Description

A new look at modernism's relationship to human feeling and the public sphere




The Advanced School of Collective Feeling


Book Description

Modern architecture's evolution during the interwar period represents one of the most radical turns in design history. While the role of new materials and production modes in this development is beyond dispute, of equal importance was the emergence of a distinctly modern physical culture. Largely unacknowledged today, new conceptions of body and movement had a profound influence on how architects designed not only public spaces like the gymnasium or the stadium, but also domestic spaces. Hannes Meyer, Swiss modernist and director of Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1930, colorfully encapsulated this phenomenon in his 1926 essay The New World as "the advanced school of collective feeling." In their new book, Matthew Kennedy and Nile Greenberg explore the impact of physical culture during the 1920s and '30s on the thinking of some of modern architecture's most influential figures. Using archival photographs, diagrams, and redrawn plans, they reconstruct an obscure constellation of domestic projects by Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Richard Neutra, Franco Albini, and others. They argue that the impact of sport on modern architecture was a discursive phenomenon, best understood by going beyond a mere typological reading of the stadium or the gymnasium, to an examination of how gymnastic equipment and other trappings of physical culture were folded into domestic space. The featured houses, apartments, and exhibitions demonstrate their architects' response to, and attempt to dictate, the relationship between body, and the spaces and objects that give it shape.




Feeling Dis-ease in Modern History


Book Description

This book explores experiences of illness, broadly construed. It encompasses the emotional and sensory disruptions that attend disease, injury, mental illness or trauma, and gives an account of how medical practitioners, experts, lay authorities and the public have felt about such disruptions. Considering all sides of the medical encounter and highlighting the intersection of intellectual history and medical knowledge, of institutional atmospheres, built environments and technological practicalities, and of emotional and sensory experience, Feeling Dis-ease in Modern History presents a wide-ranging affective account of feeling well and of feeling ill. Especially occupied with the ways in which dynamics of power and authority have either validated or discounted dis-eased feelings, the book's contributors probe at the intersectional politics of medical expertise and patient experience to better understand situated expressions of illness, their reception, and their social, cultural and moral valuation. Drawing on methodologies from the histories of emotions, senses, science and the medical humanities, this book gives an account of the complexity of undergoing illness: of feeling dis-ease.




Form and Feeling in Modern Literature


Book Description

"Essays, short stories and poems by eminent creative writers, critics and scholars from three continents celebrate the literary achievements of Barbara Hardy, the foremost exponent of close critical reading in the latter half of the twentieth century and today. Her work, as the essays in the volume bear witness, encompasses 19th and 20th century British fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare. In addition to an introduction outlining and assessing Hardy's career and writing, there is an extensive bibliography of her work. Comparatively short, concise essays, stories and poems by twenty distinguished hands express the eclectic nature of Barbara Hardy's work and themselves form a many-faceted critical/creative gathering. Form and Feeling moves away from the traditional festschrift to create an innovative critical genre that reflects the variety and nature of its subject's work. In addition to Barbara Hardy's own writing, authors and subjects treated include Anglo-Welsh poetry, nineteenth century fiction, Margaret Atwood, Wilkie Collins, Ivy Compton Burnet, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. M. Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Shakespeare, and W. B. Yeats, amongst others."




The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe


Book Description

The heart is an iconic symbol in the medieval and early modern European world. In addition to being a physical organ, it is a key conceptual device related to emotions, cognition, the self and identity, and the body. The heart is read as a metaphor for human desire and will, and situated in opposition to or alongside reason and cognition. In medieval and early modern Europe, the “feeling heart” – the heart as the site of emotion and emotional practices – informed a broad range of art, literature, music, heraldry, medical texts, and devotional and ritual practices. This multidisciplinary collection brings together art historians, literary scholars, historians, theologians, and musicologists to highlight the range of meanings attached to the symbol of the heart, the relationship between physical and metaphorical representations of the heart, and the uses of the heart in the production of identities and communities in medieval and early modern Europe.




A Revolution of Feeling


Book Description

In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke called 'the most important of all revolutions...a revolution in sentiments'. Inspired by the French Revolution, British radicals concocted new political worlds to enshrine healthier, more productive, human emotions and relationships. The Enlightenment's wildest hopes crested in the utopian projects of such optimists - including the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood - who sought to reform sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine by freeing desire from repressive constraints. But by the middle of the decade, the wind had changed. The French Revolution descended into bloody Terror and the British government quashed radical political activities. In the space of one decade, feverish optimism gave way to bleak disappointment, and changed the way we think about human need and longing. A Revolution of Feeling is a vivid and absorbing account of the dramatic end of the Enlightenment, the beginning of an emotional landscape preoccupied by guilt, sin, failure, resignation and repression, and the origins of our contemporary approach to feeling and desire. Above all, it is the story of the human cost of political change, of men and women consigned to the 'wrong side of history'. But although their revolutionary proposals collapsed, that failure resulted in its own cultural revolution - a revolution of feeling - the aftershocks of which are felt to the present day.




Feeling Jewish


Book Description

In this sparkling debut, a young critic offers an original, passionate, and erudite account of what it means to feel Jewish—even when you’re not. Self-hatred. Guilt. Resentment. Paranoia. Hysteria. Overbearing Mother-Love. In this witty, insightful, and poignant book, Devorah Baum delves into fiction, film, memoir, and psychoanalysis to present a dazzlingly original exploration of a series of feelings famously associated with modern Jews. Reflecting on why Jews have so often been depicted, both by others and by themselves, as prone to “negative” feelings, she queries how negative these feelings really are. And as the pace of globalization leaves countless people feeling more marginalized, uprooted, and existentially threatened, she argues that such “Jewish” feelings are becoming increasingly common to us all. Ranging from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, Sarah Bernhardt to Woody Allen, Anne Frank to Nathan Englander, Feeling Jewish bridges the usual fault lines between left and right, insider and outsider, Jew and Gentile, and even Semite and anti-Semite, to offer an indispensable guide for our divisive times.




Emotion in the Tudor Court


Book Description

Deploying literary analysis, theories of emotion from the sciences and humanities, and an archival account of Tudor history, Emotion in the Tudor Court examines how literature both reflects and constructs the emotional dynamics of life in the Renaissance court. In it, Bradley J. Irish argues that emotionality is a foundational framework through which historical subjects embody and engage their world, and thus can serve as a fundamental lens of social and textual analysis. Spanning the sixteenth century, Emotion in the Tudor Court explores Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Henrician satire; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and elegy; Sir Philip Sidney and Elizabethan pageantry; and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and factional literature. It demonstrates how the dynamics of disgust,envy, rejection, and dread, as they are understood in the modern affective sciences, can be seen to guide literary production in the early modern court. By combining Renaissance concepts of emotion with modern research in the social and natural sciences, Emotion in the Tudor Court takes a transdisciplinary approach to yield fascinating and robust ways to illuminate both literary studies and cultural history.




Feng Shui Modern


Book Description

The ancient practice of feng shui is uncovered in this simple and practical guide, revealing the tools that will lead to a healthier, happier home for every budget. How do you place a bed in an awkward room? How can your space help you be more focused and more productive? How do you set up your room to make you ready for romantic love? It's simple! In Feng Shui for Modern Living, TikTok influencer Cliff Tan answers these questions and more, explaining the ancient practice of feng shui and how it can be translated to modern homes. Cliff has become an internet sensation with his videos demonstrating the principles of feng shui, and in this practical guide he shows how to apply these principles room-by-room in your own home. He takes you behind the mysticism to reveal the logic behind feng shui. This is the key to unlocking the power of this ancient practice: once you understand the logic, your application of feng shui will work every time. There is no room too challenging, no problem that feng shui can't unravel. That's why people have been using it for thousands of years. In the tradition of Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch, this guide will revolutionise how you think about your space. It's feng shui made simple, and anyone can learn.




Borderline Welfare


Book Description

Which 'forms of feeling' are facilitated and which discouraged within the cultures and structures of modern state welfare? This book illuminates the social and psychic dynamics of these new public cultures of welfare, locating them in relation to our understanding of borderline states of mind in individuals, organizations and society. Drawing upon their idea of a psychoanalytic sensibility rooted in Wilfred Bion's notion of 'learning from experience', the authors aim to access the new structures of feeling now taking shape in marketized and commodified health and social care systems. Integrating their reflections on clinical work with patients, consultancy with public sector organizations, political analysis, and the tradition of Group Relations Training, they offer a wide-ranging perspective on how contemporary social anxieties are managed within modern public welfare. Our collective struggle with fears of dependency and loss, and the demands of living and working in an interdependent 'networked' world give rise to fresh challenges to our ability to maintain depth of emotional engagements in welfare settings. Part of the Tavistock Clinic Series.