The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"―or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.
Author(s): Joshua Landy, Michael T. Saler
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Year: 2009
Language: English
Commentary: scantailor + ocrmypdf
Pages: 387
City: Stanford, California
Tags: magic;marvelous;rationalism;secularism;thought;thinking;civilization
The Re-Enchantment of the World
Contents
Figures
4.1. Jimmy’s Garden
5.1. The premier art roman region
5.2. St. Pantaleon, Cologne (Westwerk c. 990, reconstructed in the postwar era)
5.3. St.-Martin-du-Canigou, Upper Church (completed 1028)
5.4. Puig i Cadafalch, Casa Marti, Barcelona, 1896
5.5. Puig i Cadafalch, Casa Amatiler, Barcelona,1900
5.6. Puig i Cadafalch, Casa Bartomeu Terradas i Brutau, Barcelona, 1905
5.7. Puig i Cadafalch, Casa Quadras, Barcelona, 1904/06
6.1. “The Ethereal Suspension”
7.1. Les Drames de Paris: Rocambole (cover by Kauffmann, 1883-86)
7.2. Rocambole: La Maison de Fous (cover by Gino Starace, 1913)
7.3. André Gill, “True Portrait of Rocambole” (1867)
12.1. Raphael, The Transfiguration (1520)
12.2. Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Libyan Sibyl (c.1512)
Contributors
Introduction: The Varieties of Modern Enchantment (JOSHUA LANDY AND MICHAEL SALER)
1. “Broken Knowledge” (ANDREA NIGHTINGALE)
2. Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: William James’s Feeling of “If” (LINDA SIMON)
3. Waste Lands and Silly Valleys: Wittgenstein, Mass Culture, and Re-Enchantment (MICHAEL SALER)
4. Homeless Gardens (ROBERT HARRISON)
5. The Modernist Imagination of Place and the Politics of Regionalism: Puig i Cadafalch and Early Twentieth-Century Barcelona (MAIKEN UMBACH)
6. Modern Magic: Jean-Eugeéne Robert-Houdin and Stéphane Mallarmé (JOSHUA LANDY)
7. The Rocambolesque and the Modern Enchantment of Popular Fiction (ROBIN WALZ)
8. “Lost in Focused Intensity”: Spectator Sports and Strategies of Re-Enchantment (HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT)
9. Permanent Re-Enchantments: On Some Literary Uses of the Supernatural from Early Empiricism to Modern Aesthetics (NICHOLAS PAIGE)
10. Gnosophilia: Bloch, Benjamin, and the Authority of Counter-Tradition (DANIEL JIRO TANAKA)
11. The Birth of Ideology from the Spirit of Myth: Georges Sorel Among the Idéologues (DAN EDELSTEIN)
12. Nietzsche on Redemption and Transfiguration (R. LANIER ANDERSON)
Epilogue: What Hearing Knows (MICHEL SERRES)
Notes
Works Cited
Index
