Lewis H. Lapham was fascinated and puzzled by money. Particularly by the people who had lots of it. Money and Class in America, subtitled "Notes on the Civil Religion", is a polemic discussion of the power and influence of financial capital on the psychology and emotional character of the wealthy American classes. It follows in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen, combining a journalistic observation of people and experiences with a critical insight of national and class character.
Extensively expanded and revised, with a new foreword by Thomas Frank
In the United States, happiness and wealth are often regarded as synonymous. Consumerism, greed, and the insatiable desire for more are American obsessions. In the native tradition of Twain, Veblen, and Mencken, the editor of Lapham's Quarterly here examines our fascination with the ubiquitous green goddess.
Focusing on the wealthy sybarites of New York City, whom Lewis H. Lapham has been able to observe firsthand in their natural habitat, Money and Class in America is a caustic, and often hilarious, portrait of a segment of the American population who,…
French Philosopher Jacques Ranciere's latest book about film delves into the concept of time. The camera records the world unfolding at its own pace, yet the cinema demands that this time be fragmented, warped, and shaped to political and explanatory ends. Through a Neo-Marxist interpretation, Modern Times reveals how the movements of the cinematic apparatus replicate the movements of social life and expose the distinction between people who 'have time' (employers) and 'those who do not' (workers).
In this book Jacques Ranciere radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in modern processes of emancipation and artistic revolutions, showing how this plurality itself refers to the double dimension of time. Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy, continued in the Marxist notion of the vanguard and nakedly exhibited in Clement Greenberg's modernism, still…
Fredric Jameson (who died in September 2024), was a giant of the literary and cultural landscape. Famous for his work theorising "postmodernism," he was also an insightful critic of contemporary social history and our multimedia world. Inventions of a Present, one of his last books, offers a selection of scintillating essays on topics from across the face of modern cultural production, from Henry James to the TV show The Wire.
A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naive reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living. The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try-and sometimes manage-to awaken our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience, revealing a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and a class or community. But even if this happens (which is rare), one must go on…
Did the birth of cinema herald a new era of technological modernism? Or was it the culmination of a Romantic dream?
Beginning with the theory that film art is always poised between forces of freedom and tyranny, this book explores the precarious condition of the modern political subject in films by two of the twentieth century’s most important directors: Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Mickey One, and The Missouri Breaks) and Lindsay Anderson (If…., Brittania Hospital, O Lucky Man!).
