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Before Modernism Was places modernist writing within the texture of modern history. Texts by Woolf, James, Freud, Wyndham Lewis, Stein, Malinowski, and others are read through a range of figures that construct and disrupt modern meaning: the ghost that affects the value of your property; the sulky, graceless adolescent; the Pole who may not be Polish; the nervous owner of the dog; the addict and her smoke. Eccentric to its institutions, these figures are central to the constituency of modernism.
In this bold theoretical work, Bruce Lincoln explores the ways in which myth, ritual, and classification hold human societies together--and how, in times of crisis, they can be used to take a society apart and reconstruct it. Without overlooking the role of coercive force in the maintenance (or overthrow) of social structures, Lincoln argues his thesis with compelling illustrations drawn from such diverse areas as Platonic philosophy, the Upanishads of India, ancient Celtic banquets, professional wrestling, and the Spanish Civil War. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary study--which draws on works in history, semiotics, anthropology, sociology, classics, and indology--offers challenging new insights into the complex dynamics of social cohesion and change.
The theory is applied to the domain of politics, including the debate about the war in Iraq, where political leaders' speeches serve as a case study for detailed contextual analysis."--BOOK JACKET.
These essays are "essays," indeed, in the etymological sense of the word, in that they "try out" my ideas on different topics and different texts. As they are developed, they build up to a climactic crescendo of futility, which may be explained, in part, not by the darkening vision of a wizened and aging man, but by the gathering storms, which have tended to becloud the nation-state of Nigeria. ... The milieu from which my essays emerge has not been conducive to any optimistic or celebratory readings of texts and contexts.