The re-enchantment of the world
Subtitle: secular magic in a rational age
By: edited by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler.
Contributors: Landy, Joshua, 1965-; Saler, Michael T., 1960-
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 387
ISBN-13: 9780804752992
Subjects: Magic -- Social aspects; Marvelous, The -- Social aspects; Rationalism; Secularism; Thought and thinking; Civilization, Modern
Description: "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alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems.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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : the varieties of modern enchantment / Joshua Landy and Michael Saler; title: "Broken knowledge" / Andrea Nightingale; title: Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered : William James's feeling of 'if' / Linda Simon; title: Waste lands and silly valleys : Wittgenstein, mass culture, and re-enchantment / Michael Saler; title: Homeless gardens / Robert Harrison; title: The modernist imagination of place and the politics of regionalism : Puig i Cadafalch and early 20th-century Barcelona / Maiken Umbach; title: Modern magic : Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and Stéphane Mallarmé / Joshua Landy; title: The rocambolesque and the modern enchantment of popular fiction / Robin Walz; title: "Lost in focused intensity" : spectator sports and strategies of re-enchantment / Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; title: Permanent re-enchantments : on some literary uses of the supernatural from early empiricism to modern aesthetics / Nicholas Paige; title: Gnosophilia : Bloch, Benjamin, and the authority of counter-tradition / Daniel Jiro Tanaka; title: The birth of ideology from the spirit of myth : Georges Sorel among the idéologues / Dan Edelstein; title: Nietzsche on redemption and transfiguration / R. Lanier Anderson; title: Epilogue : what hearing knows / Michel Serres.