Search results for ""author timothy campbell""

Historical Style connects the birth of eighteenth-century British consumer society to the rise of historical self-consciousness. Prior to the eighteenth century, British style was slow to change and followed the cultural and economic imperatives of monarchical regimes. By the 1750s, however, a growing fashion press extolled, in writing and illustration, the new phenomenon of periodized fashion trends. As fashion fads came in and out of style, and as fashion texts circulated and obsolesced, Britons were forced to confront the material persistence of out-of-date fashions. Timothy Campbell argues that these fashion texts and objects shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past, as well as a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood. In a panoptic sweep, Historical Style brings together art history, philosophy, and literary history to portray an era increasingly aware of itself. Burgeoning consumer society, Campbell contends, highlighted the distinction between the past and the present, created an expectation of continual change, and forged a sense of history as something that could be tracked through material objects. Campbell assembles a wide range of writings, images, and objects to render this eighteenth-century landscape: commercial dress displays and David Hume's ideas of novelty as historical form; popular illustrations of recent fashion trends and Sir Joshua Reynolds's aesthetic precepts; fashion periodicals and Sir Walter Scott's costume-saturated historical fiction. In foregrounding fashion to trace eighteenth-century historicism, Historical Style draws upon the interdisciplinary, multimedia archival impressions that fashionable dress has left behind, as well as the historical and conceptual resources within the field of fashion studies that literary and cultural historians of eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain have often neglected.

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Roberto Esposito is one of the most prolific and important exponents of contemporary Italian political theory. Bíos-his first book to be translated into English-builds on two decades of highly regarded thought, including his thesis that the modern individual-with all of its civil and political rights as well as its moral powers-is an attempt to attain immunity from the contagion of the extraindividual, namely, the community. In Bíos, Esposito applies such a paradigm of immunization to the analysis of the radical transformation of the political into biopolitics. Bíos discusses the origins and meanings of biopolitical discourse, demonstrates why none of the categories of modern political thought is useful for completely grasping the essence of biopolitics, and reconstructs the negative biopolitical core of Nazism. Esposito suggests that the best contemporary response to the current deadly version of biopolitics is to understand what could make up the elements of a positive biopolitics-a politics of life rather than a politics of mastery and negation of life. In his introduction, Timothy Campbell situates Esposito’s arguments within American and European thinking on biopolitics. A comprehensive, illuminating, and highly original treatment of a critically important topic, Bíos introduces an English-reading public to a philosophy that will critically impact such wide-ranging current debates as stem cell research, euthanasia, and the war on terrorism. Roberto Esposito teaches contemporary philosophy at the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences in Naples. His books include Categorie dell impolitico, Nove pensieri sulla politica, Communitas: orgine e destino della comunità, and Immunitas: protezione e negazione della vita. Timothy Campbell is associate professor of Italian studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University and the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minnesota, 2006).

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This anthology collects the texts that defined the concept of biopolitics, which has become so significant throughout the humanities and social sciences today. The far-reaching influence of the biopolitical—the relation of politics to life, or the state to the body—is not surprising given its centrality to matters such as healthcare, abortion, immigration, and the global distribution of essential medicines and medical technologies.Michel Foucault gave new and unprecedented meaning to the term "biopolitics" in his 1976 essay "Right of Death and Power over Life." In this anthology, that touchstone piece is followed by essays in which biopolitics is implicitly anticipated as a problem by Hannah Arendt and later altered, critiqued, deconstructed, and refined by major political and social theorists who explicitly engaged with Foucault's ideas. By focusing on the concept of biopolitics, rather than applying it to specific events and phenomena, this Reader provides an enduring framework for assessing the central problematics of modern political thought.Contributors. Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Timothy Campbell, Gilles Deleuze, Roberto Esposito, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt, Achille Mbembe, Warren Montag, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Adam Sitze, Peter Sloterdijk, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek

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