Into the universe of technical images

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Mark E. Blum

Continuity, quantum, continuum, and dialectic are foundational logics of Western historical thought. The historiographical method to discern them is a critique of historical reason. I demonstrate through ‘stylistics’ how the inner temporal experience of the person shapes both judgment and historical action. My work augments the epistemology of Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Edmund Husserl. Studies of significant persons from Shakespeare through the Framers of the American Constitution, as well as contemporary adolescents, illustrate the intergenerational presence of these historical logics. Courses in historical method, phenomenological philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and literary theory can benefit from my findings and approach.

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Max I. Dimont

A wondrous tale of American Judaism as the world's greatest success story, by the flamboyantly upbeat author of Jews, God and History (1964) and The Indestructible Jews (1971). According to Dimont, the first Jews to arrive--in search of safety and opportunity, not a haven for orthodoxy--had it made before they landed, thanks to the Old Testament hold on Colonial life (the Mosaic commandments, the Promised Land, the Puritan ethic); and thereafter, unhampered either by prejudice or by tyrannical rabbis, they dispersed along the frontier, instituted secular reforms (anticipating the German Reform movement), and prospered as merchants and bankers. This German-Jewish ""crowd"" also, says Dimont, ""'invented' modern philanthropy"" and, to tame their unruly Russian co-religionists, sponsored Conservative Judaism, more American than orthodoxy, more traditional than Reform. Subsequently, ""all the dissident elements of American Jewish society. . . coalesced to give birth to the first 'American Jews.'"" None of this--told with an emphasis on commanding personalities--is either wholly unfounded or totally novel, but it is so highly colored, so feeble as social history, and so full of holes that one can't treat it seriously. American Jewish socialism and American Yiddish culture are disposed of in two pages; the one time American anti-Semitism rears its ugly head (apropos of the 1862 Grant affair), it's explained away; and American Zionism--without even a psychological stake in Israel--can then be altogether ""altruistic."" Neither do American Jews have an identity problem: a strong organizational life compensates for a weak religious life. Dimont, as he's demonstrated before, has no use for the ghetto image of the Jew or for Jewish history as a ""dirge of oppression,"" and those who share his antipathies will find here the American dream come true.

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Anthony Vidler

"Anthony Vidler looks at the historical approaches of Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri, and the specific versions of modernism advanced by their historical narratives. Vidler shows that the modernism conceived by Kaufmann was like the late Enlightenment projects he revered, one of pure geometrical forms and elemental composition; that of Rowe saw manifest ambiguity and complexity in contemporary design; Banham's modernism took its cue from the aspirations of the futurists; and the "Renaissance modernism" of Tafuri found its source in the division between the technical experimentation of Brunelleschi and the cultural nostalgia of Alberti. Vidler's investigation demonstrates the inevitable collision between history and design that pervades all modern architectural discourse - and has given rise to some of the most interesting architectural experiments of the postwar period."--Jacket.

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Patrick Grant

"This book makes an original contribution to the study of modern Northern Ireland by examining the complex relationships among religion, literature and ethnicity since 1967. Patrick Grant focuses on a contradiction within sectarianism between the Christian injunction to love one's enemies, and the scapegoating, stereotyping and mirror oppositions that result from an annexation of religion to ethnic exclusivism. In general, a 'post-critical' view of religion is offered, welcoming the critique provided by secularism and maintaining that the varieties of imagination - whether literary or religious - can be liberative and mutually supporting."--Jacket.