Synopses & Reviews
Perhaps more than anything else, it is the concept of the everyday that has most marked the arts and culture of the twentieth century. Nowhere has this been so clearly articulated as in France after World War II. Indeed, the 1950s and 1960s in France were awash in a sociological fascination with the transformed rhythms and accoutrements of daily lived experience.
The Art of the Everyday features essays by prominent writers on the topic of the quotidian in philosophy, cinema, theater, photography, and other visual arts of postwar France. In particular, a number of younger artists practicing todaysuch as Jo'l Bartoloméo, Rebecca Bournigault, Claude Closky, Frédéric Coupet, Valerie Jouve, Philippe Mairesse, Jean-Luc Moulène, and Rainer Oldendorffind inspiration in the stuff of everyday life, rejecting an outmoded reverence for le grand goût. For them, the sophisticated urbanity of the nineteenth-century flâneur has mutated into a city dweller well-acquainted with the often unpleasant requirements of city life.
A panorama of an important aspect of postwar French culture, The Art of the Everyday brings to light the work of a new generation of contemporary French artists viewed through the lens of daily experience.
Review
"Eisenstein's lucid analysis is formed around the factual datum of the global cybereconomy, which even a cursory glance reveals as appallingly inequitable: 'Eighty-four percent of computer users are found in north america and northern europe.'" -Signs,
Synopsis
The New York Times devotes the cover of its magazine to America's declining interest in politics and its obsession with money, finance, and the markets. Bill Gates builds a $50 million mansion while food pantries and homeless shelters overflow with the desperate. The explosive expansion of media and cyber conglomerates creates dreamworlds while the ecology of our actual world is jeopardized. Public space and public democracy withers, as is evidenced by the fact that the closest facsimile of a town square is the local Barnes and Noble.
New geographies of power are defined by sex scandals, plant closings, cyberporn, sweatshop labor, information webs, and stock market schizophrenia. Global capitalism and its cyberrelations use this chaos to construct modern forms of sexual and racial exploitation.
Into this world steps Zillah Eisenstein, with a book of profound despair and yet also great hope, informed by her trademark sharp analysis and her unrelenting passion for a more humane world. Exposing the purported democratic effect of new media for the global mirage it is, Eisenstein shows how transnational capital and its patriarchal obsessions threaten us all, while at the same time creating possibilities for a new democratic society.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-208) and index.
About the Author
A noted feminist writer, Zillah Eisenstein is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College. She is the author of The Female Body and the Law, which won the Victoria Schuck Book Prize for the best book on women and politics, and, more recently, The Color of Gender: Reimaging Democracy and Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century.
Table of Contents
Seeing : virtual globes and cyberpublics -- Viewing : media-ted seeing and cultural capitalism -- Talking : cyberfantasies and the relations of power -- Surviving : transnations, global capital, and families -- Wishing/hoping : Transnational capitalis patriachy, Beijing, and virtual sisterhoods.