Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture
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Book Overview
Combining ethnography, history, and social theory, Dominic Boyer's Spirit and System exposes how the shifting fortunes and social perceptions of German intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries influenced Germans' conceptions of modernity and national culture. Boyer analyzes the creation and mediation of the social knowledge of "German-ness" from nineteenth-century university culture and its philosophies of history, to the media systems and redemptive public cultures of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, to the present-day experiences of former East German journalists seeking to explain life in post-unification Germany. Throughout this study, Boyer reveals how dialectical knowledge of "German-ness"--that is, knowledge that emphasizes a cultural tension between an inner "spirit" and an external "system" of social life --is modeled unconsciously upon intellectuals' self-knowledge as it tracks their fluctuation between alienation and utopianism in their interpretations of nation and modernity.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0226068919
ISBN13:9780226068916
Release Date:December 2005
Publisher:University of Chicago Press
Length:288 Pages
Weight:1.05 lbs.
Dimensions:0.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"
Related Subjects
Anthropology Cultural Europe Germany History Politics & Social Sciences Social Science Social SciencesCustomer Reviews
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