Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions
Providing a detailed analysis of Bach's Passions, this book represents an important contribution to the debate about the culture of 'classical music', its origins, priorities and survival. The angles from which each chapter proceeds differ from those of a traditional music guide, by examining the Passions in the light of the mindsets of modernity, and their interplay with earlier models of thought and belief.
Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt, whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated by admirers who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and Nietzschean theme of a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics.
Theoretical Criminology : From Modernity to Post-Modernism
This book incorporates many of the exciting debates in the social sciences and philosophy of knowledge concerning the issues of modernity and post-modernism. It sets out a new project for criminology, a criminology of modernity, and offers a sustained critique of theorising without a concern for social totalities.
Modernity in Spanish America has been viewed by a 'postmodern' cultural studies as a condition of the first half of the twentieth century whose major political, philosophical and cultural assumptions the region would do well to leave behind. This book explores a corpus of Spanish-American literary texts from that 'modern' period which dramatize the constitutive dynamics of modernity, in particular the legacy of the French Revolution, the logic of nationalism, the founding of the modern city, and the awkward relationship to both Western and indigenous traditions. Its argument is that one cannot so easily take leave of modernity.
Naguib Mahfouz is the most important Arabic fiction writer of this century. Born in 1911, his long and prolific writing career represents the evolution of the novel genre in Arabic literature. His books are a rich record of the tragic tensions attendant on a nation's quest for freedom and modernity. In 1988 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
