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Harry Harootunian
Columbia University Press

History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life

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AuthorHarry Harootunian
PublisherColumbia University Press
PublishedApr 05 2002
Book FormatPaperback
ISBN-139780231117951
Dimensions8.78 X 5.92 X 0.47 inches
Weight 0.57 pounds
BISAC
CategoriesHistory > Modern - 20th Century
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

Acclaimed historian Harry Harootunian calls attention to the boundaries, real and theoretical, that compartmentalize the world around us. In one of the first works to explore on equal footing European and Japanese conceptions of modernity--as imagined in the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, as well as ethnologist Yanagita Kunio and Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun--Harootunian seeks to expose the problematic nature of scholarly categories. In doing so, History's Disquiet presents intellectual genealogies of such orthodox notions as field and modernity and other concepts intellectuals in the East and West have used to understand the changing world around them. Contrasting reflections on everyday life in Japan and Europe, Harootunian shows how responses to capitalist society were expressed in similar ways: social critics in both regions alleged a broad sense of alienation, particularly among the middle class. However, he also points out that Japanese critics viewed modernity as a condition in which Japan--without the lengthy period of capitalist modernization that characterized Europe and America--was either catching up with those regions or copying them.

As elegantly written as it is controversial, this book is both an invitation for rethinking intellectual boundaries and an invigorating affirmation that such boundaries can indeed be broken down.

Author Bio

Harry Harootunian is professor emeritus of New York University and his research interests include early modern and modern Japanese history, and historical theory.

Professor Harootunian received his B.A. from Wayne State (1951), M.A. in Far Eastern Studies and Ph.D. 1958 in History from Michigan.

His prolific publications include

History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of the Everyday Life (Columbia UP, 2000),

Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Commodity in Interwar Japan (Princeton UP, 2000),

Japan in the World, ed. with Masao Miyoshi (Duke UP, 1993), and

Postmodernism in Japan, with Masao Miyoshi (Duke UP, 1989).

Professor Harootunian was formerly the Max Palevsky Professor of History and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, the Dean of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, editor of Journal for Asian Studies, and co-editor of Critical Inquiry.

Source: NYU Arts & Science

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