History's disquiet : modernity, cultural practice, and the question of everyday life / Harry Harootunian.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

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CHOICE Review

Harootunian (New York Univ.) has long shown himself sensitive to theory and is known for provocative, difficult, and stimulating contributions to the study of Japanese intellectual history. The present volume, based on lectures delivered at the 1997 Critical Theory Institute, concerns "how the category of everydayness was conceptualized as a minimal unity of temporal experience and how it might serve as a historical optic to widen our understanding of the process of modernity being experienced throughout the world at the same time." Harootunian takes a vigorous swipe at area studies and argues for the need for theory early on, suggesting a fusion with cultural studies as a remedy. But the heart of the book is the discourse on everydayness developed mostly in the period between the two world wars by Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Siegfried Kracauer, Kon Wajiro, Tosaka Jun, Aono Suekichi, Henri Lefebvre, and others. Since the subject is elusive and the language often quite abstract, some familiarity with the intellectual landscape of cultural studies will help readers follow the discussion. This book will be of interest to upper-division and graduate students of cultural studies and intellectual history. C. Schirokauer; Columbia University