株式会社極東書店トップ ＞ 商品一覧 ＞ Atavistic Tendencies : The Culture of Science in American Modernity.
商品詳細
Atavistic Tendencies : The Culture of Science in American Modernity.
・ISBN 978-0-8166-5123-8 hard US$ 67.50
￥15,814.- (税込) ※（※）価格はご注文時の参考価格となります。
納品価格につきましては書籍の入荷時点で確定となります。
版元の原価改定、外国為替の変動等により異なる場合がございますので、予めご了承下さい。
| 著者・編者 | Seitler, Dana, |
|---|---|
| 出版社 | (University of Minnesota Press, US) |
| 出版年月 | 2008 |
| ページ数 | 320 pp. |
| 言語 | ENG |
| ニュース番号 | ＜L25-41846＞ |
解説
A provocative exploration of the impact of the human sciences on literature, politics, and culture
The post-Darwinian theory of atavism forecasted obstacles to human progress in the reappearance of throwback physical or cultural traits after several generations of absence. In this original and stimulating work, Dana Seitler explores the ways in which modernity itself is an atavism, shaping a historical and theoretical account of its dramatic rise and impact on Western culture and imagination.
Examining late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, fiction, and photography, Seitler discovers how modern thought oriented itself around this paradigm of obsolescence and return-one that served to sustain ideologies of gender, sexuality, and race. She argues that atavism was not only a discourse of violence-mapping racial and sexual divisions onto the boundary between human and animal-but was also an illustration of how modern science understood human being as a temporal category. On one hand, atavism positioned some humans as more advanced than others on an evolutionary scale. On the other, it undermined such progressivism by suggesting that because all humans had evolved from animals they were therefore not purely human. Atavism thus reveals how scientific theories of a recurrent past were a significant feature of modernity.At the beginning of the twentieth century, atavistic theory had widespread social and economic effects on the taxonomies of medicine, the logic of the welfare state, conceptions of the modern family, and images of the abnormal. Investigating the cultural logic of science in conjunction with naturalist, feminist, and popular narratives, Seitler exposes the influence of atavism: a fundamental shift in ways of knowing-and telling stories about-the modern human.