Modernity and Urban Life
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In connecting the notion of modernity to urban life, it is important to recognize its status as a moral value. At the very least, moral weight--for good and ill--attaches to modernity as an expression of urban experience. Modernity is derived from urban experience to the extent that what is novel in the culture--that is, in the psychoemotional makeup of human society--is in significant part generated in the city. That idea is captured in Schwartz's subtitle: "early mass culture in fin-de-siFcle Paris." The fin-de-siFcle concept itself connotes transition, a consciousness that what was long deemed morally or physically stable (whether actually stable or indeed valuable is a matter apart) is no longer so and must fall before perpetual novelty. The fact that the concept achieves moral standing in the French language is consistent with Schwartz's citing Walter Benjamin's description of Paris as the "capital of the nineteenth century" (3).Cultural values as such were not necessarily required for cosmopolitan cities to be identified with modernity but instead seem to have been in part derived from the fact that physical attributes of cities changed significantly in the nineteenth century and have more or less continued to change since that time. The Haussmanization of Paris under Napoleon III is one aspect of this. Vienna, too, was physically transformed from a medieval estate redolent of imperial/aristocratic grandeur to a setting more consistent with a constitutional monarchy a
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in the idea of revolution but far enough to have a species of the community feeling that Engels finds so lacking in England. The form that this feeling took was mutual participation in pop culture. That helps explain the odd mixture of vulgarian taste and social-reform sentiment. Schwartz cites Parisian preoccupation with the spectacle of such phenomena as prostitution, visits to the city morgue, and the showcasing of fashion and art, which are set beside the widely shared impulse toward personal improvement or social conformity: "Dufourny's praise of panoramas expressed the bourgeois values of instruction and utility that served to legitimate most sanctioned public entertainment throughout the nineteenth century" (Schwartz 152). Though Europe was rife with revolutionary rhetoric in the late nineteenth century and even though the masses might have been socially alienated in a Marxist sense, Schwartz argues, the force of urban popular culture (except for the short-lived Commune of 1871) was greater than the revolutionary imperative. Despite the concentration of wealth and the inequitable division of labor in a way consistent with Marxist analysis, there was no particular rush to overthrow bourgeois capitalism from what was deemed t
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Haussmannization Paris, Reid Hugo's, Napoleon III, Jean Valjean, Hugo Paris, Industrial Revolution, , Maison Vauquer, Paris Haussmann, Vaquer EugFne, nineteenth century, urban experience, rich poor, paris sewers, industrial capitalism, mass culture, bourgeois values, popular culture, experience rich poor, experience rich, inequities industrial capitalism, royal indifference, mass culture fin-de-sifcle, culture fin-de-sifcle paris, urban popular culture,
Approximate Word count = 2577
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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