Books about Post modernism from Amazon.com

An Introduction to Music and Art in the Western World, 10th edition, is a clear and attractive guide to the great artists and composers of the West and the societies in which they lived and worked..
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In this magnificently illustrated and comprehensive book, readers will take one of the most beautiful journeys our world has to offer: an exploration of the greatest are and architecture of Western civilization. Art of the Western World -- the companion volume to the nine-part PBS television series -- traces the history of Western art from its classical roots in ancient Greece up to the present day and the international Post-Modernism of artists as diverse as Christo, Hockney, and Kiefer. Along the way experts Bruce Cole and Adelheid Gealt carefully chart the evolution of the Western tradition, from the grandeur of Roman architecture to the symbolic language of medieval art, through the unparalleled achievements of the Renaissance, the turbulent emotionalism of the Romantics like Turner and Constable, the Impressionists' search for a new reality, and the revolution of the Abstract Expressionists of the twentieth century.

Art of the Western World integrates the works of each period with the history, values, and ideals that gave birth to them: the influence of the Medicis and other great patrons of Renaissance Italy; the resurgence of the classical style, inspired by the French Revolution; the break with the past evidenced in the works of the Impressionists; and the tortured visions of the modern world devastated by wars depicted in the paintings of Picasso, Marc, Groez, and others.

A valuable key to understanding the language of art, Art of the Western World offers fresh insight into what the great works meant at the time they were created and why they maintain their special meaning to us now. It is the perfect guide to the masterpieces of Western art.

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A superbly illustrated overview of the major movements in the visual arts from Impressionism to Post-Modernism

Modern Art is an authoritative introduction to every important development in the visual arts from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. Eight critical essays by noted art historians shed light on topics from Impressionism to Dada, Art Nouveau to Pop Art. The essays are ordered chronologically, and each thoroughly examines the historical context—political, social, and technological —that shaped the movement under discussion.

The text is accompanied by more than 400 color illustrations of the work of some of the most celebrated figures in art history, comprising an invigorating multiplicity of visual styles. Anyone seeking a gallery of the masterpieces of twentieth-century art, together with an informed survey of the period, will find no better single volume. 400+ color illustrations..
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This volume is part of a four-volume series about art and its interpretation in the 19th and 20th centuries The books provide an introduction to modern European and American art and criticism that should be valuable both to students and to the general reader. This first volume focuses on aspects of Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in Paris between 1848 and 1900. Discussing works by Courbet, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Morisot and other great painters of the period, the authors demonstrate how some historians view this art as representative of the social, historical, and economic circumstances in which it was produced, how the painterly effects of the art are evaluated and how a feminist perspective can help to explain art works and change our perception of them..
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This highly regarded anthology of primary readings in sociological theory covers the major theorists and schools from classic to contemporary, modernist, and postmodernist, in a chronological organization. Its comprehensive coverage and excellent introductions make this book appealing as a main text for professors who want to encourage students to read and interpret original sources, or as a supplement for those who use a traditional main text. ..
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Post-modernism offers a revolutionary approach to the study of society: in questioning the validity of modern science and the notion of objective knowledge, this movement discards history, rejects humanism, and resists any truth claims. In this comprehensive assessment of post-modernism, Pauline Rosenau traces its origins in the humanities and describes how its key concepts are today being applied to, and are restructuring, the social sciences. Serving as neither an opponent nor an apologist for the movement, she cuts through post-modernism's often incomprehensible jargon in order to offer all readers a lucid exposition of its propositions. Rosenau shows how the post-modern challenge to reason and rational organization radiates across academic fields. For example, in psychology it questions the conscious, logical, coherent subject; in public administration it encourages a retreat from central planning and from reliance on specialists; in political science it calls into question the authority of hierarchical, bureaucratic decision-making structures that function in carefully defined spheres; in anthropology it inspires the protection of local, primitive cultures from First World attempts to reorganize them. In all of the social sciences, she argues, post-modernism repudiates representative democracy and plays havoc with the very meaning of "left-wing" and "right-wing." Rosenau also highlights how post-modernism has inspired a new generation of social movements, ranging from New Age sensitivities to Third World fundamentalism. In weighing its strengths and weaknesses, the author examines two major tendencies within post-modernism, the largely European, skeptical form and the predominantly Anglo-North-American form, which suggests alternative political, social, and cultural projects. She draws examples from anthropology, economics, geography, history, international relations, law, planning, political science, psychology, sociology, urban studies, and women's studies, and provides a glossary of post-modern terms to assist the uninitiated reader with special meanings not found in standard dictionaries.

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Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism.
“We have a great desire to be supremely American,” Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America’s cultural and collective identity—ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism.
Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity—linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos—something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels’s sustained rereading of the texts of the period—the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar—exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.
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This ground-breaking volume brings together the essays of top theorists including Arjo Klamer, Deirdre McCloskey, Julie Nelson, Shuan Hargreaves-Heap and Philip Mirowski on a diverse range of topics such as gender, post-colonial theory, rationality, and modernism..
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