Mark Greif

"These essays address such key topics in the cultural, political, and intellectual life of our time as the tyranny of exercise, the tyranny of nutrition and food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of Radiohead, the rise and fall of the hipster, the impact of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life what might be the right philosophical stance to adopt toward one's self and the world." -- Amazon.com.

Essays

Against Everything

"Mark Greif's original and compelling history of the 'crisis of man' shows how important this debate was not just to American intellectual life in the middle of the twentieth century, but to the postmodernity that was to follow, and to theoretical questions that still engage us. Through a series of dazzling readings, Greif shows that literature, not theory or philosophy, provided by far the best analyses of the problem of the nature and future of 'man.' Anyone interested in theories of human rights and the posthuman, in the constant tug of war between universalism and difference, or in the relationship between literature and philosophy should read this book."--Toril Moi, Duke University "This book offers more than a fine history of midcentury intellectual life. A set of ideas that have long seemed deader than the paper they are printed on are given, not credence, but a thrilling sense of energy and urgency. The strength of the conceptual framework lets one see how the restless ghosts of the 'age of the crisis of man' have been keeping us company all along. Against the odds, Greif's account provides us with new tools for understanding our present, when the category of the human has never seemed a less reliable beacon to the making of a better world."--Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing "Mark Greif is one of my favorite contemporary essayists, and it's a pleasure to read his analysis of a time of change so fundamental to our culture and artworks today. This is a brilliant history of midcentury American (and European) thought. His writing is witty, profound, and able to change the inner landscape of anyone who encounters it."--Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? "An utterly surprising prehistory of our present, and one of the best imaginable roadmaps to the intellectual and literary geography of the last seventy years."--Elaine Scarry, Harvard University "This is a substantial, even brilliant, contribution to the literary history of midcentury America. Mark Greif is a bold, idea-intensive critic."--David A. Hollinger, author of After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History "One shouldn't use the word 'masterpiece' promiscuously, but this is a truly valuable excavation and explanation of a puzzling phase of twentieth-century culture that has been not only buried but largely forgotten. Mark Greif's writing is utterly straightforward, and the book is limpidly researched, smartly argued, and, in case after case, stunningly right, as it sheds new light on the crucial middle decades of the century. I was riveted from start to finish."--Morris Dickstein, author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression "This excellent book offers an original view of midcentury U.S. intellectual and literary history, making a compelling case for a forgotten but pivotal episode: the debate about the 'crisis of man.' Mark Greif elegantly shows how this debate came to shape postwar politics and fiction. His discussions of Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Ellison, O'Connor, and Pynchon are brilliantly illuminating."--Sean McCann, Wesleyan University

Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973

The Age of the Crisis of Man

A Sociological Investigation

What was the Hipster?

Elif Batuman

Daniel Smith

Rachel Sherman

Keith Gessen

Alexander Kluge

Pankaj Mishra

Peter Gizzi

Benjamin Kunkel

Marco Roth

Peter Frankel

Happiness

n+1, Number 2

Mark Greif, siguiendo la tradicion de grandes intelectuales americanos como Lionel Trilling o Susan Sontag, se replantea en este libro todo lo que damos por supuesto: por que hacemos ciertas cosas y no otras? De verdad creemos en lo que hacemos, o solo seguimos un patron aprendido en el que ni siquiera acabamos de confiar? El libro tambien aborda cuestiones sociales clave (la redistribucion de la renta, el fenomeno YouTube, la politica internacional de los Estados Unidos) a la hora de conformar nuestro mundo futuro, y nos ofrece, ademas, una cronica personal del movimiento Occupy Wall Street en la que Greif reivindica la figura de Henry David Thoreau como ejemplo de pensamiento independiente y radical a la hora de enfrentarse a los retos de la vida social y cotidiana.

Contra Todo

Negation

N+1, Number One

Sarah Leonard

Carla Blumenkranz

Sarah Resnick

In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, Occupy! combines adrenalin-fueled first-hand accounts of the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street with contentious debates and thoughtful reflections, featuring the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1, as well as some of the world’s leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit. The book conveys the intense excitement of those present at the birth of a counterculture, while providing the movement with a serious platform for debating goals, demands, and tactics. Articles address the history of the “horizontalist” structure at OWS; how to keep a live-in going when there is a giant mountain of laundry building up; how very rich the very rich have become; the messages and meaning of the “We are the 99%” tumblr website; occupations in Oakland, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere; what happens next; and much more.

Scenes from Occupied America

Occupy!

Bluescreen

Kathleen French

Dayna Tortorici

Emma Janaskie

Nick Werle

"Collects 150 letters that Americans (and one Canadian) wrote directly to executives and directors of five big banks in fall 2011, at a time when protests were emerging in Occupy Wall Street camps across the United States"--P. [4] of cover.

Letters to Wall Street

The Trouble Is the Banks

Ende der neunziger Jahre tauchte plötzlich eine neue soziale Spezies in US-Großstädten auf: die Hipster. Die Erben der Beatniks oder Hippies trugen zu enge Jeans, Baseballmützen, Schnäuzer und hatten Dosenbier oder einen Laptop dabei. Begleitet wurde ihr Auftreten von der Musik der Strokes oder von Belle and Sebastian, 2001 setzte Wes Anderson ihnen in »The Royal Tenenbaums« ein filmisches Denkmal. Spätestens als 2004 die erste deutsche Filiale von American Apparel eröffnete, hatten die Hipster bzw. die eng mit ihnen verwandten digitalen Bohèmes den Sprung über den Atlantik geschafft. Die New Yorker Zeitschrift n+1 widmete den Hipstern 2009 eine Tagung an der New School: Was sind eigentlich Hipster? Und wofür sind sie ein Symptom? Für eine Generation, die Geld verdienen und doch nicht erwachsen werden will? Ein durch und durch ironisches Zeitalter? Den postindustriellen Konsumkapitalismus? Der Band sorgte nicht nur in den USA für großes Aufsehen, das Buch wird mittlerweile in mehrere Sprachen übersetzt. In dieser Ausgabe werfen Jens-Christian Rabe (Süddeutsche Zeitung), Tobias Rapp (Der Spiegel) und Thomas Meinecke zusätzlich einen deutschen Blick auf dieses transatlantische Phänomen.

Eine transatlantische Diskussion

Hipster

"Ein Schritt weiter", die Anthologie mit Texten aus dem New Yorker Magazin "n+1", stieß 2008 auf überwältigende Resonanz: "Die Zeit" nannte den Band einen »Rosinenbomber voll origineller Gedanken«, die NZZ bezeichnete ihn als »anregend, geistreich und erfrischend frech«. Mark Greif, einer der Herausgeber von n+1, gilt als einer der talentiertesten amerikanischen Essayisten seiner Generation, er verbindet narratives Geschick mit zeitdiagnostischer Klarheit. Der Band versammelt seine Texte über die digitalen Medien, die unseren Alltag erobern: YouTube, Reality-TV, Internet-Pornographie. In einem der Essays schildert er, wie schwer es für einen mit Rock sozialisierten weißen Ostküstenakademiker ist, Rappen zu lernen. Immer wieder scheitert er daran, 17 Silben in zwei Takten Musik unterzubringen.

Mark Greif

Books

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