Michael North

من العصر الفينيقي إلى الزمن الحاضر

اكتشاف بحار العالم

A Return to the Scene of the Modern

Reading 1922

Scott Herring

Heather Love

Christopher Looby

Sam See

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

From the Vikings to the EU the Baltic has been a Nordic Mediterranean, a shared maritime zone with distinct patterns of trade, cultural exchange, and conflict. Covering a thousand years in a part of the globe where seas are more connective than land, Michael North’s overview transforms the way we think about one of the world’s great waterways.

The Baltic

In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists--including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace--to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.

Machine-Age Comedy

A provocative new look at concepts of the present, their connection to ideas about time, and their effect on literature, art, and culture The problem of the present—what it is and what it means—is one that has vexed generations of thinkers and artists. Because modernity places so much value on the present, many critics argue that people today spend far too much time in the here and now—but how can we tell without first knowing what the here and now actually is? What Is the Present? takes a provocative new look at this moment in time that remains a mystery even though it is always with us. Michael North tackles puzzles that have preoccupied philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, history, and aesthetic theory and examines the complex role of the present in painting, fiction, and film. He engages with a range of thinkers, from Aristotle and Augustine to William James and Henri Bergson. He draws illuminating examples from artists such as Fra Angelico and Richard McGuire, filmmakers like D. W. Griffith and Christopher Nolan, and novelists such as Elizabeth Bowen and Willa Cather. North offers a critical analysis of previous models of the present, from the experiential present to the historical period we call the contemporary. He argues that the present is not a cosmological or experiential fact but a metaphor, a figurative relationship with the whole of time. Presenting an entirely new conception of the temporal mystery Georg Lukács called the "unexplained instant," What Is the Present? explores how the arts have traditionally represented the present—and also how artists have offered radical alternatives to that tradition.

What Is the Present?

This engaging study returns to a truly remarkable year, the year in which both Ulysses and The Waste Land were published, in which The Great Gatsby was set, and during which the Fascisti took over in Italy, the Irish Free State was born, the Harlem Renaissance reached its peak, Charlie Chaplin's popularity crested, and King Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered. In short, the year which not only in hindsight became the primal scene of literary modernism but which served as the cradle for a host of major political and aesthetic transformations resonating around the globe. In his previous study, the acclaimed Dialect of Modernism (OUP, 1994), Michael North looked at the racial and linguistic struggles over the English language which gave birth to the many strains of modernism. Here, he expands his vision to encompass the global stage, and tells the story of how books changed the future of the world as we know it in one unforgettable year.

The Dialect of Modernism uncovers the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. Rebelling against the standard language, and literature written in it, modernists, such as Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams reimagined themselves as racial aliens and mimicked the strategies of dialect speakers in their work. In doing so, they made possible the most radical representational strategies of modern literature, which emerged from their attack on the privilege of standard language. At the same time, however, another movement, identified with Harlem, was struggling to free itself from the very dialect the modernists appropriated, at least as it had been rendered by two generations of white dialect writers. For writers such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, this dialect became a barrier as rigid as the standard language itself. Thus, the two modern movements, which arrived simultaneously in 1922, were linked and divided by their different stakes in the same language. In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North shows, through biographical and historical investigation, and through careful readings of major literary works, that however different they were, the two movements are inextricably connected, and thus, cannot be considered in isolation. Each was marked, for good and bad, by the other.

Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature

The Dialect of Modernism

Maggie Atkinson

Tasman District (N.Z.). District Council

Guiding Native Restoration in Tasman District

Go Wild

John W. I. Lee

"Borderlands are complex spaces that can involve military, religious, economic, political, and cultural interactions--all of which may vary by region and over time. John W.I. Lee and Michael North bring together interdisciplinary scholars to analyze a wide range of border issues and to encourage a nuanced dialogue addressing the concepts and processes of borderlands. Gathering the voices of a diverse range of international scholars, Globalizing Borderlands Studies in Europe and North America presents case studies from ancient to modern times, highlighting topics ranging from religious conflicts to medical frontiers to petty trade. Spanning geographical regions of Europe, the Baltics, North Africa, the American West, and Mexico, these essays shed new light on the complex processes of boundary construction, maintenance, and crossing, as well as on the importance of economic, political, social, ethnic, and religious interactions in the borderlands. Globalizing Borderlands Studies in Europe and North America not only forges links between past and present scholarship but also paves the way for new models and approaches in future borderlands research"--

Globalizing Borderlands Studies in Europe and North America

A History of the Here and Now

Focussing on catalysis through non-endangered metals, this book is an important reference for researchers working in catalysis and green chemistry.

With Non-Endangered Metals Part 1

Sustainable Chemistry

Offering an introduction to the world's seas as a platform for global exchange and connection, Michael North offers an impressive world history of the seas over more than 3,000 years. Exploring the challenges and dangers of the oceans that humans have struggled with for centuries, he also shows the possibilities and opportunities they have provided from antiquity to the modern day. Written to demonstrate the global connectivity of the seas, but also to highlight regional maritime power during different eras, From Harbour to Horizon takes sailors, merchants and migrants as the protagonists of these histories and explores how their experiences and perceptions of the seas were consolidated through trade and cultural exchange. Bringing together the various maritime historiographies of the world and underlining their unity, this book shows how the ocean has been a vital and natural space of globalization. Carrying goods, creating alliances, linking continents and conveying culture, the history of the ocean played a central role in creating our modern globalized world.

From Harbour to Horizon

A World History of the Seas

Mike North’s true loves are boxing and photography. But, a Missourian in Los Angeles, he has only managed to live his dreams through being an amateur boxing official and a wedding photographer. Then he meets David, the skilled journalist and retired British midshipman, and together they navigate the hard-hitting, complex, and exciting world of boxing in its heyday. AT THE APRON: A NIGHT AT THE FIGHTS brings us right up to ringside to witness the thrilling, true-tolife experiences of photographers, journalists, promoters, judges, and fighters both at and away from the apron. AT THE APRON explores the boxing world, capturing the lively and action-packed decades in which boxing was the premier combat sport. Mike North, writer, photographer, and amateur boxing official, introduces us to an incredible cast of characters who chose the boxing life—and the arenas where their lifeblood was spent—and invite us to share in their stories, their knowledge, and their passion.

A Night at the Fights

At the Apron

With Non-endangered Metals Part 2

Sustainable Catalysis

Camera Works is about the impact of photography and film on modern art and literature. For many artists and writers, these new media offered hope of new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, but hovering in a kind of utopian space between. At the same time, the new media introduced a dramatic element of novelty into the age-old evidence of the senses. For the avant-garde, the challenges of the new media were the modern in its most concentrated form, but even for aesthetically unadventurous writers they constituted an element of modern experience that could hardly be ignored. Camera Works thus traces some of the more utopian projects of transatlantic avant-garde, including the Readie machine of Bob Brown, which was to turn stories and poems into strips of linguistic film. The influence of photography and film on the avant-garde is traced from the early days of Camera Work, through the enthusiasm of Eugene Jolas and the contributors to his magazine transition, to the crisis created by the introduction of sound in the late 1920's. Subseguent chapters describe the entirely new kind of sensory enjoyment brought into modern American fiction by the new media. What Fitzgerald calls "spectroscopic gayety," the enjoyable diorientation of the senses by machine perception, turns out to be a powerful force in much American fiction. The revolutionary possibilities of this new spectatorship and its limitations are pursued through a number of examples, including Dos Passos, James Weldon Johnson, and Hemingway. Together, these chapters offer a new and substantially different account of the relationship between modern American literature and the mediatized society of the early twentieth century. With a comprehensive introduction and detailed particular readings, Camera Works substantiates a new understanding of the formal and historical bases of modernism. It argues that when modern literature and art respond to modernity, on a formal level, they are responding to the intervention of technology in the transmission of meaning, an intervention that unsettles all the terms in the essential relationship of human consciousness to the world of phenomena.

Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word

Camera Works

vom Mittelalter bis heute

Kleine Geschichte des Geldes

Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed a commercialisation of culture as the marketing of culture became separated from its production and new cultural entrepreneurs entered the stage. Cultural consumption also played a substantial role in creating social identity. In this book, Michael North systematically explores this field for the first time in regard to the European Continent, and especially to eighteenth-century Germany. Chapters focus on the new forms of entertainment - concerts, theatre, opera, reading societies and traveling - on the one hand and on the new material culture - fashion, gardens, country houses and furniture - on the other.

Michael North

Books

Your next favorite book is out there