Seminar papers.

In Lost Modernities Alexander Woodside offers a probing revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their transparent procedures. The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that good politics could be established through the "development of people"--the training of people to be politically useful. Centuries before civil service examinations emerged in the Western world, these three Asian countries were basing bureaucratic advancement on examinations in addition to patronage. But the evolution of the mandarinates cannot be accommodated by our usual timetables of what is "modern." The history of China, Vietnam, and Korea suggests that the rationalization processes we think of as modern may occur independently of one another and separate from such landmarks as the growth of capitalism or the industrial revolution. A sophisticated examination of Asian political traditions, both their achievements and the associated risks, this book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history and on global historical time.

Under the microscope of recent scholarship the universality of Greek tragedy has started to fade, as particularities of Athenian culture have come into focus. Miriam Leonard contests the idea of the death of tragedy and argues powerfully for the continued vitality and viability of Greek tragic theater in the central debates of contemporary culture.

Focusing specifically on the Kemalist project to create a modern Turkish secular nation-state, Ibrahim Kaya analyses its historical roots, the role of concepts of ethnicity and nation and the configuration of state, society and economy in the new Turkish republic.

Global Modernities is a sustained commentary on the international character of the most microcosmic practices. It demonstrates how the global increasingly informs the regional, so deconstructing ideas like the `nation state′ and `national sovereignty′. The spatialization of social theory, hybridization and bio-politics are among the critical issues discussed.

Where did literary modernism happen? This book answers this question, re-evaluating the parameters of modernism in the light of recent developments in literary geography and literary history through an examination of novels, poetry, theatre, and "e;little magazines"e;. Essays identify and appraise the local attachments of modernist texts in particular geographical regions and question the idea of the "e;regional"e; in light of the alienating displacements of transnational modernity.

The book aims to illustrate that what is distinctive about any particular society is not the fact of its modernity, but rather its own unique debates about modernity. Behind the embattled arena of culture in India, for example, lie particular social and political interests such as the growing middle class, the entrepreneurs and commercial institutions, and the state. The contributors address the roles of these various intertwined interests in the making of India's public culture, each examining different sites of consumption. The sites which are explored include cinema, radio, cricket, restaurants and tourism. The book also makes distinct the differences among public, mass and popular culture.