MDSC53H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Elizabeth Eisenstein, Sandra Gilbert, Technological Determinism
Document Summary
E. g. language, images, music, gestures, exchange of things, etc: it"s a process, this shared understanding is the result of shared practices of interaction. No place that everyone in the community shares at the same time. Yet such groups clearly form at large scales, like national groups and religious groups: shifts in community formation. Anderson: from dynastic states (i. e. kings, emperors, etc. ) with religious notions of community to nation states with new kinds of imagining. From a sacred language on a sacred script to which only a few people could control a vernacular language, language of the people that everyone can read and understand. This shift involves a certain kind of existential crisis that occurs on a mass scale. In western europe the 18th century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalims but the dusk of religious modes of thought. The century of the enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness.
