Age of Anxiety
The "Age of Anxiety" refers to a period in the 20th century, particularly after World War I, characterized by widespread unease, disillusionment, and uncertainty. This term is often used to describe the social, cultural, and psychological impact of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and technological advancements, as well as the aftermath of global conflicts. It reflects a pervasive sense of insecurity and existential angst among individuals and societies.
4 Key excerpts on "Age of Anxiety"
eBook - ePubAnxiety in Middle-Class America
Sociology of Emotional Insecurity in Late Modernity
- Valérie de Courville Nicol(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Anxiety is a condition of contemporary social life rather than a character defect: The man who lives in the 1970s is entitled to feel anxiety, perhaps even some panic. Not to do so would be indication that to some extent he is out of touch with his times. Never before in the history of the world has Freud’s observation that neurosis is the hallmark of civilized man been truer. (5) A grey outlook informed by complexity has replaced black and white thinking: It is simpler to live in the black and white world of the good cowboy and the bad Indian, the sophisticated city slicker and the innocent country bumpkin. It is not as easy to live in the realistic world of grays as it is to place people, events, and feelings into neat little pigeonholes. (8) The authors underscore the painful conflict produced by human beings’ newfound awareness of their power and lack of it in this post-religious reality. They refer to the period-specific emotionality captured by W.H. Auden’s poem published shortly after World War II: ‘Anxiety has become a word to describe the era in which we live. Auden aptly called it “the Age of Anxiety”’ (3). On the one hand, in the post–World War II era, human beings have become conscious of their responsibility for their own potentially destructive impulses. They no longer project this responsibility onto an omnipotent being: Today, our art, music, and literature reflect acute awareness that man has only limited control over his destiny. We no longer believe disasters occur because a supreme being is punishing us. Rather, we are aghast at the destructiveness of impulses that are given free rein. (7) On the other hand, the unconscious’s role in shaping how we feel and what we do is now commonly acknowledged: There is more and more popular understanding of the nature of the unconscious...
eBook - ePub- Dr John Haffenden, John Haffenden, Dr John Haffenden, John Haffenden(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...’The Age of Anxiety’ New York, July 1947; London, September 1948 99 M.L. ROSENTHAL, SPEAKING GREATLY IN AN AGE OF CONFUSION, ‘NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE’ 20 July 1947, section 7, 3 M.L. Rosenthal (b. 1917), poet and critic, has taught at New York University since 1945. His publications include ‘The Modern Poets’ (1960), ‘The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II’ (1967), and ‘Sailing into the Unknown: Yeats, Pound, and Eliot’ (1978). This is the first poem, in English at any rate, that speaks boldly, greatly and at length of our sick, desperate confusion in this era of the second world war. It will give sharp reminder to our numerous talented minor poets that there can be strength and responsibility in their art: All that exists Matters to man; he minds what happens And feels he is at fault, a fallen soul With power to place, to explain every What in his world but why he is neither God nor good…. The vigor, even the quality, of the ideas in ‘The Age of Anxiety’ must obviously be tested by their influence on its readers, many of whom will doubtless find Auden’s diagnosis, with all its pessimism, infinitely superior to his suggested cure. But no one who takes up this emotionally stunning work is likely to concern himself immediately with whether or not he agrees with the author. Rather, his attention will be absorbed by the various centers of concentration along which the ‘plot’ is strung, each of them one aspect of a continuous, straining effort to get at the heart of the human condition and trace the lines of possible (or impossible) salvation...
eBook - ePubPsychoanalysis and Anxiety: From Knowing to Being
From Knowing to Being
- Chris Mawson(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...PART I Anxiety From the ancient world to ontological philosophy 1 Anxiety Antiquity towards modernity In a letter to Richard Bentley in 1753, Horace Walpole described a small pew hung with green damask as “a modernity which beats all antiquities for curiosity” (Wright, 1842, p. 184). An apt epigraph for this chapter would be its transposition: “But here is an antiquity which beats all modernities for curiosity”, because in specific Epicurean texts to which I will draw attention there appear some of the earliest systematic writings on the mind, and in those passages it is emotion rather than cognition that is recognised as being at the heart of the mind. In this chapter I will begin with these writings to show how some of the observations concerning anxiety, and of the human being’s relations towards it, are startling both in their acuity and contemporary relevance. In the first century bce, in his epic philosophical texts, De rerum natura 1 (The Nature of Things), the Roman philosopher Lucretius, 2 distinguished anxiety from fear almost two thousand years before Søren Kierkegaard did so...
eBook - ePub- Sergio Starkstein(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...An important caveat, here, is that the religious connotations in Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety have been translated into a social emphasis on safety (Mythen 2004), a step far removed from Kierkegaard’s high spiritual and ethical standards. The eminent sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens have written extensively on the fact that the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of what is called the “age of risk,” a harbinger of increasing anxiety (Beck 2009 ; Giddens 1990, 1991). 20 Far from Kierkegaard’s understanding of the anxiety of being human (inner dread), though as part of a sociological movement that frequently references it, these authors conceptualise anxiety as being determined by powerful socioeconomic factors acting on the individual, an understanding commonly referred to under the more generic term, the ‘social construction of emotions’. Boiger and Mesquita define the “social construction of emotions” as the understanding that emotions are primarily constituted, shaped and defined by social contexts (Boiger and Mesquita 2012). They also suggest that the social construction of emotions depends on three primary situations. The first, termed “moment-to-moment interactions”, refers to the fact that emotions are constructed at the time of social exchange, for instance, when I develop anxiety after a friend tells me about future job cuts in my work place. Accordingly, anxiety is shaped by present social exchanges and their future implications for the individual. The second kind of situation occurs when social interactions directly produce anxiety, and the emotion impacts, in a circular way, upon the social interaction. For instance, this occurs when my boss’s actions and words make me feel continuously anxious, and my anxiety further shapes interactions with my boss. The third situation relates to specific socio-cultural contexts...
