The Antechamber: Toward a History of Waiting (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Puff, Helmut

ISBN 10: 1503637026 / ISBN 13: 9781503637023

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2023

A sound copy with only light wear. Overall a solid copy at a great price! Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers BOS-C-04b-02226

Inhaltsangabe:

Helmut Puff invites readers to visit societies and spaces of the past through the lens of a particular temporal modality: waiting. From literature, memoirs, manuals, chronicles, visuals, and other documents, Puff presents a history of waiting anchored in antechambers-interior rooms designated and designed for people to linger.

In early modern continental Western Europe, antechambers became standard in the residences of the elites. As a time-space infrastructure these rooms shaped encounters between unequals. By imposing spatial distance and temporal delays, antechambers constituted authority, rank, and power. Puff explores both the logic and the experience of waiting in such formative spaces, showing that time divides as much as it unites, and that far from what people have said about early moderns, they approached living in time with apprehensiveness. Unlike how contemporary society primarily views the temporal dimension, to early modern Europeans time was not an objective force external to the self but something that was tied to acting in time. Divided only by walls and doors, waiters sought out occasions to improve their lot. At other times, they disrupted the scripts accorded them. Situated at the intersection of history, literature, and the history of art and architecture, this wide-ranging study demonstrates that waiting has a history that has much to tell us about social and power relations in the past and present.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor: Helmut Puff is Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Collegiate Professor of History and Germanic Languages at the University of Michigan. His other books include Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland (2003) as well as Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History (2014).

Bibliografische Details

Titel: The Antechamber: Toward a History of Waiting...
Verlag: Stanford University Press
Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
Einband: Softcover
Zustand: Good