What Is an Event?
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction 1
Why a Book about Events?
Advances and Limitations of Existing Scholarship
Form and Flow
1 • Political Semiosis
Inside or Outside
Deconstructing Political Semiosis
Summary
2 • Ground
L’Origine du Monde: Birth
Et in Arcadia Ego: Death
Background
Ground as Surface, Point of Contact, Scene of Action
Underground and Overground
3 • Rupture
Suspended Animation
Time and Space in Rupture
Event and Series: The Financial Crisis of 2008
“The Trigger Gave”
4 • Resonating Forms
Violence and Event Formation
The French Revolution
Jacques- Louis David: Eventful Moments and the Pause
5 • Fragmenting Forms
The Representational Uncertainty of the Paris Commune
Styles and Genres of the Paris Commune
Formal Fault Lines of Il Quarto Stato
6 • Sedimentation and Drift
9/11
Sedimentation and the Official Report
Insiders and Outsiders
Event Spaces
9/11 in Lower Manhattan
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction 1
Why a Book about Events?
Advances and Limitations of Existing Scholarship
Form and Flow
1 • Political Semiosis
Inside or Outside
Deconstructing Political Semiosis
Summary
2 • Ground
L’Origine du Monde: Birth
Et in Arcadia Ego: Death
Background
Ground as Surface, Point of Contact, Scene of Action
Underground and Overground
3 • Rupture
Suspended Animation
Time and Space in Rupture
Event and Series: The Financial Crisis of 2008
“The Trigger Gave”
4 • Resonating Forms
Violence and Event Formation
The French Revolution
Jacques- Louis David: Eventful Moments and the Pause
5 • Fragmenting Forms
The Representational Uncertainty of the Paris Commune
Styles and Genres of the Paris Commune
Formal Fault Lines of Il Quarto Stato
6 • Sedimentation and Drift
9/11
Sedimentation and the Official Report
Insiders and Outsiders
Event Spaces
9/11 in Lower Manhattan
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Review Quotes
William H. Sewell, Jr., University of Chicago
“What Is an Event? is a sustained meditation about what Wagner-Pacifici has called the ‘restlessness’ of events. She develops a ‘political semiotics’ of the event, elaborating and classifying the speech acts and other symbolic performances that attempt to comprehend, represent, steer, deflect, or bring to an end events—but that often have the effect of pushing them unpredictably forward. Anyone interested in the dynamics of history will have much to learn from this remarkable book.”
Eviatar Zerubavel, Rutgers University
“What Is an Event? is an attempt by one of contemporary sociology’s most brilliant practitioners to theorize the process by which we come to perceive and narrate particular stretches of history as ‘events.’ Drawing on official documents, novels, paintings, and personal narratives, Wagner-Pacifici examines the way we conceptualize beginnings, pauses, turning points, trajectories, as well as the historical background from which events such as shootings, stock market crashes, and revolutions ‘emerge’ or ‘erupt.’ The result is a remarkably ambitious sociological theory of the ‘shape’ of the past.”
Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication, University of Pennsylvania
“What Is An Event? is an intellectual treat. Charting how and why events matter, it animates a wide range of cultural texts—from seventeenth century paintings to twenty-first century violence, from political revolutions to financial crises—and demonstrates how they transform across time and space en route to taking their place at the forefront of historical and social thought. Eloquently phrased and elegantly formulated, the book showcases Wagner-Pacifici’s theoretical sophistication, singular analytical acumen, and splendid prose. This is Wagner-Pacifici at her finest.”
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University
“Once again, Wagner-Pacifici brings together art, philosophy, and sociology in probing, sophisticated, and deeply illuminating sophisticated ways. Her new social theory sheds new light on empirical events that have remained mysterious even as they continue to transform our social world in fateful ways.”
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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Philosophy: Philosophy of Society
Sociology: Social History | Theory and Sociology of Knowledge
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