期刊名称：Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
电子版ISSN：0975-2935
出版年度：2010
卷号：2
期号：4
页码：648-659
出版社：Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
摘要：European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century marked a paradigm shift in its perception of time and in the practice of historiography. The idea of linear/teleological classification of time and the notion of empirical documentation of historywas combined with the notion of progress,which saw civilization as a development from the state of barbarity to that of refinement. The appropriation of this progressivist ideology by the powerful in society has served as a tool of domination. Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History"(1940) and Rabindranath Tagore's "Crisis in Civilization"(1941), written in the wake of World War II, provide us with two radical perspectives which challenge such progressivist assumptions. Expanding the critical span into their other writings, this paper seeks to historicize the two figures in their varied positionsof marginality as two counter-Enlightenment ideologues, writing at a moment of human history when the idea of being civilized was continually threatened by manifestations of barbarity in the socio-political/cultural dynamics of the entire world
