Synopses & Reviews
THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION
Fromabout 1880 to World War I, sweeping changes in technology and culture created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. Stephen Kern writes about the onrush of technics that reshaped life concretely--telephone,electric lighting, steamship, skyscraper, bicycle, cinema, plane, x-ray, machine gun-and the cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought--the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneouspoetry, relativity, and the introduction of world standard time.
Kern interprets this generation's revolutionized sense of past, present, and future, and of form, distance, and direction. Thisoverview includes such figures as Proust Joyce, Mann, Wells, Gertrude Stein, Strindberg, Freud, Husserl, Apollinaire, Conrad, Picasso, and Einstein, as well as diverse sources of popular culture drawn from journals, newspapers, andmagazines. It also treats new developments in personal and social relations including scientific management, assembly lines, urbanism, imperialism, and trench warfare.
While exploring transformedspatial-temporal dimensions, the book focuses on the way new sensibilities subverted traditional values. Kern identifies a broad leveling of cultural hierarchies such as the Cubist breakdown of the conventional distinction between theprominent subject and the framing background, and he argues that these levelings parallel the challenge to aristocratic society, the rise of democracy, and the "death of God." This entire reworking of time and space is shown finally tohave influenced the conduct of diplomacy during the crisis of July 1914 and to have structured the "Cubist war" that followed.
Review
Kern's book is splendid. It is imaginative, convincing, learned, and readable.
Review
"No brief summary can do justice to the richness and range of this exciting book, which brims with ideas and insights, evidence and examples, and provides the most comprehensive account of the life of the mind in these crucial decades before the First World War, when so much of our modern world was formed and fashioned. Kern's command of art and literature, painting and architecture, philosophy and psychology, physics and technology is awesome: he moves from Proust to Picasso, Einstein to Stravinsky, with consummate ease and unquenchable enthusiasm."
--David Cannadine, London Review of Books"A most valuable and inventive book, one that will surely be consulted as a model for future study on the large area of the relation of culture and technology."
--Mark Poster, American Historical Review"In its effort to tie material culture with intellectual history, in its attempt to synthesize a vast number of subjects, and in its quest for basic human experiences that were responsible for making this period distinctive, Kern's book suggests rich possibilities for a new kind of historiography."
--Neil Harris, Journal of Modern History"A brilliant, gutsy essay in intellectual history [on] how thought, technology, art and politics smashed objective time and bourgeois hierarchies of space."
--Nation"[Kern] sets out ambitiously to locate the essential thought or content of an age by cutting across traditional disciplines. His categories of time, space, speed, distance, and form refer as much to science and technology as to philosophy and the arts. The last two chapters on World War I offer an often dazzling performance during which Kern juggles the accelerated telephone-inspired timing of the crisis among the European powers--'the whole-souled sentimental equipment' that F. Scott Fitzgerald said won the war--and Picasso's recognition of Cubism's contribution to camouflage. Kern proposes a final panoptic metaphor for the era: 'the miles of telephone wires that criss-crossed the Western world' and stand for 'the vast extended present' of simultaneity."
--Roger Shattuck, New York Review of BooksReview
In its effort to tie material culture with intellectual history, in its attempt to synthesize a vast number of subjects, and in its quest for basic human experiences that were responsible for making this perioddistinctive, Kern's book suggests rich possibilities for a new kind of historiography.
Review
No brief summary can do justice to the riches and range of this exciting book, which brims with ideas and insights, evidence and examples, and provides the most comprehensive account of the life of the mind in thesecrucial decades before the First World War, when so much of our modern world was formed and fashioned. Kern's command of art and literature, painting and architecture, philosophy and psychology, physics and technology is awesome: hemoves from Proust to Picasso, Einstein to Stravinsky, with consummate ease and unquenchable enthusiasm.
Review
[Kern] sets out ambitiously to locate the essential thought or content of an age by cutting across traditional disciplines. His categories of time, space, speed, distance, and form refer as much to science andtechnology as to philosophy and the arts. The last two chapters on World War I offer an often dazzling performance during which Kern juggles the accelerated telephone-inspired timing of the crisis among the European powers--'thewhole-souled sentimental equipment' that F. Scott Fitzgerald said won the war--and Picasso's recognition of Cubism's contribution to camouflage. Kern proposes a final panoptic metaphor for the era: 'the miles of telephone wires thatcriss-crossed the Western world' and stand for 'the vast extended present' of simultaneity.
About the Author
Stephen Kernis Professor of History at <>Ohio State University.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Nature of Time
2. The Past
3. The Present
4. The Future
5. Speed
6. The Nature of Space
7. Form
8. Distance
9. Direction
10. Temporality of the July Crisis
11. The Cubist War
Conclusion
Notes
Index