Waubonsee Community College

The first moderns, profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought, William R. Everdell

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 423-461) and index

index present

non fiction

The first moderns

bibliography

35714512

William R. Everdell

"In the early 1870s, mathematicians like Cantor and Dedekind discovered the set and divided the mathematical continuum; in 1886, Georges Seurat debuted his visionary masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte; by the end of 1900, Hugo de Vries had discovered the gene, Max Planck had laid claim to the quantum, and Sigmund Freud had laid bare the unconscious workings of dreams. Throughout the worlds of art and ideas, of science and philosophy, Modernism was dawning, and with it a new mode of conceptualization." "With astounding range and scholarly command, William Everdell constructs a lively and accessible history of nascent Modernism - narrating portraits of genius, profiling intellectual breakthroughs, and richly evoking the fin-de-siecle atmosphere of Paris, Vienna, St. Louis, and St. Petersburg. He follows Picasso to the Cabaret des Assassins, discourses with Ernst Mach on the contingency of scientific law, and takes in the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring." "But how are we to define the inception of an era predicated upon such far-flung and radically disparate innovations? Everdell is careful not to insist on the creative interrelation of these events. Instead, what for him unites such germinally modernist achievements is a profound conceptual insight: that the objects of our knowledge are - contrary to the evolutionary seamlessness of nineteenth-century thought - discrete, atomistic, and discontinuous. The gray matter was found to be made out of neurons, poems out of disjunctive images, and paintings out of dots of color, all by innovators whose worlds were just beginning to align." "Theoretically sophisticated yet marvelously entertaining, The First Moderns offers an invigorating look at the unfolding of an age."--Jacket

profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought

Introduction : What modernism is and what it probably isn't -- The century ends in Vienna : modernism's time lost, 1899 -- Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and Gottlob Frege : what is a number, 1872-1883 -- Ludwig Boltzmann : statistical gases, entropy, and the direction of time, 1872-1877 -- Georges Seurat : divisionism, cloisonnism, and chronophotography, 1885 -- Whitman, Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue : poems without meter, 1886 -- Santiago Ramón y Cajal : the atoms of brain, 1889 -- Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau : inventing the concentration camp, 1896 -- Sigmund Freud : time repressed and ever-present, 1899 -- The century begins in Paris : modernism on the verge, 1900 -- Hugo de Vries and Max Planck : the gene and the quantum, 1900 -- Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl : phenomenology, number, and the fall of logic, 1901 -- Edwin S. Porter : parts at sixteen per second, 1903 -- Meet me in Saint Louis : modernism comes to middle America, 1904 -- Albert Einstein : the space-time interval and the quantum of light, 1905 -- Pablo Picasso : seeing all sides, 1906-1907 -- August Strindberg : staging a broken dream, 1907 -- Arnold Schoenberg : music in no key, 1908 -- James Joyce : the novel goes to pieces, 1909-1910 -- Vassily Kandinsky : art with no object, 1911-1912 -- Annus mirabilis : Vienna, Paris, and St. Petersburg, 1913 -- Discontinuous epilogues : Heisenberg and Bohr, Gödel and Turing, Merce Cunningham and Michel Foucault