The first moderns : profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought

The Resource The first moderns : profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought

Label

The first moderns : profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought

Title remainder

profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought

Statement of responsibility

William R. Everdell

Language

eng

Summary

"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

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

190/.9/04

Index

index present

LC call number

B804

LC item number

.E84 1997

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Context

Context of The first moderns : profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought

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