The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought
In this truly exciting study of the origins of modernist thought, poet and teacher Everdell (The End of Kings, 1983) roams freely across disciplinary lines, commenting on fields as disparate as mathematics and moving pictures, neuroscience and music, and literature and the concentration camps. He argues that the most original thinkers in the modern age (ca. 1870 to 1914) illuminated a shared perception of the world, pointing to a reality seen as fragmented and discontinuous, isolate, "digital" (yes/no, not flowing), and quantized. "Modernists dissect routinely and obsessively.... The intellectual world of Modernism is...a world of precise definition and separability." Some of the thinkers Everdell profiles include mathematician Georg Cantor, physicists Ludwig Bolzmann and Albert Einstein, Freud, Seurat and Picasso, Rimbaud and Whitman, Edwin S. Porter, and Merce Cunningham. A brilliant book that will prove useful to scholars and generalists for years to come; enthusiastically recommended.?David Keymer, California State Univ., StanislausCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.