The first moderns : profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought
"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
History
xi, 501 pages ; 23 cm
9780226224800, 9780226224817, 0226224805, 0226224813
35714512
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