Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880–1930

by Ronald Schleifer

• ISBN13: 9780521120159
• ISBN10: 0521120152
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-09-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Ronald Schleifer offers a powerful reassessment of the politics and culture of modernism. His study analyzes the transition from the Enlightenment to post-Enlightenment ways of understanding in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues that this transition expresses itself centrally in an altered conception of temporality. Addressing a variety of disciplines, this study examines the period's remarkable breaks with the past in literature, music, and the arts more generally, and engages with the work of writers and thinkers as varied as George Eliot, Walter Benjamin, Einstein and Russell.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Post-Enlightenment modernism and the experience of time

Post-Enlightenment Apprehension:

The Enlightenment, abundance, and postmodernity

Temporal allegories: George Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the redemption of time

The second industrial revolution: history, knowledge, and subjectivity

Logics of Abundance:

The natural history of time: mathematics and meaning in Einstein and Russell

Analogy and example: Heisenberg, linguistic negation, and the language of quantum physics

The global aesthetics of genre: Mikhail Bakhtin and the borders of modernity

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