Stephen Kern writes about the sweeping changes in technology and culture between 1880 and World War I that created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. To mark the book's 20th anniversary, Kern provides a new preface about the breakthrough in interpretive approach that has made this a seminal work in interdisciplinary studies.
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No brief summary can do justice to the richness and range of this exciting book, which brims with ideas and insights, evidence and examples, and provides the most comprehensive account of the life of the mind in these crucial decades before the First World War, when so much of our modern world was formed and fashioned. Kern's command of art and literature, painting and architecture, philosophy and psychology, physics and technology is awesome: he moves from Proust to Picasso, Einstein to Stravinsky, with consummate ease and unquenchable enthusiasm. London Review of Books A brilliant, gutsy essay in intellectual history [on] how thought, technology, art, and politics smashed objective time and bourgeois hierarchies of space. The Nation
About the Author
Stephen Kern is Professor of History at Ohio State University.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By RJ
Format:Paperback
This is a brilliant book in its insights into the traumatic upheavals in Europe at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kern explores how the writing and researches of sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, scientists and psychologists overturned society's 'taken for granted' assumptions about reality and how these changes impacted all the arts, leading to such innovative works as 'The Waves', 'Ulysses', Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism. R. Jenkins
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.2 out of 5 stars
8 reviews
31 of 32 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
the book is a superb general cultural history of the period.
21 Oct 1998
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
The book is a superb general cultural history of the turn of the century period that relates developments in culture and society to new technologies of transportation and communication. He divides the period into subtopics of time and space, as the major chapters focus on changing ways people experienced past, present, future, speed, form, distance, and direction. Two concluding chapters examine how the changing experiences and ideas about time and space in the prewar period shaped World War I--first a chapter on "The Temporality of the July Crisis" and a final chapter, "The Cubist War." The overall aregument is that these new technologies forced a new set of values on the Western world, one which Kern calls a rehierarchization of earlier cultural forms. Kern sees these new technologies as moving society in the direction of greater democracy, a leveling of older aristocratic hegemony, and a secularization of life and thought.
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Exciting Approach to the Study of Cultural History
24 Sep 2001
By mwreview
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Stephen Kern conducts an innovative examination of the way in which new perceptions of time and space influenced ideas, philosophies, art forms, behavior, politics, and foreign relations. Kern is able to connect such seemingly unrelated topics as the sinking of the RMS Titanic and Friedrich Nietzche's evaluation of the present (an approach he calls "conceptual distance") to create a better understanding of the changing attitudes concerning time and space at the turn of the twentieth century. As Kern points out, the study of such an array of diverse cultural elements in terms of temporal and spatial experiences is essential because time and space are universal. All peoples experience time and space. Ultimately, he explains how the changing notions of time and space culminated in the diplomatic breakdown which led to the First World War.
This study is very intriguing, but there are weaknesses in his many conclusions. On the cinema, for example, certainly, it was exciting for viewers to see, for the first time, a man running backwards on the screen; however, it is difficult to take from such experiences the assertion that viewers changed their attitudes regarding time outside the theatre. Although some memebers of the audience indeed ducked at the sight of an oncoming locomotive on the screen, one must assume that viewers were able to distinguish between what they saw in the theatres and their experiences in real life. More convincing is Kern's argument that the cinema promoted a sense of temporal world unity (displaying a global sense of time through newsreels, etc.).
His main argument regarding the July crisis is also a little weak. Briefly, Kerns maintains that the preoccupation with speed (especially with the fast, impersonal telegraph) caused diplomacy to fail due to rapid, ill-considered responses to events (the assassiantion of Archduke Ferdinand) and the short time limit given to the Serbian government to respond to Austria's ultimatum. Certainly there were failures in diplomacy before the telegraph. Moreover, it could be argued that the telegraph had the potential of making accidental conflicts less likely than before because it allowed for immediate decisions to be made by governments at home rather than by military officers and soldiers abroad (i.e. the Cuban Missile Crisis, although this was--of course--outside of Kern's period of study). It is also a little hard to swallow that the wonderful technological, philosophical, cultural advances and changes of this period were steering the world to an irreversible path of destruction.
Despite these weaknesses, this work is a must have for students of this period because it covers such a broad range of topics and links them into an intriguing and ambitious theory. It really prompted me to think about this period (my favorite period of history) with a very broad brush.
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Encore!
12 Nov 2004
By W. R. Everdell
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
The Culture of Time and Space was a pioneering book when it first came out and it is wonderful to see how elegantly it has aged. These connections among the sciences and the arts, and among the arts themselves, were mostly new when Kern first published this essay, and are still too rarely made, even those between literature and painting that we find discreetly suggested by the cover of almost every serious book these days. Best of all, those relationships really exist. The connection between Picasso's cubist representation of space (beginning in 1907) and Einstein's four-dimensional representation of space-time (which depends on the Relativity paper of 1905 and an insight about gravity Einstein had in 1907) is entirely real. This is history, not an "alternative reading," and it is intellectual/cultural history at its best. For me it was the inspiration to finish writing a book of my own, and it's a pleasure to welcome it back to print.
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4.2 out of 5 stars
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