The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 [Paperback]

Stephen Kern (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674179730 | ISBN-13: 978-0674179738 | Publication Date: February 1986

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION

From about 1880 to World War I, sweeping changes in technology and culture created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. Stephen Kern writes about the onrush of technics that reshaped life concretely--telephone, electric lighting, steamship, skyscraper, bicycle, cinema, plane, x-ray, machine gun-and the cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought--the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry, relativity, and the introduction of world standard time.

Kern interprets this generation's revolutionized sense of past, present, and future, and of form, distance, and direction. This overview includes such figures as Proust Joyce, Mann, Wells, Gertrude Stein, Strindberg, Freud, Husserl, Apollinaire, Conrad, Picasso, and Einstein, as well as diverse sources of popular culture drawn from journals, newspapers, and magazines. It also treats new developments in personal and social relations including scientific management, assembly lines, urbanism, imperialism, and trench warfare.

While exploring transformed spatial-temporal dimensions, the book focuses on the way new sensibilities subverted traditional values. Kern identifies a broad leveling of cultural hierarchies such as the Cubist breakdown of the conventional distinction between the prominent subject and the framing background, and he argues that these levelings parallel the challenge to aristocratic society, the rise of democracy, and the "death of God." This entire reworking of time and space is shown finally to have influenced the conduct of diplomacy during the crisis of July 1914 and to have structured the "Cubist war" that followed.

Editorial Reviews

Review

ÝKern sets out ambitiously to locate the essential thought or content of an age by cutting across traditional disciplines. His categories of time, space, speed, distance, and form refer as much to science and technology as to philosophy and the arts. The last two chapters on World War I offer an often dazzling performance during which Kern juggles the accelerated telephone-inspired timing of the crisis among the European powers--'the whole-souled sentimental equipment' that F. Scott Fitzgerald said won the war--and Picasso's recognition of Cubism's contribution to camouflage. Kern proposes a final panoptic metaphor for the era: 'the miles of telephone wires that criss-crossed the Western world' and stand for 'the vast extended present' of simultaneity. -- Roger Shattuck "New York Review of Books"

Review

Kern's book is splendid. It is imaginative, convincing, learned, and readable.
--Eugen Weber (University of California, Los Angeles )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (February 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674179730
• ISBN-13: 978-0674179738
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #785,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the book is a superb general cultural history of the period., October 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (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.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Exciting Approach to the Study of Cultural History, September 23, 2001

By 

mwreview "mwreview" (Northern California, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (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.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Encore!, November 12, 2004

By 

W. R. Everdell (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918: With a New Preface (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.