Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund

UID:

Format: 1 online resource (xii, 264 pages) : , illustrations

Edition: Reprint 2019

ISBN: 9780520341098 , 0520341090 , 9780585184319 , 0585184313

Content: The year 1910 marks an astonishing, and largely unrecognized, juncture in Western history. As the spectacle of Halley's Comet pierces the skies of Europe, traditional harmonies fade away and dissonance dawns. In this brilliantly conceived work, Thomas Harrison defines 1910 through a perceptive interdisciplinary analysis of the creative works produced during or close to that year, most of them as unsettling as the comet itself: the atonal music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern; the distraught poetry of Trakl, Campana, and Rilke; the militant philosophy of Lukacs, Simmel, and Buber; the abstract or subjectivist paintings of Kandinsky, Schiele, and Kokoschka. All are matched by historical and existential turbulence: epidemics of suicide and madness and the plight of Italians and Jews in the empire of Austria-Hungary. Unlike previous cultural studies of the pre-World War I era, this book locates the most significant traits of the period in Middle rather than Western Europe and in expressionism rather than in more celebrated developments of the avant-garde. Expressionism's violent extremes, Harrison argues provocatively, were the explosions of a last, desperate attempt by the intelligentsia to defend some of the most venerable presuppositions of Western culture. Among these were the idea of human subjectivity as the measure of all things, the habit of thinking in terms of antitheses, and belief in the universality of the understanding. Ultimately, Harrison claims, this ideological desperation was not only a spiritual prelude to World War I but also a prophetic, unheeded critique.

Note: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph , The Emancipation of Dissonance -- , Gorizia, Judaic Indeterminacy and Triestine Art -- , The Chimera -- , Poetic Duplicity -- , Decentralized Music -- , Spirituality and Materialism -- , Destiny at Odds with Itself -- , An Ontology of Opposition -- , Persuasive Life-Experience -- , The Deficiency of Being -- , Three Women -- , A Deadly Vocation -- , In the Beginning Was the End -- , Life as Abstraction -- , Sociology of Death -- , Decrepitude in Body and Soul -- , Cosmic Guilt -- , Impotence -- , Loss of Self -- , The Hole Called the Soul -- , Autoscopy -- , Qualitative Individualism -- , Subjective Transcendence -- , Self-Possession -- , Pictures of Soul -- , An Ethics of Misunderstanding -- , Ethical and Aesthetic Transcendence -- , Spiritual Poverty -- , Tragic Acquiescence -- , Ecstatic Confessions -- , Intransitive Love -- , Ladies of the Unicorn: Structive Art , English

Additional Edition: ISBN 9780520200432

Additional Edition: ISBN 0520200438

Language: English

DOI: 10.1525/9780520341098