In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans were faced with the challenges and uncertainties of a new era. The comfortable Victorian values of continuity, progress, and order clashed with the unsettling modern notions of constant change, relative truth, and chaos. Attempting to embrace the intellectual challenges of modernism, American thinkers of the day were yet reluctant to welcome the wholesale rejection of the past and destruction of traditional values. In Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900, George Cotkin surveys the intellectual life of this...
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans were faced with the challenges and uncertainties of a new era. The comfortable Victorian ...
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans were faced with the challenges and uncertainties of a new era. The comfortable Victorian values of continuity, progress, and order clashed with the unsettling modern notions of constant change, relative truth, and chaos. Attempting to embrace the intellectual challenges of modernism, American thinkers of the day were yet reluctant to welcome the wholesale rejection of the past and destruction of traditional values. In Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900, George Cotkin surveys the intellectual life of this...
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans were faced with the challenges and uncertainties of a new era. The comfortable Victorian ...
Europe's leading existential thinkers--Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus--all felt that Americans were too self-confident and shallow to accept their philosophy of responsibility, choice, and the absurd. -There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization, - Sartre remarked in 1950, while Beauvoir wrote that Americans had no -feeling for sin and for remorse- and Camus derided American materialism and optimism. Existentialism, however, enjoyed rapid, widespread, and enduring popularity among Americans. No less than their European...
Europe's leading existential thinkers--Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus--all felt that Americans were too self-confident and ...
Herman Melville's epic tale of obsession has all the ingredients of a first rate drama--fascinating characters in solitude and society, battles between good and evil, a thrilling chase to the death--and yet its allusions, digressions, and sheer scope can prove daunting to even the most intrepid reader. George Cotkin's Dive Deeper provides both a guide to the novel and a record of its dazzling cultural train. It supplies easy-to-follow plot points for each of the novel's 135 sections before taking up a salient phrase, image, or idea in each for further exploration. Through these...
Herman Melville's epic tale of obsession has all the ingredients of a first rate drama--fascinating characters in solitude and society, battles betwee...
In the face of an uncertain and dangerous world, Americans yearn for a firm moral compass, a clear set of ethical guidelines. But as history shows, by reducing complex situations to simple cases of right or wrong we often go astray.
In "Morality's Muddy Waters," historian George Cotkin offers a clarion call on behalf of moral complexity. Revisiting several defining moments in the twentieth century the American bombing of civilians during World War II, the My Lai massacre, racism in the South, capital punishment, the invasion of Iraq Cotkin chronicles how historical figures have grappled...
In the face of an uncertain and dangerous world, Americans yearn for a firm moral compass, a clear set of ethical guidelines. But as history shows,...
In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences with 4'33," his compositional ode to the ironic power of silence. From Cage's minimalism to Chris Burden's radical performance art two decades later (in one piece he had himself shot), the post-war American avant-garde shattered the divide between low and high art, between artist and audience. They changed the cultural landscape. Feast of Excess is an engaging and accessible portrait of "The New Sensibility," as it was named by Susan Sontag in 1965. The New Sensibility sought to push culture in extreme directions: either towards stark...
In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences with 4'33," his compositional ode to the ironic power of silence. From Cage's minimalism to Chris Burden's radica...
