The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought

In his introduction, Everdell makes the point that educated readers use the word modernism all the time, ""possessed of certain spreadeagled definitions learned, perhaps, in courses in art history or 20th century fiction and reinforced by daily trips through the glass canyons of downtown."" While Everdell dislikes loose, rangy definitions of modernism extrapolated from art alone, he relishes the fact that understanding modernism demands ""a bit of everything"" and a willingness to indulge in ""wholesale crossing of what we have come, in the 20th century, to call `disciplinary barriers.' "" Everdell himself crosses and recrosses those barriers, venturing from philosophy, mathematics and literature to science, art and politics. Rather than adopting an academic, theory-based approach, Everdell relies on narrative to illustrate the shift between 19th-century certainty and the atomized, self-referential, uncertain universe of the 20th century. Each self-contained chapter stands alone as an intellectual exploration of a particular idea, discovery, personality or event. Those chapters create some illuminating juxtapositions, as when the section on Ludwig Boltzmann and his research into molecular theory abuts one on Georges Seurat and pointillism. Everdell does not just discuss their achievements in their cultural contexts, however--he narrates their discoveries. His approach has a certain humanizing immediacy, but the overall effect is discontinuous--perhaps a reflection of modernism itself, but still frustrating in a book that purports to trace the history of an intellectual and artistic epoch. (June)