Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #155837 in Books
• Published on: 1986-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 372 pages

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"

Synopsis
Looks at how technological innovations have changed our perception of past, present, and future and on form, distance, and direction.