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WORKS REFERENCED SINCE 31 MARCH 1999
Adorno, Theodore. THE STARS DOWN TO EARTH AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE IRRATIONAL IN CULTURE: One of the leaders of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Adorno escaped to California when the Nazis took over in Germany in the 1930s. He put his mind there to the political significance of the American popular press. That led to this analysis from 1952-3 of an LA Times astrology column. Editor Crook sees it and the other essays collected into this volume as a still-relevant critique of modern culture. The fundamental problem for Adorno was the integral operation of authoritarian irrationalism within a supposedly rational and enlightened modernity. The affinity of one for the other, Adorno thought, was found in the "psychodynamics" of modernity--"in the characterological bases and outcomes of processes of cultural, economic, political, and social modernization," as Crook puts it (2). Adorno, in analyzing an astrology column from popular culture, sought to show how this authoritarian irrationality accompanying modernity crops up in the products of the "culture industry." (2) More generally, I interpret Adorno as follows: He is suggesting that the claims of universal rationality in the Enlightenment foundations of modernity are undeliverable. (14 November 1999)
Bridges, William. JOBSHIFT: HOW TO PROSPER IN A WORKPLACE WITHOUT JOBS: Bridges is to the worker what Tom Peters or Peter Drucker is to the corporation--the seer into the magma of social change, the guru advising how to turn change into advantage. He first gives a brief history of the "late, great job." The job grew out of the division of labor and the time clock, hallmarks of the Industrial Revolution. By now, we take the job as a given of nature. But it is an artifact of the dying industrial age. Yet, says Bridges, social needs are alive and well. Coming to birth is a new way to organize human capital to meet those needs. Bridges offers a "how-to" guide for the careerist in the jobless world. It amounts to a kit for the individual entrepreneur, "You & Co." He describes how the "post-job" organization will run. It is a visit to the "agile" world where alliances and partnerships replace departments and divisions. (Agility is the core idea behind CAPE [A Community of Agile Partners in Education] and the focus of the research done by a team at Lehigh University.) Bridges examines the psychological impact of "dejobbing." He suggests "how-to" steps for those in this historical moment when we have left the industrial job behind and have not yet made "You & Co." the norm. I think Bridges scrapes the surfaces of the deeper conceptual issues involved in the transformation from modern to postmodern work patterns. But he gives us a useful glance at the shape of the post-industrial world from the viewpoint of the individual. In an exchange with Peter Balcziunas, Executive Director of Pa. Association of Colleges & Universities, I became aware of two limits to Bridges's prediction that the job is dead or dying: (1) Its fits the high tech world but ignores the continued production of harder stuff and its social carryover from the high industrial age. (2) It pertains mostly to the USA and glosses over the industrial state of the underdeveloped areas of the world. (Entered 21 Nov 99)
Canfield, Dorothy. THE DAY OF GLORY: Canfield reported on women and men in World War I from the viewpoint of an American advocate: the deathly circumstances of the war, which she acknowledged, were a price well paid for the sake of victory, the day of glory. Death was, from her viewpoint, justifiable in the service of political abstraction. Appearing in 1919, the book looks like opportunistic journalism today, though at the time it was probably patriotic fare well received. The contrast between Canfield's unironic assessment of the day of glory and the bitter report from the trenches by Erich Maria Remarque is stark. The distance between the two viewpoints measured the incoherence that would mark the century to come. From her description of Paris on 11 November 1918: We lived and drew our breath only in the knowledge that 'firing had ceased at eleven o'clock that morning,' and that those who had fought as best they could for the Right had conquered." (141)
Currie, Mark. POSTMODERN NARRATIVE THEORY. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Ursinus College Library 808.3/C936. Currie's examination of the "narratological" shift from modern to postmodern techniques is valuable beyond the narrow interest of literary study. His study of narrative strategies actually opens into a broader analysis of the cultural transition of the past third of a century. Narrative theory in the modern and postmodern modes thus appears as both a cause and an effect of that transition. The book in fact is one in a series titled "Transitions." Under the general editorship of Julian Wolfreys, the series to 1998 included, along with Currie, a title on "New Historicism and Cultural Materialism" by John Brannigan and "Deconstruction—Derrida" by Wolfreys. In his chapter titled "The Manufacture of Identities," we see an example of the way Currie moves from narrow to broad analytical perspective. He discusses the way postmodern narrative authors construct a character's personality through narrative about his/her relations with others. In so doing, he entertains the broader issues of essential and existential being. These issues are at the heart of the distinction between modernist and postmodernist ways of identifying the human subject. Lack of time prevented me from doing a more complete review of this insightful book.
Eisenhower, John. "The War to End All Wars." Rev. of The First World War, by John Keegan: Eisenhower commented mainly on Keegan's successes and failures in rendering the campaign strategies and battles. He found fault with Keegan's weak handling of the American effort. He objected particularly to Keegan's omission of the Meuse-Argonne campaign led by the American Gen. John Pershing. US forces there lost 55,000 men in five weeks--more than we lost in the whole eight years in Vietnam. Eisenhower's review interested me mainly because he too saw WWI as a forgotten epic. "Despite its size and its impact on twentieth-century civilization, the First World War has been largely forgotten, overshadowed by its legacy, World War II." (137) He saw Keegan's book as a remedy for that forgetfulness.
Florka, Roger. DESCARTES'S METAPHYSICAL REASONING. New York: Routledge, 2001. Studies in Philosophy: Outstanding Dissertations, Ed. Robert Nozick. Ursinus College Library 194/D453zFL. Where are the foundations of the modern mind? Typically we refer to the intellectual developments of the seventeenth century in Europe to help situate those foundations. We especially refer to the rise of scientific method in that period to explain the elevation of experiment and of an empirical attitude toward the world humans inhabit and seek to develop. "Cartesian" is a common term in these references; and it usually aims to show that Descartes's thinking about the method of inquiry into truth encouraged the split between substance and spirit (body and mind). This split, the story goes, liberated Western thinkers to analyze the myriad conditions of the material world around them. Owing to their ingenious work, European culture leaped ahead and came to dominate the modern world. Roger Florka's tightly written little book (117 pages) usefully takes us back to Descartes and casts a less familiar light on Cartesian thought. Florka (of the Ursinus faculty) concentrates on certain texts from the Descartes canon that scholars apparently have studied less than others. That shift of attention allows him to lay out his argument. The argument is about the role of reason in the method of finding truth. Florka finds that the role of reason, as Descartes saw it, is more complex than the received story about the origins of modern science would allow. In brief, he finds that Descartes advanced a God-centered vision of reason at work. Following a "correct method" of organized thinking, a pursuer of truth would not be dependent on logical or formal structures of thought. Instead, reason, rightly understood, would lead him to "reveal" the metaphysical truth. To quote Florka's summing up in his preface: "…[I]t is the structure of real metaphysical relations—as laid down by God—that reason follows. This discovered metaphysical structure is not merely the construction of correct ratiocinative reflection that proceeds according to its own, independent rules. The structure of metaphysics constitutes the order of reason. Reason expresses—and, in a sense, realizes—metaphysics." (x) (I read this book some months after the attack on America by Islamic extremists. That coincidence gave it significance in my mind quite unintended by the author. America, we discovered, confronts enemies who situate [their version of] God at the center of their vision of reality. Like many Americans, I have had a hard time imagining myself into the mind-set of these enemies. It occurred to me that if we understood Florka's Descartes better, we might understand these enemies better. Descartes saw mind and body both—the whole human potential—flowing from the Godly apex. That metaphysically charged picture of human life seems to offer comparisons [and perhaps contrasts] with the picture of human life that Islamists are making us aware of today. There may be an irony here. As Florka indicates, Western thinkers have tended to push Cartesian metaphysics to the periphery. If they had not done so, today our awareness of Descartes's metaphysical thinking might attune us better to a God-centered sense of reasoning. Perhaps in some way this would have equipped us better to understand these new enemies. –But this is a gratuitous speculation.)
Kennedy, Paul. "In the Shadow of the Great War." Rev. of The First World War, by John Keegan, and The Pity of War, by Niall Ferguson: The two books reviewed by Kennedy exemplified the renewed significance accorded World War I as the West at century's end continued to look for the roots of its central theme of cultural crisis. Kennedy cataloged the many consequences of WWI, including "a cultural crisis in the arts, in ideas, religion, literature, and life styles." (36) He characterized its significance as "central to an understanding of the twentieth century." (36) In Keegan's work Kennedy commended mainly his account of the killing fields; he praised less Keegan's handling of the economic and social dimensions of the war and its aftermath. He found that the iconoclastic Ferguson did not prove his argument that had Britain not entered the war there would have been no World War II. I emphasize the central significance of WWI in my essay review of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.
Remarque, Erich Maria (1898-1970). ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: Remarque says in the preface that his book is neither an accusation, a confession, nor an adventure story. It tries "simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war." The story of German trench soldiers complemented my reading of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It supported my theme that World War I broke European culture. It was the Big Bang that created the cultural crisis that the next generations in the 20th century had to live through. Im Westen Nichts Neues originally appeared in German in 1928. This English translation first came out from Little, Brown in 1929.
Remarque, Erich Maria (1898-1970). THE ROAD BACK: Remarque picked up the story of his German soldiers after the end of World War I (having shown them in battle in All Quiet On The Western Front) and recounted nothing redeeming in the lives they tried to patch up at home. These veterans who gave all finally were attacked by some Nazi-like thugs, who saw them as the enemy--defeat compounded. One of the veterans returned later to the battlefield. He stood before the dark crosses of the fallen and suddenly understood all. "Before these crosses the whole fabric of grand abstractions and fine phrases comes crashing down." Then he shot himself. (331) Remarque's raw tales established the theme that the men who shot one another on the Front were generational brothers sucked into the horror by the abstractions of nationalism. "A generation annihilated! A generation of hope, of faith, of will, strength, abililty, so hypnotized that they have shot down one another, though over the whole world they all had the same purpose!" (215) Der Weg Zuruck first appeared in German in 1931. I emphasize the central significance of WWI in my essay review of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.
Schorske, Carl E. THINKING WITH HISTORY: EXPLORATIONS IN THE PASSAGE TO MODERNISM: The historian of fin-de-siecle Vienna offered in this set of essays an aid to thinking about the passage from the nineteenth century's culture to our own. His particular aid is history itself. That is, the essays are not about history. Rather, they employ "the materials of the past and the configurations in which we organize and comprehend them to orient ourselves in the living present." (3) Schorske writes with an elegant clarity from a mastery of the materials of nineteenth century Europe. The dualities and antinomies that command the structure of his essays left strong tracks in my mind. I will henceforth think of Freud's development, for example, as a journey from London to Paris to Rome to Egypt--because that is the way Schorske explained Freud's arrival late in life at his interpretation of Moses (Moses and Monotheism). Schorske displays an enviable agility with issues from architecture, music, urban design, politics, and the web of culture resulting from their interactions. His sketch of Gustav Mahler's complex development as the "wanderer" (we called them "outsiders" in the 1950s) was memorable: Mahler dominated the establishment while never in his mind entering it unqualifiedly. Most of the essays bore on my interest in the state of European culture as it was about the break up in World War I. Those on the interiorities of the intellectual and artistic leaders of that time and place were valuable additions to my understanding of the modern self or subject. I noted that the anti-Semitism that consumed Europe after World War I was already tragically rising in the erstwhile liberal climate of Vienna in the 1880s. That is, the fault lines of 20th century crisis, both personal and cultural, show clearly in the pre-WWI culture explicated so clearly and elegantly by Schorske.
Wallace, David Foster. INFINITE JEST: A Novel. Boston: Little Brown, 1996. Sometimes you just have to say no. So, this is "no" to 1,079 pages of Wallace's novel. I know Wallace represents the X-generation flowering of postmodern expression. This book has the heft--and the generational significance--that Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow had for his generation. Disclosure: I had a hell of a time finishing Pynchon's book years ago, and I don't remember it as a fun thing to do. Like GR, IJ weighs in like a monumental artifact of our nation's change of consciousness. It is so big and barely readable because its author was so thoroughly ravished by the reality that surprised him. If I had more life to live, maybe I would give Infinite Jest another chance. Right now, I'm settling for an essay or two by Wallace. I did get to page 84. What critics said about his insight into the poetry and philosophy of tennis was right, though it is a tad precious: "the competing body on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance." (84) The real game is "life's endless war against the self you cannot live without." Tennis takes on moral significance like big game hunting in Hemingway. Maybe young Wallace is not so lost in postmodern space after all.
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