Changing concepts and experiences of time and space

Abstract

Interpreting the culture of any epoch is a formidable challenge. This essay interprets an exceptionally dynamic period that involved a spectrum of revolutionary cultural developments: most notably, Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of god; Einstein’s relativity theory; Mendelian genetics; Freudian psychoanalysis; atonal music; formal innovations in art such as cubism, abstraction, and collage; and formal innovations in the novel such as seemingly trivial subject matter, weak plots, stream of consciousness, unreliable narrators, and unresolved endings. A further challenge is to relate these high cultural developments with mass culture and material aspects of everyday life such as urbanism, imperialism, and World War I as well as developments in technology. I interpret the fin de Siècle through concepts and experiences of time and space that were reinterpreted in high culture, reworked by new communication and transportation technologies, and palpably manifest in everyday life (Kern 1983, 2011). That focus is at the foundation of human experience, which is necessarily grounded in these dimensions. While this transformation began in Europe and America, it had global implications.