Jerrold E. Seigel

"Elisabeth Sifton books."Includes index. Bibliography: p. 405-440.

Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-century art and culture, the common source to which many contemporary movements trace their roots. His career has often been celebrated for its contradictions and discontinuities, its disparate parts unified only by their assault on the traditions of art. Jerrold Seigel offers a wholly different view, revealing a web of interrelated themes that unify Duchamp's work and tie it to his life. At the book's center is a reinterpretation of the famous "readymades," of which the urinal Fountain and the defaced Mona Lisa were the most shocking. The result gives the artist's career the unity of a colorful and intricate puzzle. Behind that puzzle were the great modernist themes of isolation, perpetuated desire, and the imagined dissolution of the self. These themes entered Duchamp's mind both from his social and cultural environment and from the shaping experience of his family; around them were woven the patterns of working and loving that Seigel uncovers in his life. Duchamp emerges not just as a coherent, understandable personality, but as an exemplary one, his very eccentricities reflecting essential dimensions of modern experience.

"To be modern may mean many different things, but for nineteenth-century Europeans 'modernity' suggested a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values all played key roles. Jerrold Seigel's panoramic new history offers a magisterial and highly original account of the ties between modernity and bourgeois life, arguing that they can be best understood not in terms of the rise and fall of social classes, but as features of a common participation in expanding and thickening 'networks of means' that linked together distant energies and resources across economic, political and cultural life. Exploring the different configurations of these networks in England, France and Germany, he shows how their patterns gave rise to distinctive forms of modernity in each country and shaped the rhythm and nature of change across spheres as diverse as politics, money and finance, gender relations, morality, and literary, artistic and musical life"--

Trying to grasp the history of contemporary thought brings special opportunities and problems, providing a chance to participate in current intellectual life, but posing especially sharply the question about whether and how scholarship can distinguish itself from partisanship. The essays in this collection, taken from the Journal of History of Ideas, take sides on the issues they address, but they all proceed on the assumption that the past, even the recent past, must be understood and learned from before it can be turned to present uses. This twelfth volume in the Library of the History of Ideas includes discussions of a wide range of thinkers, from Nietzsche, Durkheim and Freud to Hans-Georg Gadamer and Werner Blumenberg, but it is unified by an attention to specific themes, notably individuals and their relations to society; the encounter between liberalism and movements of social reform; the evolution of psychology; and the relation between reason and metaphor in the interpretation of culture.