1910, the emancipation of dissonance

About this book

The year 1910 marks an astonishing, and largely unrecognized, juncture in Western history. As the spectacle of Halley's Comet pierces the skies of Europe, traditional harmonies fade away and dissonance dawns. In this brilliantly conceived work, Thomas Harrison defines 1910 through a perceptive interdisciplinary analysis of the creative works produced during or close to that year, most of them as unsettling as the comet itself: the atonal music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern; the distraught poetry of Trakl, Campana, and Rilke; the militant philosophy of Lukacs, Simmel, and Buber; the abstract or subjectivist paintings of Kandinsky, Schiele, and Kokoschka. All are matched by historical and existential turbulence: epidemics of suicide and madness and the plight of Italians and Jews in the empire of Austria-Hungary. Unlike previous cultural studies of the pre-World War I era, this book locates the most significant traits of the period in Middle rather than Western Europe and in expressionism rather than in more celebrated developments of the avant-garde. Expressionism's violent extremes, Harrison argues provocatively, were the explosions of a last, desperate attempt by the intelligentsia to defend some of the most venerable presuppositions of Western culture. Among these were the idea of human subjectivity as the measure of all things, the habit of thinking in terms of antitheses, and belief in the universality of the understanding. Ultimately, Harrison claims, this ideological desperation was not only a spiritual prelude to World War I but also a prophetic, unheeded critique.