All That Is Solid Melts Into Air/No Place of Grace
Williams, Peter W.
Confronting modernity ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR THE EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY Marshall Herman Simon and Schuster, $17.50, 383 pp. NO PLACE OF GRACE ANTIMODERNISM AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF...
...Where Lears's thought tends to run deep, Berman aims for breadth, and to a surprising extent achieves it...
...Petersburg as image (or objective correlative), through Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs...
...Does the failure of the anti-modernists lie in their inability to anticipate the dimly articulated social john garvey writes regularly for Commonweal...
...peter W. Williams is the author of Popular Religions in America (Prentice-Hall...
...is associate professor of comparative literature and director of Catholic studies at Kent State University...
...His first concern is with the literary and intellectual roots of modernism, which he traces with energy and ingenuity from Goethe's Faust through Marx, Baudelaire, a long string of Russian writers and their use of St...
...His subjects were members of the "Eastern Establishment elite" of the decades near the turn of the previous century, most of them relegated now to a perhaps deserved oblivion...
...His portrayal of Faust as the spiritual antecedent of Robert Moses is clever - but what happens to the rest of Goethe's intricacies...
...Where Lears's prose is at times redundant, convoluted, and jargonistic to the point of obscurity, Berman is astonishingly easy to read...
...On the whole, Lears finds these alternatives to the culture of modernity to be superficial manifestations of false consciousness...
...His central image is the modern city, the prime arena of modern life and the battleground between those who strive to preserve its diversity and vitality and others who would impose their own transformations upon it without regard to human cost...
...criticism of Professor Lears...
...His basic concern is with the idea of modernity as two-sided, as potential liberator of human capacities or, when realized in the megalomaniac schemes of such diverse figures as Stalin or Robert Moses, destructive and dehumanizing...
...However, they may leave their readers looking for solutions which have seemingly melted into air...
...dabblers in the exotic religious traditions of the Orient...
...and, most centrally, such resuscitators of the medieval heritage as the Gothic revivalist architect and eventual proto-fascist, Ralph Adams Cram...
...Both books, in short, bring together vast bodies of material and extract from them clever and telling analyses of the roots of the culture of modernity (and its foes...
...Among them were the advocates of the Arts and Crafts movement, which presented itself as a counterforce to mass production...
...Peter W. Williams Both of these works deal with intellectual and artistic responses to the rapid and violently disruptive social transformations of the past two centuries, and both do so in an unusually engaging and provocative manner...
...NO PLACE OF GRACE ANTIMODERNISM AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE, 1880-1920 T. J. Jackson Lears Pantheon Books, $18.50, 375 pp...
...He also tends to dismiss Liberal Protestantism as a whole as spiritually bankrupt, with little attention to its varieties and nuances even in the period with which he deals...
...Diana CULBERTSON...
...Each represents interdisciplinary scholarship on a grand scale, and both writers attempt to bring the matter and methods of the humanities and social sciences to bear on one another...
...Though a social scientist, he eschews the technical language which Lears over-uses and engages the reader in a uniformly smooth flow of ideas over vast cultural and historical landscapes...
...Berman's very clarity, however, raises some alarms...
...Most telling, however, is his lack of clar-ity about his own ideological suppositions, which, when teased out, seem to point in a vaguely Christian-existentialist-socialist direction...
...Another problem is a tendency towards ahistoricism exhibited in his lack of attention to the intellectual forerunners of his cast of characters...
...Each writer is staggeringly ambitious in defining his scope, and neither is reticent about making clear his responses to his subjects and subject-matter...
...His use of Baudelaire to illuminate nineteenth-century reactions to the reconstruction of Paris is equally engaging, but what of Les Fleurs du Mal...
...Both books are immensely provocative, even dazzling ventures into both cultural analysis and synthesis...
...They ironically helped not to repeal modernity but instead to shore up the underpinnings of bourgeois society, and served as an escape from a confrontation with social and economic reality into an anticipation of the banality of the "therapeutic worldview" which Lears (with, perhaps, Christopher Lasch) sees as one of the chief heresies of our own time...
...The earlier portions of the book are plagued by vast quantities of social-scientific jargon and an endless repeti-tiveness which could have been easily avoided through judicious editing...
...Both writers are accomplished analysts, but their prophetic stances leave the reader hanging...
...Lears is a thorough and provocative scholar, but his approach has its problems...
...His treatment of Henry Adams - one of the best I have read - shows that he can combine humanistic and scientific insight gracefully...
...His books include Saints for Confused Times (Thomas More...
...And, perhaps not surprisingly, the remarkably ambitious scope of each work raises some problems...
...His own commitment to the promises of modernity and his simultaneous recognitiion of its ambiguities remove his work from the realm of scholarship in the narrow sense and invite the broader readership which his work deserves...
...Victorian militarists who rejected the effete-ness of bourgeois society in favor of virile armed conflict...
...Is the real answer to the devastation of the Bronx an historical mural...
...This tendency towards oversimplification haunts the work, though it does not finally destroy Berman's immense powers of suggesting relationships among otherwise disparate aspects of modernity...
...Each finds inspiration in Karl Marx's characterization of the modern age as one in which "all that is solid melts into air": the epoch of intense modernization is one in which all that humanity has previously taken for granted is now subject not only to question but to immediate and dramatic challenge and possible overthrow...
...Professor Lears's theme is "anti-modernism": the rejection of the emergent world of urban anonymity and consumption-oriented capitalism in favor of any number of picturesque alternatives...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 20
