Böcker av Stephen Kern

This book analyzes changes in ideas about and experiences of time and space from 1880 to 2020, relying on new technologies for causal explanations of changes in nine key elements of time and space.The major question at the heart of the volume is the significance of these changes. It bases its historical arguments on sharp contrasts of major historical phenomena--Judeo-Christianity and modern secularism, the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and 9/11, World War I and the Gulf Wars, gravity bombs and smart bombs, the pandemics of 1918 and 2020, assembly lines and flexible production, Farmer's Almanacs and computer-based weather predictions, cash transactions and 1-click ordering, decolonization and globalization, and the telephone and the Internet. The book makes three interpretive arguments: the Epistemological Argument covers how greater knowledge introduced uncertainties; the Ethical Argument tracks how new technologies prompted ethical judgments about their value; and the Re-hierarchizing Argument tracks the erosion of spatial hierarchies most notably in religion, society, and politics with the increasing progress of secularization, social mobility, and democratization.Time and Space in the Internet Age is a thought-provoking study for academics and general readers interested in the history of technology and science.

Kern interprets the sweeping change in loving that spanned a period when scientific discoveries reduced the terrors and dangers of sex, when new laws gave married women control over their earnings and their bodies, when bold novelists and artists shook off the prudishness and hypocrisy that so paralyzed the Victorians.

Kern writes about sweeping changes in technology and culture between 1880 and World War I that created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. To mark the book's 20th anniversary, Kern provides a new preface about the breakthrough in interpretive approach that has made this a seminal work in interdisciplinary studies.

This pioneering work is the first to trace how our understanding of the causes of human behavior has changed radically over the course of European and American cultural history since 1830. Focusing on the act of murder, as documented vividly by more than a hundred novels including Crime and Punishment, An American Tragedy, The Trial, and Lolita, Stephen Kern devotes each chapter of A Cultural History of Causality to examining a specific causal factor or motive for murder--ancestry, childhood, language, sexuality, emotion, mind, society, and ideology. In addition to drawing on particular novels, each chapter considers the sciences (genetics, endocrinology, physiology, neuroscience) and systems of thought (psychoanalysis, linguistics, sociology, forensic psychiatry, and existential philosophy) most germane to each causal factor or motive. Kern identifies five shifts in thinking about causality, shifts toward increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty. He argues that the more researchers learned about the causes of human behavior, the more they realized how much more there was to know and how little they knew about what they thought they knew. The book closes by considering the revolutionary impact of quantum theory, which, though it influenced novelists only marginally, shattered the model of causal understanding that had dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century. Others have addressed changing ideas about causality in specific areas, but no one has tackled a broad cultural history of this concept as does Stephen Kern in this engagingly written and lucidly argued book.