{"product_id":"in-1926-living-at-the-edge-of-time-living-on-the-edge-of-time-9780674000551","title":"In 1926 Living at the Edge of Time Living on the Edge of Time","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGumbrecht evokes the year 1926 through explorations of such things as bars, boxing, movie palaces, hunger artists, airplanes, hair gel, bullfighting, film stardom, and dance crazes. From the vantage points of Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York, the reader is immersed in the activities, entertainments, and thought patterns of the citizens of 1926.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e[Gumbrecht] approaches the culture of the early twentieth century in an...ingenious and intriguing way in his \u003ci\u003eIn 1926\u003c\/i\u003e. What interests him, he says, is to what extent a year, a simple, purely conventional unit of time, can be constituted as an object of historical inquiry--not, however, with the purpose of isolating that year's essence or significance, but rather simply by way of getting some inkling of what it was like to be alive at the time. -- Edwin Frank * Boston Review *\u003cbr\u003eWritten almost entirely in the present tense, and zooming cinematically from a lone woman swimming the English Channel to roof gardens in Manhattan, the book attempts to re-create the feeling of 'being-in-1926,' to borrow the author's Heideggerian formulation. The entries are a droll pastiche of literary criticism, sociological statistics, and historical anecdotes. -- Adam Shatz * Lingua Franca *\u003cbr\u003eActing as the literary equivalent of Web surfing, the innovative structure [of this book] perfectly reflects the increasingly kinetic and fragmented culture of the time, when the inherited certainties of faith and tradition were giving way to volatile and mass enthusiasms in sports and cinema and to unsettling experiments in technology, music, and gender roles. In both content and form, this work is an important advance in cultural scholarship. -- Bryce Christensen * Choice *\u003cbr\u003eIn the year 1926, no presidents were elected or assassinated, no wars began or ended, and no titans strode across the world stage. But beneath the year's deceptive quiet, a turbulent new world was aborning, its gestation signaled by the tortured fiction of Kafka, the ontological ponderings of Heidegger, the labyrinthine wanderings of Borges, the comedic paths of Chaplin, the daring theorizing of Freud, and he fevered rhetoric of Hitler. Gumbrecht invites us to experience this year in a book that discards the conventions of linear narrative in favor of a series of 51 essays interconnected by numerous cross-references. Acting as the literary equivalent of Web surfing, the innovative structure perfectly reflects the increasingly kinetic and fragmented culture of the time, when the inherited certainties of faith and tradition were giving way to volatile mass enthusiasms in sports and cinema and to unsettling experiments in technology, music, and gender roles. In both content and form, this work is an important advance in cultural scholarship. -- Bryce Christensen * Booklist *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUser's Manual     Arrays   Airplanes   Americans in Paris   Assembly Lines   Automobiles    Bars   Boxing   Bullfighting   Cremation   Dancing   Elevators   Employees   Endurance   Engineers   Gomina    Gramophones   Hunger Artists   Jazz   League of Nations   Mountaineering   Movie Palaces   Mummies   Murder   Ocean Liners   Polarities   Railroads    Reporters     Revues    Roof Gardens    Six-Day    Races    Stars    Strikes    Telephones     Timepieces    Wireless Communication     Codes    Action vs. Impotence    Authenticity vs. Artificiality    Center vs. Periphery    Immanence vs. Transcendence   Individuality vs. Collectivity   Male vs. Female   Present vs. Past   Silence vs. Noise   Sobriety vs. Exuberance    Uncertainty vs. Reality     Codes Collapsed   Action = Impotence (Tragedy)   Authenticity = Artificiality (Life)   Center = Periphery (Infinitude)   Immanence = Transcendence(Death)    Individuality = Collectivity (Leader)   Male = Female (Gender Trouble)    Present = Past (Eternity)     Frames   After Learning from History   Being-in-the-Worlds of 1926: Martin Heidegger, Hans Friedrich Blunck, Carl Van Vechten    Notes   Acknowledgments   Index","brand":"Harvard University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53733862900055,"sku":"9780674000551","price":37.36,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/in-1926-living-at-the-edge-of-time-living-on-the-edge-of-time-9780674000551","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}