Stephen kern biography

Abstract ideas such as time and space serve as crucial characters in Stephen Kern’s intellectual history The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. The collapse of space, the imposition of time, the destruction of form, and the rapidly increasing importance of the present due to technological advance drove intellectual thought, art, literature and even war in the first decades of the long twentieth century.

Kern’s work argues that essential human understandings regarding time, space, direction, and form were radically transformed by technological innovations such as the telegraph, telephone, railroad, automobile and cinema which undermined traditional hierarchies throughout society.

Kern divides his attentions between the abstracts of time and space but divides them between the past, present, the future, speed, form, distance and direction.

Moreover, Kern employs the work and ideas of intellectuals/writers/artists such as James Joyce, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Pa