Being Modern presents seventeen essays offering actor-oriented perspectives of what it meant to ‘be modern’ that highlight relationships between science and modernity in the early twentieth century. Being Modern's aim to initiate wider discussions about the role of science in studies of modernity across cultural studies, English literature, art history and the history of science is met through the wealth of papers and clear editorial direction. This book provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of the period broadly concerned with the culture of modernity.
Introducing these essays (which began as conference papers given at UCL in 2015), Robert Bud and Morag Shiach signal the relative infancy of scholarly consideration of ‘being modern’ in Britain whilst emphasizing that case studies debunk exceptionalism, situating the British experience in a wider Western context. Notably, as actors and institutional perspectives illuminate views of modernity, the volume encompasses practical applications of science, from technologies to architecture. Bud and Shiach emphasize the boundaries at play between science and art, pointing to the permeability of categories highlighted across the volume. Likewise, in tackling the broad church of ‘modernity’, Bud and Shiach note that ‘our understanding of flexibility of the term need not undermine our recognition of its potency’ (p. 7).
The diverse range of papers have been organized by the editors into four sections. Section One introduces ‘Science, modernity and culture’, with Section Two including papers on ‘Tensions over science’. Section Three focuses on ‘Mathematics and physics’ and Section Four on ‘Life, biology and organicist metaphor’ – these work particularly well as thematic sections with essays framed around contemporary views of physical and natural sciences, which continue to resonate. We therefore find Judi Loach's Chapter 10 work on Le Corbusier's 1920s influences in the former and Tim Benton's Chapter 17 on his ‘rejection of the machine’ and 1935 turn towards ‘nature’ in the latter. Even between these papers we see the contradiction of scientific distinction, as Benton demonstrates Le Corbusier's dual understanding of ‘Nature’ as reason and geometric order and ‘nature’ as wild and organic, whilst Loach's paper brings new light to Le Corbusier's influences beyond mathematics, reflecting on the circulation of psychological theories amongst his networks.
There is a refreshing range of methodological approaches to interrogating early twentieth-century modernity. For example, in Chapter 1, Mitchell G. Ash explores the plurality of modernism in Vienna around 1900 and Shiach's Chapter 3 on Woolf, Eliot and Richardson captures another moment of science and modernism in 1919. In Nina Engelhardt's Chapter 8 on mathematics as a model for literary modernism, her analysis compares Robert Musil's 1906 novel and 1913 essay with Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1920 We and later essay, providing a longer view of ‘being mathematical’. Consideration of diverse sites of interaction also adds analytical clout, from the milieu of London's literary figures contributing to The Athenaeum (Shiach, Chapter 3) to the exhibitions of belle époque Paris where Umberto Boccioni exhibited Development of a Bottle in Space in 1913 (Lewis Pyenson, Chapter 9). Beyond city spaces, wireless airwaves transmitted ideas nationwide – facilitating the public consumption of discourses on applied science, as explored by Robert Bud in Chapter 5. In Chapter 11, Jeff Hughes describes the BBC's interwar wireless service as a ‘fertile meeting-place for ideas from the worlds of scientific and humanistic culture’ (p. 248).
Essays vary in scope from those dealing with personal relationships with science, including literary modernists – T.S. Eliot (Kevin Brazil, Chapter 4), Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence (Craig Gordon, Chapter 15) and Alfred Döblin (Esther Leslie, Chapter 16) – to papers with a range of actors and publics. In Chapter 7, Charlotte Sleigh explores young science fans’ interactions with science as a cultural resource and in Chapter 13 Michael Guida highlights the popularity of Ludwig Koch's audiological research into birdsong. Ruth Oldenziel's Chapter 12, ‘Whose modernism, whose speed?’ provides an Edgertonian evaluation of the expansion and popular use of bicycles when the automobile was heralded as signifying modern mobility in advertising and aspirational rhetoric. In Chapter 14, Annabella Pollen illuminates the curious construction of evolutionary science by the Kibbo Kift Kindred in the 1920s. Citizenship is a theme that emerges across the papers concerned with dissemination of and participation in scientific discourse, complimenting current work on British interwar publics.
An inexplicit but appealing part of the book is how many chapters convey sensory engagement with the sciences, from Tim Boon's Chapter 2 on experimentation with soundtracks for film that reflected industrial modernity, to Guida's exploration of the popular consumption of Koch's birdsong on the BBC, to Shiach's study of Dorothy Richardson's use of a scientific lecture on light waves in Part Four of Pilgrimage. Elsewhere, Loach highlights the influence of theories of sensual perception upon Le Corbusier and Hughes contributes to the concept of ‘new aurality’ that came with mass consumption of wireless broadcasting, demonstrating how this culture fed into the practice of nuclear physics.
Of particular interest to students of the field is a historiographic study on the nascent years of the history of science by Frank James in Chapter 6. James highlights the role of scientists and historians in the field's infancy who looked to the epistemology of seventeenth-century science to frame science as an entity distinct from culture and society (and their contemporary opposition), paving the way for post-war determinations of difference between science and the arts. The ‘two-cultures’ debate (coined at C.P. Snow's 1959 Cambridge lecture) is further contextualized in the epilogue, ‘Science after modernity’, by James and Bud. This provides a bridge to the post-war period, questioning the rigidity of the transition into ‘postmodernity’.
This wide-ranging volume reflects the shift towards interdisciplinary scholarship essential to testing intellectual boundaries and definitions embedded in the history and current practice of science. Being Modern invites further explorations of science and culture in the early twentieth century, as Bud and James suggest – neither science nor culture can be rendered black boxes: ‘diverse visions of modernity were creatively interwoven’ in the still-recent past (p. 392).
