Dissertation Information for Linus Benjamin Kafka NAME: - Linus Benjamin Kafka
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2007)
ADVISORS: - Thomas S. Hines
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Michael North - Theodore M. Porter - Janice L. Reiff
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Cosmopolitan connections: Henry Adams, his circle, and the global Gilded Age
Abstract: This dissertation analyzes cosmopolitanism through a study of the nineteenth-century thinker Henry Adams (1838-1918) and his relationship to American intellectual history. I reassess Adams within the context of a global Gilded Age. Adams's cosmopolitanism arose from his republican heritage and his trans-Atlantic travels. The crisis of the Civil War emphasized Adams's intellectual struggle. Ideas of unity and fragmentation that interested Adams became central to his developing philosophy. Accordingly, he embraced a cosmopolitan outlook that acknowledged multiple and competing forces, historically and globally. The obsession with unity and fragmentation fostered by the war also informed Adams's interest in art.
After 1870 Adams continued his artistic education by associating with H.H. Richardson, Augustus Saint Gaudens, and John La Farge. These artists shared Adams's desire to integrate a global consciousness into their work. Adams rejected both American exceptionalism and American imperialism. Empire, art, race, science, and gender became interrelated themes for Adams. As Adams traveled the South Seas in 1890-91, his dissatisfaction with American notions of race and empire became manifest. These travels emphasized the multiplicity of human experience.
Adams searched for unity in the past as a benchmark against modern fragmentation. His Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: A Study in Twelfth Century Unity (1904) forms the first half of a mature philosophy of cosmopolitanism. That work was complemented by his semi-autobiographical Education of Henry Adams: A Study in Twentieth Century Multiplicity (1907, 1918). The question of fragmentation versus unity became a philosophical struggle that necessitated the mediation of ideas in conflict.
I conclude that Adams's themes of detachment, disorientation, technological anxiety, cultural doubt, and social dislocation were received by a group of modernist thinkers after 1918. With his ambiguity, irony and detachment, Adams inspired a generation of intellectuals in America and elsewhere. Adams's cosmopolitan history, which denounced progressive teleology, the improvement of humanity, or the natural superiority of the United States, also questioned the very foundations of historical knowledge. Often ignored in American historiography, Adams's ideas reveal that Gilded Age cosmopolitanism provided an intellectual link between the republicanism of the Founding Fathers and the modernism of the post-World War I generation.
| |
MPACT Scores for Linus Benjamin Kafka A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-06 09:23:39
Advisors and Advisees Graph
generating graph, please reload |