Kafka and Mann’s challenge to the concepts of reason and cause.

This chapter explores the efforts of the Founders to harness the power of education to create a citizenry capable of self-government. It emphasizes that while the Founders built a Constitution premised upon a cautious view of human nature, they saw education in a more optimistic light. Specifically, they viewed its role as helping to create a body of citizens capable of forming and maintaining meaningful relationships. In fact, they saw this as an indispensible task. Additionally, the chapter recounts the efforts of individuals such as Benjamin Rush and Horace Mann to expand educational access The chapter concludes with a critical analysis of Reconstruction, highlighting the missed opportunities and faulty historiography that continue to deny many citizens an equal chance to obtain an education. Though intended as a “re-founding” of the nation, Reconstruction in practice failed to live up to the Founders’ vision. The early promise of the “Civil War Amendments” and similar legislation went largely unfulfilled due to an adverse Supreme Court ruling and lack of political will.

This chapter explores the presence of religious narratives and traditions in Modernist literature, arguing that it shapes both what authors write about and how they write. Drawing on texts by Trakl, Rilke, Brecht, Musil, Thomas Mann, Wolfenstein, Kafka and Sachs, the chapter explores the wide range of attitudes both towards established religion (Christianity and Judaism) and alternative forms of spirituality (occultism and spiritualism). For all their differences, Modernist authors focus on a set of recurring concerns: the tension between tradition and modernity; the relationship between self and God, and between self and other; the changing role of community; and existential experiences such as suffering, persecution and death. In times of war, social change and political upheaval, the relationship between literature and religion remains mutually productive. Modernist texts reflect the crisis of established religious traditions, but literature is also an active agent, a site where old and new attitudes towards spiritual matters can be explored.

The centrality of decadence to the development of modernism is clear in the work of the major modernist figures James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann. Joyce expatiates on decadent traits with such encyclopaedic abandon in the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses that they finally evince something absurd and mysterious in human nature, whereas in In Search of Lost Time Proust more tightly aligns decadent traits with the burden of personal character and societal malaise. Mann, in underscoring both medical and metaphysical aspects of decadence, links with Joyce and Proust at many points. These prominent modernists reflect awareness of two basic polarities that first emerged in the decadent era of the fin de siècle: on the one side, concern over disintegrative forces in the modern world and realization of the need to take spiritual and aesthetic shelter; and, on the other, a sense of the aesthetic imperative to harvest the gains which the opportunity of such a moment presented.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.