All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
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All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is an academic text written by Marshall Berman between 1971 and 1981, and published in New York in 1982. The book examines social and economic modernization and its conflicting relationship with modernism.
Berman first uses Goethe's Faust as a literary interpretation of modernization, through the processes of dreaming, loving and developing. In the second section he uses Marxist texts to analyse the self-destructive nature of modernization. In the third section French poetry (especially Baudelaire) is used as model of modernist writing, followed by a selection of Russian literature (Pushkin, Biely, Gogol and Mandelstam) in the fourth section. The book concludes with some notes on modernism in New York during the 1960s and 1970s.
[edit] Other Information
The title is a line from Marx's Communist Manifesto.
It's popularly believed the book was purposely published in weak paperback binding so that it itself would "melt into air" after one reading. Possibly an academic myth, it's an ironic play on the central theme of the book, self-destruction as an innate characteristic.
[edit] See also
- Modernism
- Post-Modernism
- Anti-Modernism
