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REVIEWS
| A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels and Systems of Thought. By Stephen Kern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 437 pp. $29.95).
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| With A Cultural History of Causality, Stephen Kern sets out to undertake what "no one else has tackled" (p.1) and provide a broad survey of changing ideas about the causes of human behavior from the Victorian era to modern times. Taking a three-pronged approach, he offers extensive descriptions of scientific developments in fields from evolutionary biology to quantum mechanics; detailed exegesis of the work of theorists from Nietzsche to Freud; and original readings of a wide selection of literary authors from Charles Dickens to Don DeLillo. Mulling these through, Kern argues that causal understanding became ever more highly elaborated yet simultaneously ever less certainly bounded over the course of the period from 1830 to the present. Encapsulating this paradox with the term "the specificity-uncertainty dialectic," Kern argues, in essence, that the hallmark of modernity has been the recognition that "the more we know, the more we realize how little we know" (p.13). |
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Seeking a smooth avenue into this vast territory, Kern decided to focus on a single, signal human act. He sought for study a dramatic action that, while unchanging in itself, could be shown to have undergone markedly varied causal explanations over time. Murder eventually suggested itself and, with murder novels as his touchstone, Kern works systematically to elucidate varied theories of causation from the sexual and emotional, to the linguistic and the social. |
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