The Wreck of Western Culture
March 12th, 2009 | by Matthew Smith |I mentioned a month or two back that I’ve been reading The Wreck of Western Culture by John Carroll. I didn’t end up finishing this book (well I skimmed the last bit) because I lost what the point of it was and then it became very overdue from the library. My recollection of it is that it is an interpretation of a kind of narrative of Humanism over the past half a century. The threads of this narrative are drawn from important cultural works, mainly paintings and writing which describe the rise and fall of the humanist ideal.
The artists mentioned and the works Carroll draws upon are all listed at the back of the book: Donatello, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Holbein, Luther, Calvin, Raphael, Caravaggio, Poussin, Valázquez, Rembrandt, Bach, Descartes, Mozart, Kant, Marx, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Henry James and John Ford.
If nothing else, I’ve had a “who’s who” style education of modern history. I think this book would have made more sense if I’d already studied this period and was aware of the conventional readings. The Wreck of Western Culture strikes me as an alternative reading that works against the traditional view of the humanist / modern / structuralist era.