Stephen Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought, Princeton UP, Paper | 2006 | $22.95 / £14.95 | ISBN: 0-691-12768-9Cloth | 2004 | $29.95 / £18.95 | ISBN: 0-691-11523-0, 448 p.
This pioneering work is the first to trace how our understanding ofthe causes of human behavior has changed radically over the course ofEuropean and American cultural history since 1830. Focusing on the actof murder, as documented vividly by more than a hundred novelsincluding Crime and Punishment, An American Tragedy, The Trial, and Lolita, Stephen Kern devotes each chapter of A Cultural History of Causalityto examining a specific causal factor or motive for murder--ancestry,childhood, language, sexuality, emotion, mind, society, and ideology.In addition to drawing on particular novels, each chapter considers thesciences (genetics, endocrinology, physiology, neuroscience) andsystems of thought (psychoanalysis, linguistics, sociology, forensicpsychiatry, and existential philosophy) most germane to each causalfactor or motive.
Kern identifies five shifts in thinking aboutcausality, shifts toward increasing specificity, multiplicity,complexity, probability, and uncertainty. He argues that the moreresearchers learned about the causes of human behavior, the more theyrealized how much more there was to know and how little they knew aboutwhat they thought they knew. The book closes by considering therevolutionary impact of quantum theory, which, though it influencednovelists only marginally, shattered the model of causal understandingthat had dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century.
Othershave addressed changing ideas about causality in specific areas, but noone has tackled a broad cultural history of this concept as doesStephen Kern in this engagingly written and lucidly argued book.
Stephen Kern is Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. He is the author of The Culture of Time and Space, The Culture of Love, and Eyes of Love.
"[An]ambitious book. . . . [Kern's] focus on murder keeps things pleasantlylurid, and his erudition and passion shine through on every page."--Publishers Weekly
"Thoughtful and carefully done, the fruit of considerable research."--Richard A. Posner, Science
"Kernhas mastered the novels, the critical literature, and the works byphilosophers and sociologists bearing on his thesis. . . . [R]eadersfamiliar with the novels will see them in a new light."--Jonathan Beard, Scientific American
"Asa history of science and ideas, Kern's study succeeds brilliantly.Gathering the disparate knowledge systems of nearly two centuries intodiscrete categories, Kern produces a taxonomy of causality that iscogent and convincing. . . . From Enlightenment positivism to quantumdiscontinuity; from religion to existentialism, and phrenology tocybernetics; from Freud to Nietzsche to Foucault, and from Darwin toDurkheim to Derrida: Kern ranges comfortably (and profitably) amongthem all. Specialists and novice alike will find much hereto learn andadmire."--Peter Okun, American Historical Review
"Murderstories, Kern argues, are a sort of cultural repository of thoughtsabout causality, of how things fit together. From the pseudo-scientificdeductions of Conan Doyle to the postmodern self-reflections of DonDeLillo, Philip Kerr and Robert Coover, detective stories demonstratehow we cope with the biggest contingency of all: consciouskilling."--Mark Kingwell, The Globe and Mail
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Ancestry 27
Chapter 2: Childhood 64
Chapter 3: Language 108
Chapter 4: Sexuality 147
Chapter 5: Emotion 189
Chapter 6: Mind 226
Chapter 7: Society 266
Chapter 8: Ideas 304
Conclusion 359
Notes 377
Bibliography 419
Index 425
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