Word: 20th
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...Dean of the Faculty and Geisinger Professor of History William C. Kirby makes his return to the lecture hall with this core class on 20th-century China. Impressive as a guest lecturer in a classes over the past few years of his deanship, students will likely flock to see what Kirby has to offer in A-74 for many reasons. According to the course guide, the class aims to answer in three parts the question of what social, economic, and political problems remain in China today...
...theory was one of history's most imaginative and dramatic revisions of our concepts about the universe. It was, said Paul Dirac, the Nobel laureate pioneer of quantum mechanics, "probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made." Max Born, another giant of 20th century physics, called it "the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition and mathematical skill...
...also the subject of many of the portraits he made during their relationship. But what secures Maar's place in the history of 20th century art is the meticulous attention she paid to the execution of one of its greatest works. Throughout May and June of 1937, exploiting her intimate access to Picasso, Maar photographed the various stages in Guernica's evolution, detailing the revisions, amendments and rearrangement of the painting. In the process she made the first and most significant documentary record of the process of artistic creation. That collection of images is one of the highlights...
...narrative, bringing it up to code with the realities of our multicultural, transcontinental, hyphenated identities and our globalized, displaced, deracinated lives. It's a literature of multiplicity and diversity, not one of unanimity, and it makes the idea of a unifying voice of a generation seem rather quaint and 20th century. I may love and empathize with the transplanted Bengalis who populate Lahiri's fiction, or Shteyngart's semi-Americanized Russians, or Foer's uprooted Old Worlders or Smith's international extended families. But I would never be so foolish as to mistake any of them for myself...
...fact is, a generation of readers will probably never again come together around a single book the way they did in the 20th century, when Holden Caulfield went looking for the ducks in Central Park. Those birds have flown. It's hard not to miss that old sense of unanimity. Even if it was a fiction, it was a pleasant, comforting...