Twentieth Century
Modernism, relativity, psychoanalysis, existentialism and the crises of the modern state.
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The century the programs are still deciding about. The nine lists agree on almost nothing after 1900, and the shelf is the union of their choices rather than a consensus: Freud, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, Eliot, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Arendt, Camus, Beauvoir, Orwell, Achebe, Morrison. What they share is that the certainties of the nineteenth century have gone and the books are about living without them.
Freud is the most assigned, because psychoanalysis changed how every later book thought about a person. Einstein is here because relativity changed what the universe was, and William James because pragmatism was the American answer to a world without foundations. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk opens the American twentieth century with the colour line, and Morrison’s Beloved closes it.
The literature is modernism: Woolf’s stream of consciousness, Joyce’s Dublin, Kafka’s trials, Eliot’s Waste Land, Beckett’s two tramps waiting. The philosophy ends in two places at once, Heidegger asking why there is something rather than nothing and Wittgenstein asking what can be said at all. Arendt, on totalitarianism, and Levi, on Auschwitz, are the century’s account of what it did. Most programs assign this shelf in the final semester, and Yale’s Directed Studies and Columbia’s Core assign more of it than the rest.
