How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity

Argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective.

What is special, distinct, modern about modernity? In How the World Became a Stage, William Egginton argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective and proposes replacing the vocabulary of subjectivity with the concepts of presence and theatricality. Following a Heideggerian injunctive to search for the roots of epochal change not in philosophies so much as in bas...