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A lyrical, provocative journey into the art, memory, and meaning of experience.
What does it mean to have an experience? When did we begin to believe we could “have" one at all? In Experience: A History, Lawrence Kramer traces the cultural birth of experience as a singular, life-defining event. Moving lyrically between criticism and memoir, he guides readers from Petrarch and Nietzsche to Virginia Woolf and Anne Carson; from Haydn’s luminous Creation to Billie Holiday's searing “Strange Fruit.” Along the way we encounter Niagara Falls and the Galápagos, Parisian department stores and Manhattan nightclubs, and luminaries such as Franz Schubert, Henry and William James, and Benjamin Britten.
As early as the fourteenth century and accelerating after the eighteenth, records of concentrated, unforgettable moments begin to proliferate—until the possibility of having an experience becomes a demand for one. Experience turns into something to seek, curate, even consume. Yet its power lies in its particulars: the convergence of history, art, memory, and self. At once personal and tender, challenging and vulnerable, Experience fuses philosophical argument with intimate recollection. The result is both a sweeping intellectual history and a deeply human reckoning with the experiences that shape and unsettle modern life.
"This historical study of aesthetic notions about musical style and human experience turns into a remarkable literary confrontation with the author's early personal memories. The gripping brilliance of the book’s concluding sections is the jewel in the crown of this project—a real literary achievement."—Peter Franklin, Professor of Music, University of Oxford
"Refreshingly direct and conversational, Experience: A History treats intellectual work as something enjoyable, meaningful, and even practical without sacrificing the rigor of the task at hand. With the essayistic mode of expression now at risk as bite-sized utterance and AI summary seem poised to overtake the pleasures of a woven text, this book offers its own experience of thought-through-writing and makes an implicit argument for slowness in its close reading of human experience through literary, philosophical, musical, and personal histories."—Heidi Hart, coauthor of Piano Decompositions: The Ecology of Destroyed and Decaying Instruments
“Drawing a bead on experience itself, this highly original and utterly unique work aims to understand the historical conditions that birthed the modern experience—and why experience as such may be slipping toward death. Reading with a mixture of intrigue and sadness, I wandered and walked along the banks of this book and caught a glance of myself when I peered over its ledge.”—Jake Johnson, author of Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America