All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Blurb

All That Is Solid Melts into Air is an academic text written by Marshall Berman between 1971 and 1981, and published in New York in 1982. The book examines social and economic modernization and its conflicting relationship with modernism. The title of the book is taken from the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Berman uses Goethe's Faust as a literary interpretation of modernization, through the processes of dreaming, loving and developing. In the second section he uses Marxist texts to analyze the self-destructive nature of modernization. In the third section French poetry is used as model of modernist writing, followed by a selection of Russian literature in the fourth section. The book concludes with some notes on modernism in New York during the 1960s and 1970s.