Alone with Others: An Essay on Tact in Five Modernist Encounters: by Dr Katja Haustein (2001)

Alone with Others looks at tact as an intuitive and creative mode of negotiating the appropriate distance between people. It shows how tact becomes significant in times of crisis, when established codes of sociability disintegrate, and new modes of communication have to be found. Drawing on a wide range of continental European literature and thought, it reconstructs tact’s conceptual history from the late eighteenth century to the present, to then focus on three periods of socio-political upheaval that have marked the twentieth century: the First World War, the Second World War and the student revolution of 1968. In a series of reading encounters with Marcel Proust, Helmuth Plessner, Theodor Adorno, François Truffaut, and Roland Barthes, Alone with Others reconsiders how we engage with other people, images, and texts, and gauges the significance of tact today.