I am still trying to pin down what to think of Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. It was a very readable book, particularly for one that was assembled from various scholarly publications. The political chapters stood out for me personally, but I can imagine the art and architecture chapters finding favor with other audiences. I also feel better for having read it--more culturally literate and well-rounded. There are a couple of problems, though. The first is that the work falls in an awkward grey region between survey and targeted study. It cannot be the former, since it leaves too many areas untouched. There is no real engagement with turn of the century Viennese philosophy (Ernst Mach) or economics (Bohm-Bawerk), for example. At the same time, chapters are a bit too varied to count as a focused investigation. They include everything from architecture to psychoanalysis to antisemitism. The second and more troubling problem is that, at times, Schorske goes completely off the rails. For instance, in writing on Klimt's Medicine, a painting the features the Greek goddess Hygeia holding a snake (as is traditional), he notes:

Hygeia is ambiguity par excellence; accordingly, she is associated with the snake, the most ambiguous of creatures...The snake, amphibious creature, phallic symbol with bisexual associations, is the great dissolver of boundaries: between land and sea, man and woman, life and death. This character accords well with the concern with androgyny and the homosexual reawakening of the fin de siècle: expressions of erotic liberation on the one hand and male fear of impotence on the other (242)

Is this a general claim about the significance of snakes tout court? If so, it hardly seems obvious. Is it supposed to reflect how Klimt's contemporaries would have seen it? This is more plausible, but would still require more historical support than he gives it. The reader doesn't even get a citation. Passages like this really hurt my reading experience.