Kirjahaku

Recent explanations of changes in early modern European thought speak much of a move from orality and emphasis on language to print culture and a 'spatial' way of thinking. Timothy J. Reiss offers a more complex explanation for the massive changes that occurred. He describes how by the late fifteenth century the language arts of the trivium had come to seem useful only for communication, teaching and public debate, and how humanists turned to the mathematical arts of the quadrivium - including music - to enable new means and methods of discovery. Reiss goes on to argue that the new 'mathematical' ideal formed the basis of wide sociocultural renewal; he analyses Northern vernacular grammars, examines the work of French and Italian mathematicians, musicians and philosophers including Descartes, and censures such modern commonplaces as the supposed impact of print and 'spatial' thinking. He ends by exploring the broad impact of this 'mathematisation' of the Western imagination.

This book investigates "cultural instruments," meaning normative forms of analysis and practice that are central to Western culture and in the course of their history came to be ways of understanding and controlling different cultures. Examples are: notions of autonomy and the division of intellectual, social, cultural, and aesthetic practices; ideas of otherness (taking forms like Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, négritude, and afrocentrism); cultural and aesthetic forms such as tragedy, mimesis, self, mind/body; certain modes of history and memory; and particular forms of discourse such as science, philosophy, and literature. The book explores the interlocking histories of cultural instruments from antiquity to the early Enlightenment and their instrumental use and reworking by different cultures, moving from Europe to Africa and the Americas, especially the Caribbean. In the process, the author gives close readings of works by a wide range of authors: Balboa, Balbuena, Brathwaite, Calvino, Carpentier, Cervantes, Césaire, Depestre, Descartes, Eltit, Fanon, Freud, Gombrowicz, Harris, Kane, Kipling, Marshall, Walcott. Many other authors' works become part of the book's general argument about how cultures are made, how they figure both themselves and other cultures, and how they mutually interact (when they do) through productions of what the author calls the "fictive imagination"—what in the West is called "art" but in different cultures may take different names and serve different purposes.

This book investigates "cultural instruments," meaning normative forms of analysis and practice that are central to Western culture and in the course of their history came to be ways of understanding and controlling different cultures. Examples are: notions of autonomy and the division of intellectual, social, cultural, and aesthetic practices; ideas of otherness (taking forms like Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, négritude, and afrocentrism); cultural and aesthetic forms such as tragedy, mimesis, self, mind/body; certain modes of history and memory; and particular forms of discourse such as science, philosophy, and literature. The book explores the interlocking histories of cultural instruments from antiquity to the early Enlightenment and their instrumental use and reworking by different cultures, moving from Europe to Africa and the Americas, especially the Caribbean. In the process, the author gives close readings of works by a wide range of authors: Balboa, Balbuena, Brathwaite, Calvino, Carpentier, Cervantes, Césaire, Depestre, Descartes, Eltit, Fanon, Freud, Gombrowicz, Harris, Kane, Kipling, Marshall, Walcott. Many other authors' works become part of the book's general argument about how cultures are made, how they figure both themselves and other cultures, and how they mutually interact (when they do) through productions of what the author calls the "fictive imagination"—what in the West is called "art" but in different cultures may take different names and serve different purposes.

Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a person—to experience who-ness—in other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions. The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes.

Timothy J. Reiss perceives a new mode of discourse emerging in early seventeenth-century Europe; he believes that this form of thought, still our own, may itself soon be giving way. In The Discourse of Modernism, Reiss sets up a theoretical model to describe the process by which one dominant class of discourse is replaced by another. He seeks to demonstrate that each new mode does not constitute a radical break from the past but in fact develops directly from its predecessor.