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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," negritude, 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, Cesaire, 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.
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," negritude, 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, Cesaire, 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.
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.
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 in thought that occurred. He describes how, while teaching and public debate continued to be based in the language arts, scientific and artistic areas came to depend on mathematical disciplines, including music, for new means and methods of discovery, and as a basis for wider sociocultural renewal.
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 in thought that occurred. He describes how, while teaching and public debate continued to be based in the language arts, scientific and artistic areas came to depend on mathematical disciplines, including music, for new means and methods of discovery, and as a basis for wider sociocultural renewal.
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