The Discourse of Modernism

Timothy J. Reiss (Author)

9781501728099

Paperback / softback, published 15 August 2018

416 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.907 kg

This is a difficult book which makes an interesting contribution to the history of ideas. It should be valued by those whose special field is seventeenth- or eighteenth- century literature and rhetoric, as well as by scholars of epistemology of aesthetic theory. Timothy J. Reiss is an erudite and provocative scholar.

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.