Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination

by Richard Kearney

Kearney addresses one of the key issues of modern European thought - how the crisis of values (ethics) relates to the crisis of imagination (poetics). Through a series of in-depth studies of thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, and others, Kearney explores the ways in which Continental philosophy, in both its modern and post-modern guises, has endeavoured to respond to these twin crises. Some studies focus on the dilemma of individual imagination faced with the fragmentation of inherited concepts of truth, God, or the good. Others concentrate on conflicts internal to the social imagination of our times - ideology versus utopia, myth versus critique, tradition versus reason, modernity versus post-modernity. Kearney also applies these philosophical disputes to a number of post-modern texts in literature and to painting and politics.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Richard Kearney is the Charles Seelig professor of philosophy at Boston College and has taught at many universities including University College Dublin, the Sorbonne, and the University of Nice.

He studied at Glenstal Abbey under the Benedictines until 1972, and was a 1st Class Honours graduate in Philosophy in the Bachelor of Arts graduate class of 1975 in UCD. He completed an M.A. at McGill University with Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, and a PhD with Paul Ricœur at University of Paris X: Nanterre. He corresponded with Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida and other French philosophers of the era. He was also active in the Irish, British, and French media as a host for various television and radio programs on literary and philosophical themes. His work focuses on the philosophy of the narrative imagination, hermeneutics and phenomenology.

Reviews

[Jad Wannous · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The following is Kundera's version of the "end of modernity" thesis: The irresistible flood of received ideas, programmed into computers, propagated by the mass media, threaten soon to become a force that will crush all original and individual thought and thus will smother the very essence of the European culture of the Modern Era. . . . however heroically the modern novel may struggle against the tide of kitsch, it ends up being overwhelmed by it. The word "Kitsch" describes the attitude of those who want to please the greatest number, at any cost. To please, one must confirm what everyone wants to hear, put oneself at the service of received ideas…. Given the imperative necessity to please and thereby to gain the attention of the greatest number, the aesthetic of the mass media is inevitably that of kitsch; and as the mass media come to embrace and to infiltrate more and more our life, kitsch becomes our everyday aesthetic and moral code."