New APPS

I was saddened to learn this past weekend of the death on March 3 of Timothy J. Reiss, emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU.  Tim was the outside reader for my dissertation and was incredibly generous in supporting the project.  I had encountered his work first as an undergraduate, when I somewhat randomly pulled a copy of his Discourse of Modernism off the shelf of a used bookstore.  I was working on a thesis about Heidegger’s metaphors for thought; Discourse seemed interesting and like the kind of thing I’d like. I read it and didn’t understand it all that well, though my underlining and marginal notes suggest I worked pretty hard at it. A few years later, I was researching my dissertation, which was half on Hobbes, relied heavily on minor 17c primary texts and made a claim about what “modern” political philosophy consisted in.  I had already been thoroughly influenced by David Lachterman’s Ethics of Geometry and had this idea that something in Discourse of Modernism might be helpful. So I picked it up again.  That time I did understand it, and remember evenings sitting by the gas fire in an underheated Oxford flat working my way through it.

At some point during this process, during which I also picked up The Meaning of Literature and Knowledge, Voyage and Discovery in Early Modern Europe, I cold emailed him, describing my project and asking if he’d be willing to be my outside reader.  A couple of days later, I got a brief but polite reply to the effect that he was already on too many projects.  A few days after that, I got another email – this time to say that he’d been looking over my proposal again, that it sounded very interesting, and he’d very much like to be one of my readers.  After I finished my dissertation, he generously cited it in one of his later books.  He also offered both positive feedback and some needed encouragement for my heterodox treatment of Hobbes’s mathematics, which was my first post-dissertation work on Hobbes.

Tim’s erudition was astonishing – he published a long list of books, much longer than I’ve recounted here.  All of them were meticulously documented and carefully argued across wide ranging primary and secondary sources.  He was a “renaissance scholar” in that he worked on texts of the European Renaissance, but the scope of his reading and thought was truly global, including to contemporary work.  In the late renaissance and early modern period in Europe, he moved seamlessly between literature and philosophy (both in Europe and outside it), locating them both in their shared cultural moment and refusing to abide by our much later disciplinary boundaries.  When I teach Modern, I’m still informed by his treatment of Descartes and the ways he shows both that Descartes was deeply attuned to his own cultural moment, and that Descartes ultimately could be read as working toward a community of thinkers, rather than the isolated ego best known for a “retreat from the polis to the poêle,” as Tim cited Lachterman as having once quipped.

NYU has a memorial notice here, and you should really read the appreciations gathered at the bottom – they speak to his scholarly contributions, his personal generosity, and his immense influence in growing and transforming the NYU comp lit department.