What the critics are saying about "Dualisms: The Agons of the Modern World".

This study compares the cross-rivalries of Erasmus and Luther, Voltaire and Rousseau, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, and Sartre and Camus.

Gerald Gillespie, Professor, Stanfordu writes:

As his extraordinary Renaissance Discovery of Time (1972) and The Changes of Cain (1991) among other books have demonstrated, the name Ricardo Quinones stands for breadth and depth, and now he excels himself in Dualisms: The Agon of the Modern Era. We need a four-dimensional model – the cultural body in all its extensions and evolving in time – to suggest what he accomplishes in this fresh intervention into the famous “conversation over the centuries” of a civilization still animated by the drama of its own multiple discourses. While reinventing the capacious “essay” as one of the highest genres in critical literature, Quinones has actually implemented, with respect to “our” heritage since the Re of theorists of semiotics who want us to consider literature tied into the whole cultural repertory and its dynamics over time. The reader feels the kind of serious joy that Thomas Mann excited with the great symposium on evolving dualisms in The Magic Mountain, and James Joyce with his symphonic treatment of dualisms in Finnegans Wake.

It is a signal mark of importance that we yearn to hear more about so many artists, thinkers, and yes, even politicians who (like Mann and Joyce) happen not to be in the spotlight as main protagonists in this brilliant surgical slice of light through our past, but could readily be invoked. Quinones is himself a master conversationalist; he brings out the natural excitement in the quite human story of key interlocutors who helped create our very mixed inheritance.

Additional endorsement:

"The author [RJQ] stresses the importance of the dialogical and shows convincingly how (1) these antagonistic pairs form the intellectual struggle of their epoch; (2) the brutal confrontation between the authors involved allowed each author to understand  more fully the nature of his thought and its ramifications; and (3) how the earlier dualisms remain alive and influence the nest pair. This is intellectual history, philosophy, theology, and literary criticism at its best." 

Additional endorsement:

"Dualisms: The Agon of the Modern Era" is the field of comparative literature as it should have been all along, and hopefully as it  could be in the future."