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CHOICE Review

De Bolla presents a highly original thesis regarding the creation of modern subjectivity. Using the methodology and vocabulary of deconstructionism, De Bolla views the self as a construct of certain "legislating discourses" and makes the argument that the modern self arose within discourses generating the notion of "excess" during the Seven Years' War, 1756-1763. He focuses attention on two regions of discourse not joined before, tracts on the national debt published in England during this period and coincident works on the sublime; and he ingeniously shows the mutual reinforcement of economic and aesthetic categories in legislating modern subjectivity. At the same time, he points to the unresolved dialectic that occurs when the "excess" thus generated is no longer subject to the limits being imposed simultaneously by these discourses, and points to this "opening" as the space within which the modern subject becomes situated. De Bolla's approach is interdisciplinary; the work will be of interest to aestheticians, semioticists, literary theorists, art historians, and historians of ideas. However, the density of language and heavy reliance on a deconstructionist framework make the book less accessible to the general academic reader than as intended. As a result, it is important for graduate students and less appropriate for more general undergraduate collections. -M. Feder-Marcus, SUNY College at Old Westbury