Christopher D. Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought.

Johnson's dense, rich, often digressive book defies summary. It is centrally concerned with Mnemosyne as a work of cultural memory based not on metonymy, like modernist montages, but on metaphor.... He does much both to illuminate the Mnemosyne project and to place Warburg in the larger context of philosophical and critical thinking about metaphor.- Ritchie Robertson (Modern Language Review) Johnson's intellectual reach is far, his commentary theoretically complex and intuitive. It provides the reader, Warburg scholar and novice alike, with many different points of entry into the material, concisely summarizes and contextualizes Warburg's project with a wealth of references and background information, and weaves these elements into a presentation of great erudition and scope that is at once deeply informed, methodologically reflective, and winningly whimsical. Johnson's approach and relationship to his material are quintessentially Warburgian: he develops his method (and lines of investigation) out of his subject matter, traces its 'implication threads' into remote areas of knowledge, follows with fascination the transtemporal and transregional migration of ideas, and moves expertly and with remarkable insight and intellectual daring between numerous discourses. Contemplative, tenacious, and thoroughly comparative, Johnson's work shares its subject's disdain for disciplinary, conceptual, or chronological boundaries.- Doris McGonagill (German Studies Review)

• 1. Atlas Gazed: Mnemosyne—Its Origins, Motives, and Scope2. Ad oculos: Ways of Seeing, Reading, and Collecting3. Metaphor Lost and Found in Mnemosyne4. Translating the Symbol: Warburg and Cassirer5. Metaphorologies: Nietzsche, Blumenberg, and Hegel6. Exemplary Figures and Diagrammatic Thought7. Synderesis: The "Bruno-Reise"IllustrationsBibliographyIndex

Christopher D. Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought.

Johnson's dense, rich, often digressive book defies summary. It is centrally concerned with Mnemosyne as a work of cultural memory based not on metonymy, like modernist montages, but on metaphor.... He does much both to illuminate the Mnemosyne project and to place Warburg in the larger context of philosophical and critical thinking about metaphor.- Ritchie Robertson (Modern Language Review) Johnson's intellectual reach is far, his commentary theoretically complex and intuitive. It provides the reader, Warburg scholar and novice alike, with many different points of entry into the material, concisely summarizes and contextualizes Warburg's project with a wealth of references and background information, and weaves these elements into a presentation of great erudition and scope that is at once deeply informed, methodologically reflective, and winningly whimsical. Johnson's approach and relationship to his material are quintessentially Warburgian: he develops his method (and lines of investigation) out of his subject matter, traces its 'implication threads' into remote areas of knowledge, follows with fascination the transtemporal and transregional migration of ideas, and moves expertly and with remarkable insight and intellectual daring between numerous discourses. Contemplative, tenacious, and thoroughly comparative, Johnson's work shares its subject's disdain for disciplinary, conceptual, or chronological boundaries.- Doris McGonagill (German Studies Review)

• 1. Atlas Gazed: Mnemosyne—Its Origins, Motives, and Scope2. Ad oculos: Ways of Seeing, Reading, and Collecting3. Metaphor Lost and Found in Mnemosyne4. Translating the Symbol: Warburg and Cassirer5. Metaphorologies: Nietzsche, Blumenberg, and Hegel6. Exemplary Figures and Diagrammatic Thought7. Synderesis: The "Bruno-Reise"IllustrationsBibliographyIndex

Christopher D. Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought.

Johnson's dense, rich, often digressive book defies summary. It is centrally concerned with Mnemosyne as a work of cultural memory based not on metonymy, like modernist montages, but on metaphor.... He does much both to illuminate the Mnemosyne project and to place Warburg in the larger context of philosophical and critical thinking about metaphor.- Ritchie Robertson (Modern Language Review) Johnson's intellectual reach is far, his commentary theoretically complex and intuitive. It provides the reader, Warburg scholar and novice alike, with many different points of entry into the material, concisely summarizes and contextualizes Warburg's project with a wealth of references and background information, and weaves these elements into a presentation of great erudition and scope that is at once deeply informed, methodologically reflective, and winningly whimsical. Johnson's approach and relationship to his material are quintessentially Warburgian: he develops his method (and lines of investigation) out of his subject matter, traces its 'implication threads' into remote areas of knowledge, follows with fascination the transtemporal and transregional migration of ideas, and moves expertly and with remarkable insight and intellectual daring between numerous discourses. Contemplative, tenacious, and thoroughly comparative, Johnson's work shares its subject's disdain for disciplinary, conceptual, or chronological boundaries.- Doris McGonagill (German Studies Review)

• 1. Atlas Gazed: Mnemosyne—Its Origins, Motives, and Scope2. Ad oculos: Ways of Seeing, Reading, and Collecting3. Metaphor Lost and Found in Mnemosyne4. Translating the Symbol: Warburg and Cassirer5. Metaphorologies: Nietzsche, Blumenberg, and Hegel6. Exemplary Figures and Diagrammatic Thought7. Synderesis: The "Bruno-Reise"IllustrationsBibliographyIndex