Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism

In arguing that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism—that is, of the possibility of radical cultural change through the creation of new values—the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy.

Nietzsche takes up the problem of modernism by inventing Zarathustra, a self-styled cultural innovator who aspires to subvert the culture of modernity (the repressive culture of the "last man") by creating new values. By ...