The unfinished Enlightenment : description in the age of the encyclopedia / Joanna Stalnaker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stalnaker, Joanna.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French literature--18th century--History and criticism.

French literature.

Description (Rhetoric)--History--18th century.

Description (Rhetoric).

Encyclopedias and dictionaries, French--History and criticism.

Encyclopedias and dictionaries, French.

Natural history--France--History--18th century.

Natural history.

Enlightenment--France.

Enlightenment.

France--Intellectual life--18th century.

France.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca [N.Y.] : Cornell University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In The Unfinished Enlightenment, Joanna Stalnaker offers a fresh look at the French Enlightenment by focusing on the era's vast, collective attempt to compile an ongoing and provisional description of the world. Through a series of readings of natural histories, encyclopedias, scientific poetry, and urban topographies, the book uncovers the deep epistemological and literary tensions that made description a central preoccupation for authors such as Buffon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, Delille, and Mercier. Stalnaker argues that Enlightenment description was the site of competing truth claims that would eventually resolve themselves in the modern polarity between literature and science. By the mid-nineteenth century, the now habitual association between description and the novel was already firmly anchored in French culture, but just a century earlier, in the diverse network of articles on description in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and in the works derived from it, there was not a single mention of the novel. Instead, we find articles on description in natural history, geometry, belles-lettres, and poetry. Stalnaker builds on the premise that the tendency to view description as the inevitable (and subservient) partner of narration-rather than as a universal tool for making sense of knowledge in all fields-has obscured the central place of description in Enlightenment discourse. As a result, we have neglected some of the most original and experimental works of the eighteenth century.

Contents:

Buffon and Daubenton's two horses

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's strawberry plant

Diderot's word machine

Delille's little encyclopedia

Mercier's unframed Paris

Description in revolution

Conclusion : virtual encyclopedias.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-231) and index.

ISBN:

0-8014-6234-7

OCLC:

732957108