The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment

The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment PDF Author: John C. O'Neal
Publisher: University of Delaware
ISBN: 1611490251
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
In The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment, John C. O'Neal draws largely on the etymological meaning of the word confusion as the action of mixing or blending in order to trace the development of this project which, he claims, aimed to reject dogmatic thinking in all of its forms and recognized the need to embrace complexity. Eighteenth-century thinkers used the notion of confusion in a progressive way to reorganize social classes, literary forms, metaphysical substances, scientific methods, and cultural categories such as taste and gender. In this new work, O'Neal explores some of the paradoxes of the Enlightenment's theories of knowledge. Each of the chapters in this book attempts to address the questions raised by the eighteenth century's particular approach to confusion as a paradoxical reorganizing principle for the period's progressive agenda. Perhaps the most paradoxical thinker of his times, Diderot occupies a central place in this study of confusion. Other authors include Marivaux, CrZbillon, Voltaire, and Pinel, among others. Rousseau and Sade serve as counterexamples to this kind of enlightenment but ultimately do not so much oppose the period's poetics of confusion as they complement it. The final chapter on Sade combines contemporary discussions of politics, society, culture, philosophy, and science in an encyclopedic way that at once reflects the entire period's tendencies and establishes important differences between Sade's thinking and that of the mainstream philosophes. Ultimately, confusion serves, O'Neal argues, as an overarching positive notion for the Enlightenment and its progressive ideals.

The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment

The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment PDF Author: John C. O'Neal
Publisher: University of Delaware
ISBN: 1611490251
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
In The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment, John C. O'Neal draws largely on the etymological meaning of the word confusion as the action of mixing or blending in order to trace the development of this project which, he claims, aimed to reject dogmatic thinking in all of its forms and recognized the need to embrace complexity. Eighteenth-century thinkers used the notion of confusion in a progressive way to reorganize social classes, literary forms, metaphysical substances, scientific methods, and cultural categories such as taste and gender. In this new work, O'Neal explores some of the paradoxes of the Enlightenment's theories of knowledge. Each of the chapters in this book attempts to address the questions raised by the eighteenth century's particular approach to confusion as a paradoxical reorganizing principle for the period's progressive agenda. Perhaps the most paradoxical thinker of his times, Diderot occupies a central place in this study of confusion. Other authors include Marivaux, CrZbillon, Voltaire, and Pinel, among others. Rousseau and Sade serve as counterexamples to this kind of enlightenment but ultimately do not so much oppose the period's poetics of confusion as they complement it. The final chapter on Sade combines contemporary discussions of politics, society, culture, philosophy, and science in an encyclopedic way that at once reflects the entire period's tendencies and establishes important differences between Sade's thinking and that of the mainstream philosophes. Ultimately, confusion serves, O'Neal argues, as an overarching positive notion for the Enlightenment and its progressive ideals.

The Sea in the Literary Imagination

The Sea in the Literary Imagination PDF Author: Ekaterina V. Kobeleva
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527524108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book

Book Description
This collection explores nautical themes in a variety of literary contexts from multiple cultures. Including contributors from five continents, it emphasizes the universality of human experience with the sea, while focusing on literature that spans a millennium, stretching from medieval romance to the twenty-first-century reimagining of classic literary texts in film. These fresh essays engage in discussions of literature from the UK, the USA, India, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Colombia, and the Caribbean. Scholars of maritime literature will find the collection interesting for the unique insights it offers on individual literary texts, while general readers will be intrigued by the interconnectedness that it reveals in human experience with the sea.

Exorbitant Enlightenment

Exorbitant Enlightenment PDF Author: Alexander Regier
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198827121
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book

Book Description
Exorbitant Enlightenment compels us to see eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture in new ways. This book reveals a constellation of groundbreaking pre-1790s Anglo-German relations, many of which are so radical âso exorbitantâ that they ask us to fundamentally rethink the ways we grasp literary and intellectual history, especially when it comes to Enlightenment and Romanticism. Regier presents two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first story uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story: about a group of idiosyncratic figures and institutions, including the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli, and Johann Caspar Lavater, as well as the two most exorbitant figures, William Blake and Johann Georg Hamann. The bookâs eight chapters show how these authors and institutions shake up common understandings of British literary and European intellectual history and offer a very different, much more counter-intuitive view of the period. Through their distinctive conceptions of language, Blake and Hamann articulate âin different yet deeply related waysâ a radical critique of instrumental thought and institutional religion. They also argue for the irreducible relation between language and the sexual body. In each case, they push against some of the most central cultural and philosophical assumptions, then and now. The book argues that, when taken seriously, these exorbitant figures allow us to uncover and revise some of our own critical orthodoxies.

Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment

Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment PDF Author: Fabienne Moore
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754663188
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book

Book Description
Tracing the prehistory of the French prose poem, Fabienne Moore demonstrates that the genre emerges nearly a century before it is generally supposed to have existed. Moore links the development of this new genre with the period's thinking about language and poetic invention, as she argues that scientific, philosophical, and socioeconomic upheavals prompted a paradoxical return during the Enlightenment to sources such as Homer, the pastoral, Ossian, the Bible, and primitive eloquence.

The Autonomy of Pleasure

The Autonomy of Pleasure PDF Author: James A. Steintrager
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540876
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Get Book

Book Description
What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous—and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law unto itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also analyzes the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.

Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature

Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature PDF Author: Fabio A Camilletti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317321340
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
In 1816 a violent literary quarrel engulfed Bourbon Restoration Italy. On one side the Romantics wanted an opening up of Italian culture towards Europe, and on the other the Classicists favoured an inward-looking Italy. Giacomo Leopardi wrote a Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry aiming to contribute to the debate from a new perspective.

An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution

An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution PDF Author: Mary Wollstonecraft
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 550

Get Book

Book Description


A History of German Literature

A History of German Literature PDF Author: John George Robertson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134928173
Category : German literature
Languages : en
Pages : 698

Get Book

Book Description


Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution PDF Author: Madame de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book

Book Description


The Authority of Experience

The Authority of Experience PDF Author: John C. O'Neal
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271027797
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book

Book Description
Sensationism, a philosophy that gained momentum in the French Enlightenment as a response to Lockean empiricism, was acclaimed by Hippolyte Taine as &"the doctrine of the most lucid, methodical, and French minds to have honored France.&" The first major general study in English of eighteenth-century French sensationism, The Authority of Experience presents the history of a complex set of ideas and explores their important ramifications for literature, education, and moral theory. The study begins by presenting the main ideas of sensationist philosophers Condillac, Bonnet, and Helv&étius, who held that all of our ideas come to us through the senses. The experience of the body in seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching enabled individuals, as John C. O'Neal points out, to challenge the sometimes arbitrary authority of institutions and people in positions of power. After a general introduction to sensationism, the author develops a theory of sensationist aesthetics that not only reveals the interconnections of the period's philosophy and literature but also enhances our awareness of the forces at work in the French novel. He goes on to examine the relations between sensationism and eighteenth-century French educational theory, materialism, and id&éologie. Ultimately, O'Neal opens a discussion of the implications of sensationist thought for issues of particular concern to society today.