The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France

The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Daniel Brewer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521414838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This study explores the problems faced by writers of the Enlightenment, who attempted to demystify all previous forms of knowledge by applying rationalist critiques that can in turn be applied to examine their own critical work. It focuses on the works of one of the best-known writers of eighteenth-century France, Denis Diderot, analysing his experimentation with presenting critical knowledge. Paying close attention to the formal-poetic nature of Diderot's writing, his 'art', it examines the interplay between critical knowledge and its representation, between epistemology and aesthetics. Professor Brewer shows how Diderot's work in the areas of philosophy, science, the fine arts and literature pushed Enlightenment critique to its limits, and points to its remarkable similarity to aspects of modern critical theory.

The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France

The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Daniel Brewer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521414838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study explores the problems faced by writers of the Enlightenment, who attempted to demystify all previous forms of knowledge by applying rationalist critiques that can in turn be applied to examine their own critical work. It focuses on the works of one of the best-known writers of eighteenth-century France, Denis Diderot, analysing his experimentation with presenting critical knowledge. Paying close attention to the formal-poetic nature of Diderot's writing, his 'art', it examines the interplay between critical knowledge and its representation, between epistemology and aesthetics. Professor Brewer shows how Diderot's work in the areas of philosophy, science, the fine arts and literature pushed Enlightenment critique to its limits, and points to its remarkable similarity to aspects of modern critical theory.

The Search for Enlightenment

The Search for Enlightenment PDF Author: John Leigh
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742500471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
In this fresh exploration of eighteenth-century French writing, John Leigh celebrates the ideas and hopes that animated its central figures and examines the extent to which authors--and their readers--shouldered heretofore-unknown responsibilities and confronted new doubts. The book identifies the key works of political protest, philosophical exploration, and religious enquiry, and at the same time encompasses such diverse forms as the novel, short story, poetry, and drama. Conveying a vivid sense of the energy and genius of the Enlightenment as embodied in its famous and controversial writers--Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau--the author also considers the achievements of influential but unsung authors such as Mabillon, Olympe de Gouges, Chénier, and de Sade.

Enlightenment and Pathology

Enlightenment and Pathology PDF Author: Anne C. Vila
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801858093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
If moods are as contagious as colds, and wickedness as debilitating as a bad diet, inquiries into assorted discourses in 18th-century France still have much to tell. Author Anne Vila shows that multiple junctures between the body and the mind promoted a steady commerce of speculation and discussion between science and the social salons of the time. 9 illustrations.

Styles of Enlightenment

Styles of Enlightenment PDF Author: Elena Russo
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801884764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
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French Thought in the Eighteenth Century

French Thought in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Daniel Mornet
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description


The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment

The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment PDF Author: Daniel Brewer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316194329
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The Enlightenment has long been seen as synonymous with the beginnings of modern Western intellectual and political culture. As a set of ideas and a social movement, this historical moment, the 'age of reason' of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, is marked by attempts to place knowledge on new foundations. The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment brings together essays by leading scholars representing disciplines ranging from philosophy, religion and literature, to art, medicine, anthropology and architecture, to analyse the French Enlightenment. Each essay presents a concise view of an important aspect of the French Enlightenment, discussing its defining characteristics, internal dynamics and historical transformations. The Companion discusses the most influential reinterpretations of the Enlightenment that have taken place during the last two decades, reinterpretations that both reflect and have contributed to important re-evaluations of received ideas about the Enlightenment and the early modern period more generally.

Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France

Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France PDF Author: Jessica L. Fripp
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 1644532026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France examines how new and often contradictory ideas about friendship were enacted in the lives of artists in the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that portraits resulted from and generated new ideas about friendship by analyzing the creation, exchange, and display of portraits alongside discussions of friendship in philosophical and academic discourse, exhibition criticism, personal diaries, and correspondence. This study provides a deeper understanding of how artists took advantage of changing conceptions of social relationships and used portraiture to make visible new ideas about friendship that were driven by Enlightenment thought. Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

The Unfinished Enlightenment

The Unfinished Enlightenment PDF Author: Joanna Stalnaker
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462347
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
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.

Reading the French Enlightenment

Reading the French Enlightenment PDF Author: Julie Candler Hayes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139426338
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In this 1999 book, Julie Candler Hayes offers an ambitious reinterpretation of a crucial aspect of Enlightenment thought, the rationalizing and classifying impulse. Taking issue both with traditional liberal and contemporary critical accounts of the Enlightenment, she analyses the writings of Denis Diderot, Emilie Du Châtelet, the Abbé de Condillac, Buffon, d'Alembert and numerous others, to argue for a new understanding of 'systematic reason' as complex, paradoxical and ultimately liberating. Hayes examines the tensions between freedom and constraint, abstraction and materialism, linear and synoptic order, that pervade not only philosophic and scientific discourse, but also epistolary writing, fiction and criticism. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of theorists from Adorno, Habermas and Foucault to Deleuze and Derrida, she offers a dialogue between the eighteenth century and our own, an ongoing exploration of the question, 'what is Enlightenment?'.

The Enlightenment Past

The Enlightenment Past PDF Author: Daniel Brewer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521175296
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Over the last two hundred years the theories and ideals of the Enlightenment have come to be viewed as the foundation of modern Western political and intellectual culture. Particularly in France they have played a fundamental role in the development of national identity. In a series of richly contextualised readings Daniel Brewer examines the cultural construction of the Enlightenment in France from the eighteenth century to the present day. He examines a range of important Enlightenment texts, explores the ways in which they defined their modernising project, and analyses the cultural and political uses to which they have been put by scholars, writers and intellectuals. This book presents a significant advance in the field of Enlightenment studies, in an important and timely reassessment of the heritage and continued relevance of Enlightenment ideals.