1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910788181403321

Autore

O'Neal John C.

Titolo

The progressive poetics of confusion in the French Enlightenment / / John C. O'Neal

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Newark : , : University of Delaware Press, , [2011]

©2011

ISBN

1-61149-025-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (241 p.)

Disciplina

840.9/353

Soggetti

Enlightenment - France

Philosophy, French - 18th century

French literature - 18th century - History and criticism

Complexity (Philosophy)

Ambiguity

France Intellectual life 18th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-226) and index.

Nota di contenuto

The subversive use of confusion in Marivaux's theater -- Cultivating the reader's critical mind in Crebillon's Les egarements du coeur et de l'esprit -- Telling, reading (or listening), and knowing : interpolated narrative in Voltaire and Diderot -- Diderot and the Enlightenment's poetics of confusion in the Lettre sur les aveugles -- Blurring the boundaries between mind and body : Rousseau and the philosophes on the soul -- Society's confusion in the Lettre a d'Alembert sur les spectacles and the question of Rousseau's modernity -- Gender confusion -- Understanding and interpreting confusion : Philippe Pinel and the invention of psychiatry -- Sade's Justine : a response to the Enlightenment's poetics of confusion.

Sommario/riassunto

Drawing largely on the etymological meaning of the word 'confusion' as the action of mixing or blending, John C. O'Neal traces the development of a progressive poetics of confusion in the French Enlightenment. This project, he claims, aimed to reject dogmatic thinking in all of its forms and to recognize 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.