The unfinished Enlightenment [[electronic resource] ] : description in the age of the encyclopedia / / Joanna Stalnaker

• Autore: Stalnaker Joanna
• Pubblicazione: Ithaca [N.Y.], : Cornell University Press, 2010
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (256 p.)
• Disciplina: 840.9/005
• Soggetto topico: French literature - 18th century - History and criticism; Description (Rhetoric) - History - 18th century; Encyclopedias and dictionaries, French - History and criticism; Natural history - France - History - 18th century; Enlightenment - France
• Soggetto geografico: France Intellectual life 18th century
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-231) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 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.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.
• Titolo autorizzato: The unfinished Enlightenment
• ISBN: 0-8014-6234-7
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910781206303321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II