4 Voltaire’s Butterflies

Yale University Press eBooks · 2025-12-31

Emotions, Mortality, and Vitality

2024-01-01

In book two of the Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau recounts the death of Madame la comtesse de Vercellis, a woman who took him into her service during his turbulent and itinerant adolescence. Her last words are characteristic of the wit that was so prized in the women-led salons Rousseau would la

Description

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature · 2020-08-27

Abstract Description is generally associated with the novel in its modern form, a perception captured in one of the dictums from Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas: “Descriptions: There are always too many of them in novels.” But description has a much longer history and abounds in other genres, from the epic to lyric and didactic poetry to tragedy and beyond. In the 18th century, it was even considered a genre unto itself, in the newly conceived genre of descriptive poetry popularized by the Scottish poet James Thomson. Description also features prominently in genres of writing often considered nonliterary, such as encyclopedias, scientific writing, how-to manuals, and travel guides. Indeed, critical suspicion surrounding description in Western rhetorical and poetic tradition stems in part from the perception that it can too easily become a site for the incursion of the nonliterary (i.e., things rather than people, scientific or technical knowledge, abstruse vocabulary) into the literary domain. Description resists easy definition and has been characterized as one of the blind spots of Western literary discourse. In antiquity, rhetorical and poetic treatises gave scant attention to description, and neoclassical poetic doctrine was more concerned with policing description’s boundaries than defining it. It was not until the 18th century that description emerged as a theoretical problem worthy of debate and as a prominent literary practice. Since antiquity, description has been associated with visualization and the visual arts, through the rhetorical figures of enargeia and ekphrasis and the Renaissance doctrine of ut pictura poesis. Through this association, description has close ties to mimesis and has proved especially vulnerable to Platonic attacks on poetry, and on literature more broadly, as a mere copy of reality. In the 19th century, description featured prominently in the realist novel, but in the mid-20th century it was used, notably by the French New Novelists, as a means of contesting realism. Formalist and structuralist criticism sparked renewed interest in theorizing description in the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the 21st century, in an age of interdisciplinarity when the boundaries between the literary and the nonliterary have become increasingly porous, description has once again emerged as a key theoretical problem for thinking across disciplines and has even been proposed as a new mode of reading that avoids the pitfalls of humanist hermeneutics.

1. Buffon and Daubenton's Two Horses

Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-11-02

The Unfinished Enlightenment

Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-10-21 · 12 citations

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.

Rousseau and Diderot

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-01-30

What Is Left of the Enlightenment

2018-12-28 · 1 citations

Madame du Deffand ou la retraite impossible

Artois Presses Université eBooks · 2018-01-01

Je dois aimer, madame, la retraite et vous. Voltaire à Mme du Deffand, 3 décembre 1759 C’était lors d’une communication que j’ai donnée à la Maison Française d’Oxford sur le rapport sous-jacent entre Denis Diderot et Jean-Jacques Rousseau à la fin de leurs vies qu’Alain Viala m’a suggéré que la notion de retraite pouvait revêtir dans les dernières décennies de l’Ancien Régime une forme et une signification sensiblement différentes de celle qu’on voit à l’œuvre, par exemple, à la fin de La Pri...

Les bouquets de Jean Starobinski

Critique · 2018-05-30

Jonathan Israel in Dialogue

Journal of the History of Ideas · 2016-01-01 · 1 citations

This essay addresses Jonathan Israel’s work on the Enlightenment and his response to his critics, with a particular focus on his interpretation of the French Enlightenment figures Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The essay makes the argument that the stakes of the vociferous exchange between Israel and his critics concern not just our historical interpretation of the Enlightenment, but also the place of dialogue in our search for historical and philosophical truth. In neglecting the central importance of dialogue in Enlightenment thought, Israel has attributed a static quality to the thought of the radical thinkers he seeks to champion.