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The Unfinished Enlightenment

by Joanna Stalnaker
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Current price ₹6,934.00
Original price ₹8,321.00
Original price ₹8,321.00
Original price ₹8,321.00
(-17%)
₹6,934.00
Current price ₹6,934.00

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Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9780801448645
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Cornell University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Cornell University Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 256
  • Original Price: USD 59.95
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 477 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): European / French

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 Encyclop�die 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.

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