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DescriptionIf you appreciate this torrent, please give it a thumbs up! To all who have taken time to give a thumbs up on any of my torrents... THANK YOU! Thank you to all those helping to seed previous uploads (the true heroes of Kickass Torrents!) Thank you in advance for all those who will help seed this one as well.  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. Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Cornell University Press; 1 edition (April 1, 2010) Language: English ISBN-10: 0801448646 ISBN-13: 978-0801448645 Sharing Widget |