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The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment
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2011
Summary
In The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment, John C. O'Neal draws largely on the etymological meaning of the word confusion as the action of mixing or blending in order to trace the development of this project which, he claims, aimed to reject dogmatic thinking in all of its forms and recognized 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. In this new work, O'Neal explores some of the paradoxes of the Enlightenment's theories of knowledge. Each of the chapters in this book attempts to address the questions raised by the eighteenth century's particular approach to confusion as a paradoxical reorganizing principle for the period's progressive agenda. Perhaps the most paradoxical thinker of his times, Diderot occupies a central place in this study of confusion. Other authors include Marivaux, CrZbillon, Voltaire, and Pinel, among others. Rousseau and Sade serve as counterexamples to this kind of enlightenment but ultimately do not so much oppose the period's poetics of confusion as they complement it. The final chapter on Sade combines contemporary discussions of politics, society, culture, philosophy, and science in an encyclopedic way that at once reflects the entire period's tendencies and establishes important differences between Sade's thinking and that of the mainstream philosophes. Ultimately, confusion serves, O'Neal argues, as an overarching positive notion for the Enlightenment and its progressive ideals.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2011
ISBN-Print
978-1-61149-024-4
ISBN-Online
978-1-61149-025-1
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
240
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Acknowledgments No access
Note on Translations and the Abbreviation of Titles No access
Introduction No access Pages 15 - 28
1. The Subversive Use of Confusion in Marivaux’s Theater No access Pages 29 - 50
2. Cultivating the Reader’s Critical Mind in Crébillon’s Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit No access Pages 51 - 71
3. Telling, Reading (or Listening), and Knowing: Interpolated Narrative in Voltaire and Diderot No access Pages 72 - 92
4. Diderot and the Enlightenment’s Poetics of Confusion in the Lettre sur les aveugles No access Pages 93 - 104
5. Blurring the Boundaries between Mind and Body: Rousseau and the Philosophes on the Soul No access Pages 105 - 124
6. Society’s Confusion in the Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles and the Question of Rousseau’s Modernity No access Pages 125 - 140
7. Gender Confusion No access Pages 141 - 177
8. Understanding and Interpreting Confusion: Philippe Pinel and the Invention of Psychiatry No access Pages 178 - 193
9. Sade’s Justine: A Response to the Enlightenment’s Poetics of Confusion No access Pages 194 - 209
