Lee, Natasha Cecile (Author)
Harvard University
McDonald, Christie
Edition Details: Advisor: McDonald, Christie
Physical Details: 344 pp.
Language: English
Unsettling Signs: Nature, Society and the Novel in the French Enlightenment explores the relation between novels of the late eighteenth century and the increasingly important discourses of sciences of man that emerged during the French Enlightenment. This thesis considers how novels of the late Enlightenment incorporated discourses of science to construct new social models, and it argues that the novel defines itself in relation to these new discourses and their claim to truth. I first outline the shift in natural philosophy and natural history (Linnaeus, Buffon) away from theological accounts of man, towards a vision of humans as objects of science. I focus, in each chapter, on how naturalized categories were brought to bear on the social. The three main chapters examine novels by Rousseau, de la Bretonne and Mercier. Each author, I argue, replaces the arbitrary order of the ancien rgime by a structure of social differences---sex, class, race---that from then on is legitimated by nature, thus erasing the socio-historical processes through which they came about. In addition, the novel links the natural to the social by imagining social models based upon these differences. At a time where the novel is still a hybrid genre, writers must secure its place within a taxonomy of genres. Moving away from the criteria of verisimilitude that had previously defined the novel, writers craft a genre that makes its own claims to truth. The novel both legitimizes its views and its status by borrowing from the established discourses of natural philosophy, in a display of how literature masters science, and it posits itself at a remove from it, through its focus on possible worlds. The novel however maintains an ambivalent relation to social categories: while it participates in an ideology of nature, it also stages with precision how no state of nature can be ahistorical. In my concluding remarks I discuss how eighteenth-century fiction proposes a framework through which to consider literature's specific role in thinking about society.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2003): 1682. UMI order no. 3091612.
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