-
Réintroduction à la littérature fantastique: Enlightenment Philosophy, Object-Oriented Ontology, and the French Fantastic
- Nineteenth-Century French Studies
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 44, Numbers 1 & 2, Fall-Winter 2015-2016
- pp. 25-45
- 10.1353/ncf.2015.0015
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Studies of the fantastic and attempts to define the fantastic as a genre have always presupposed a human-centered ontology. But the anthropocentric hierarchies of Enlightenment thought, embodied by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, are precisely what the fantastic seeks to undermine. The fantastic posits a flat ontology where humans and objects stand on equal ground, where objects act, and where human subjects are frequently objectified. After tracing a line from Kant to Théophile Gautier through E. T. A. Hoffmann, this article considers other fantastic narratives by Mérimée and Maupassant to suggest how the fantastic undermines an Enlightenment human-centered worldview while theorizing the hidden life of things. This reading leads us to tentatively redefine the fantastic as a form of speculative realism, as a genre that takes the presence and perspective of objects seriously and that embeds this object-oriented ontology into the texts in ways that trouble the reader’s subject-centered consciousness.