"Incomprehensible Contexture[s]": Laurence Sterne and David Hume on Entanglement

This article takes Laurence Sterne and David Hume as two extreme cases of how writers think, feel, and write about the figure and concept of entanglement in the late Enlightenment. The late Enlightenment was an era defined, or so I claim, by an intense investment in and anxiety over relations—among people, objects, ideas, systems, and events. More than any other figure, entanglement registers that simultaneous interest in and aversion to connections. Reading between Sterne—an arch-entangler—and Hume—an arch-separator—we see not only an old trope suddenly taking on new meaning, but also a fraught transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism.