In this Book
- The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: Cornell University Press
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.
Table of Contents
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. i-vi
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xv-xvi
- Introduction
- pp. 1-28
- Part I Natural Histories
- 1 Buffon and Daubenton’s Two Horses
- pp. 31-67
- Part II Encyclopedias
- 3 Diderot’s Word Machine
- pp. 99-123
- 4 Delille’s Little Encyclopedia
- pp. 124-148
- Part III Moral and Political Topographies
- 5 Mercier’s Unframed Paris
- pp. 151-187
- 6 Description in Revolution
- pp. 188-210
- Conclusion
- pp. 211-218
- Bibliography
- pp. 219-232