Delehanty - Literary knowing in neoclassical France: from poetics to aesthetics

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude to numerous people who have helped this book come to fruition. My first thanks go to the anonymous reader of the manuscript as well as Greg Clingham, both of whose careful suggestions and corrections were invaluable to me. I thank my colleagues at Reed College, especially Tamara Metz, Bill Ray, Hugh Hochman, Luc Monnin, Catherine Witt, Peter Steinberger, Elizabeth Drumm, and Robert Knapp for offering helpful feedback and encouragement at various points in the process. Reed College generously supported me by providing several grants, including paid sabbatical leave, a Ruby summer research grant, and funds from the Levine Foundation. I am grateful to Christopher Braider, Erec Koch, Sara Melzer, and John D. Lyons for asking helpful questions of iterations of this work along the way. Timothy Hampton, Ignacio Navarrete, and Nicholas Paige have all offered tremendous guidance, support, and inspiration to me. Katherine Ibbett, Faith Barrett, and Michael Oborne have given me many words of encouragement. I thank Margo Meyer for helping to inspire the ideas that began this project. I am eternally indebted to Tyler Blakeney for his help as a research assistant and grateful for his unrelenting enthusiasm. I thank my parents, William and Lorraine Delehanty, and my siblings, Paul Delehanty and Margaret Kelly, for their profound support. I dedicate this book to my husband, Mark de Bettencourt, and our children, Dominic, Catherine, and Oliver de Bettencourt, and thank them for their daily and unflagging encouragement.

Portions of chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5 have previously appeared as articles; they have been substantially revised for inclusion in this book. They are: Mapping the Aesthetic Mind ( Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 2 [2007]: 23353), From Judgment to Sentiment: Changing Theories of the Sublime, 16741710 ( Modern Language Quarterly 66, no. 2 [2005]: 15172), and Morality and Method in Pascals Penses ( Philosophy and Literature 28, no. 1 [2004]: 7488). I am grateful to those journals for their permission to include the materials here.

A Note on Translations

A s much as possible, I have made use of existing translations (some of which are from the eighteenth century) for the primary works studied here. Those translations are indicated following the first translated quote from each work. For the remaining works, the translations are my own.

Introduction

Mimesis and Transcendence

E very theory of literature has to account for at least three elements: the work itself, the author, and the audience of the work. Depending on what the theory posits, it will place emphasis on a different element. Theories that view the work as an autonomous object that contains beauty or truth will focus on the text itself, examining its rules, its classification (or genre), and its rhetorical or representational maneuverings. Theories that see the best literature as somehow beyond the limitations of the human sphere will focus on the character of the artist, claiming divine inspiration or genius as the source of its excellence. Finally, theories that ground an understanding of the work in the psychology or education of the author or the audience will look to the psychological responses of the audience, the cultural milieu of the text, or the intellectual training of the artist or audience. Most theories combine elements of all three models. Undergirding all of them, however, are telling assumptions about both the metaphysical and epistemological nature of the literary work that can teach us a great deal about how a given generation of thinkers understood not only the literary work but also its relation to the deepest kind of knowledge.

If we lay out several theories of literature against one another, moreover, it quickly becomes clear that we do not know whether works of literature are or whether they do . To say that a work of literature is (a representation, an image, an imitation) is to grant it ontological status that it might not fully merit. By describing rules for the composition of a literary work and evaluating the success of a work according to its compliance with those rules, for example, we implicitly suggest that literature is tangible, quantifiable, and, in those ways, like an object. A discussion of the problems inherent in the formalist reification of language was, in many ways, the beginning of poststructuralist theory in the twentieth century. By contrast, at various moments in history, we sometimes argue that works of literature do something. Some theories claim that literature makes us more virtuous; others that it moves us to pity or fear; still others that it simply pleases us by letting us witness and feel the experiences of another without fear for real-world consequences. These theories look to the effect of the work of art rather than the work as object. The risk of this kind of model lies in presuming a uniformity of response: just as individual actions strike each of us differently, so too does the literary work viewed as an act evade full categorization. In many, if not all, of these theories, there is a presumed relationship between the text and the reader whereby the work relates to its readers and the readers learn from that relationship. The language of literatures being involves patterns, rules, genres, and traditions in the words of the work itself; the language of literatures doing invokes emotions, states of mind, and abilities in the mind of the author or audience of the work as well as relationships between the author/artist and his or her audience.