Title
Voluptuous Philosophy : Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment / Natania Meeker.
ISBN
9780823293506
Published
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]
Copyright
©2007
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (336 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers
10.1515/9780823293506 doi
Summary
Eighteenth-century France witnessed the rise of matter itself-in forms ranging from atoms to anatomies-as a privileged object of study. Voluptuous Philosophy redefines what is at stake in the emergence of an enlightened secular materialism by showing how questions of figure-how should a body be represented? What should the effects of this representation be on readers?-are tellingly and consistently located at the very heart of 18th-century debates about the nature of material substance. French materialisms of the Enlightenment are crucially invested not only in the development of a sophisticated theoretical apparatus around the notion of matter but in the production of specific relationships between readers and the "matter" of the texts that they consume. How, the book asks, did the period's fascination with a markedly immaterial and ephemeral event-the reading of works of fiction-come to coincide with what appears to be a gradual materialization of human subjects: men and women who increasingly manage to envision themselves transfigured, as the century wears on, into machines, animals, and even, in the work of the Marquis de Sade, tables and chairs? In what way did the spread of new philosophies of matter depend upon the ability of readers to perceive certain figures of speech as literally and immediately true-to imagine themselves as fully material bodies even as they found themselves most deeply compelled by disembodied literary forms? More broadly, in what sense does the act of reading literature alter and transfigure our perceptions of what is, and can be, real? Voluptuous Philosophy articulates the gradual coming into being of literature as a distinct arena of textual production with the rise of an enlightened reader who remains abstracted from the bodily symptoms that any given piece of writing may induce in him. The very definition of "the literary" as an autonomous field, this book suggests, may, ironically, be dependent upon the simultaneous construction of a material world that remains fully immune to its effects.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
Available in Other Form
print 9780823226962
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Voluptuous Figures: Lucretian Materialism in Eighteenth-Century France
2. Reading for Pleasure in the French Enlightenment: The Self-Possessed Reader and the Decline of Voluptas
3. ''Flowers Strewn on the Way to Volupté'': La Mettrie and the Tropic Body of the Epicurean Philosopher
4. ''I Resist It No Longer'': Thérèse philosophe and the Compulsions of Enlightened Literary Materialism
5. Dynamism and Disinterest: The Materialist Reader and Diderot's Dream
6. ''A Fallacious and Always Perilous Metaphysic'': The Sadean Critique of Sentiment and the Neo- Lucretian Novel
Conclusions
Notes
Works Cited
Index
