The Classical Model: Literature and Knowledge in Seventeenth-century FranceLiterature has its own strategies for ordering information. In this elegant and insightful book about the formation of knowledge in seventeenth-century France, Harriet Stone asks what those strategies conveyed about the limits of science and about the cultural environment of the period. A propensity for reason and control pervaded literature as well as science, allowing classical literature to serve as a unique laboratory for exploring the model of representation developed by science. Literary texts have influenced the establishment and transformation of the paradigms grounding knowledge by drawing attention to meanings that the paradigms fail to name. Stone identifies not only the momentous achievement of the discovery of the scientific method but also the more subtle process of experimentation in literature through which ideas were continually tested and redefined. She offers close readings of works by Rotrou, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, La Rochefoucauld, and Lafayette, as well as by Descartes, Furetiere, and Pascal. Her first and last chapters frame the literary texts within a discussion of Foucault's analysis of classical science. Classical writers began to encode their own world. Once they did, not only science but literature became an authority for mapping knowledge. Notwithstanding the classical period's efforts to affirm the unity of knowledge, Stone concludes that knowledge was never complete or certain. Literature's capacity to rework the model through which it assigns meanings proves essential to unfolding both the art and the science of representation. |
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Contents
Foucault Rotrou and Corneille | 24 |
Andromaque and Bérénice | 59 |
The Inscrutable Subjects | 95 |
Copyright | |
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Alcmène Amphitryon analysis Andromaque Andromaque's Antoine Furetière argues Astyanax autres baroque Bérénice bien Camille Camille's century choses classical episteme classical period Consalve context court cultural death depicted Descartes Descartes's difference discourse drama epistemological Exemplum fiction final Foucault frame French function Furetière Genest Hector hero Horace identities imitation Jean-Luc Nancy king knowledge La Rochefoucauld Lafayette's language Las meninas literary literature Louis Marin Louis XIV lover Madame de Chartres maxims meaning method mirror Molière moralist narrative negate novel onstage order of things Orient paradigms Paris Pascal Pensées performance perspective play play's portrait position Princesse de Clèves Pyrrhus qu'il qu'on Racine Racine's reference reflects relations René Descartes representation represents Rochefoucauld role Roman Rome scene scientific Seuil seventeenth seventeenth-century signify Sosie space spectator structure taxonomy text's theater tion Titus tout truth Tulle University Press Velázquez's Velázquez's painting Zaïde