The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment.

The Progressive Poetics Of Confusion In The French Enlightenment -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Translations and the Abbreviation of Titles -- Introduction -- 1. The Subversive Use of Confusion in Marivaux's Theater -- 2. Cultivating the Reader's Critical Mind in Crébillon's Les Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit -- 3. Telling, Reading (or Listening), and Knowing: Interpolated Narrative in Voltaire and Diderot -- 4. Diderot and the Enlightenment's Poetics of Confusion in the Lettre sur les aveugles -- 5. Blurring the Boundaries between Mind and Body: Rousseau and the Philosophes on the Soul -- 6. Society's Confusion in the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles and the Question of Rousseau's Modernity -- 7. Gender Confusion -- 8. Understanding and Interpreting Confusion: Philippe Pinel and the Invention of Psychiatry -- 9. Sade's Justine: A Response to the Enlightenment's Poetics of Confusion -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index.

Drawing largely on the etymological meaning of the word 'confusion' as the action of mixing or blending, John C. O'Neal traces the development of a progressive poetics of confusion in the French Enlightenment. This project, he claims, aimed to reject dogmatic thinking in all of its forms and to recognize the need to embrace complexity. Eighteenth-century thinkers used the notion of confusion in a progressive way to reorganize social classes, literary forms, metaphysical substances, scientific methods, and cultural categories such as taste and gender.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.