Diderot and Rousseau: Networks of Enlightenment
Marian Hobson
Published on 5. April 2011
Book
Paperback/Softback
385 pages
978-0-7294-1011-3 (ISBN)
Description
Marian Hobson's work has made a seminal contribution to our understanding of the European Enlightenment, and of Diderot and Rousseau in particular. This book presents her most important articles in a single volume, translated into English for the first time.
Hobson's distinctive approach is to take a given text or problematique and position it within its intellectual, historical and polemical context. From close analysis of the underlying conceptual structures of literary texts, she offers a unique insight into the vibrant networks of people and ideas at work throughout Europe, and across disciplinary boundaries as diverse as literature and mathematics, medicine and music.
In their translations of Hobson's essays, Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman present the primary sources in both the original eighteenth-century French and modern English, making the detail of these debates accessible to everyone, from the specialist to the student, whatever their academic discipline or interest.
Hobson's distinctive approach is to take a given text or problematique and position it within its intellectual, historical and polemical context. From close analysis of the underlying conceptual structures of literary texts, she offers a unique insight into the vibrant networks of people and ideas at work throughout Europe, and across disciplinary boundaries as diverse as literature and mathematics, medicine and music.
In their translations of Hobson's essays, Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman present the primary sources in both the original eighteenth-century French and modern English, making the detail of these debates accessible to everyone, from the specialist to the student, whatever their academic discipline or interest.
Reviews / Votes
...plus qu'une simple collection d'articles, le volume permet d'apprecier, pour ainsi dire "de haut", la coherence de la carriere de Marian Hobson, et de prendre la mesure de la considerable contribution qu'elle laisse aux etudes diderotiennes.- Recherches sur Diderot et l'Encyclopedie This is an inspiring volume that has much to teach scholars of the Enlightenment hailing from a broad range of disciplines.
- H-France Review Written in French, Hobson's early articles from the 1970s played a major role in the new reading of key Enlightenment texts that emerged in the wake of post-structuralism and in particular the work of Jacques Derrida. It is a pleasure to read them again in Tunstall and Warman;s fine translations. They are as acute and relevant today as ever. [...] I would argue that Hobson's readings exemplify 'deconstructive' reading at its best: philosophically rigorous, historically precise, and attuned to the text in all its multifarious affiliations and subcurrents.
- French Studies
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Liverpool
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Liverpool University Press
Target group
Adult education
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
7 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 384 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-7294-1011-3 (9780729410113)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Kate Tunstall is Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow of Worcester College. She is a specialist of eighteenth-century French literature, the works of Diderot in particular. She is the author of Blindness and Enlightenment (2012), the co-translator (with Caroline Warman) of Rameau's Nephew (2017), and co-editor (with Wilda Anderson) of Naming, Renaming and Un-naming in Early Modern Europe (2013) and (with Helena Taylor) of Women and Quarrels in Early Modern France (2022). She is currently General Editor of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the official journal of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Content
Kate E. Tunstall and Caroline Warman, Opening lines
1. Introduction. From Diderot to Rousseau via Rameau (2005)
I. The Paradoxe sur le comedien
2. The Paradoxe sur le comedien is a paradox (1973)
3. Sensibility and spectacle: the medical context for the Paradoxe (1977)
II. Le Neveu de Rameau
4. Pantomime, spasm and parataxis: Le Neveu de Rameau (1984)
5. Deictics and dialectics in Le Neveu de Rameau (1992)
6. Lists, parataxis and Le Neveu de Rameau (1995)
III. Causality
7. Jacques le fataliste: the art of the probable (1985)
8. 'Nexus effectivus' and 'nexus finalis'; causality in Rousseau's Discours sur l'inegalite and the Essai sur l'origine des langues (1992)
IV. Aesthetics
9. Philosophy and Rococo style (2002)
10. Diderot's Lettre sur les sourds et muets: language and labyrinth (1976)
11. Kant, Rousseau and music (1980)
V. Measurement
12. Architecture, analogy and proportion (1991)
13. How to take the measure of a character (2002)
14. Measuring statues, or, special neutrality (2004)
Bibliography
Index
1. Introduction. From Diderot to Rousseau via Rameau (2005)
I. The Paradoxe sur le comedien
2. The Paradoxe sur le comedien is a paradox (1973)
3. Sensibility and spectacle: the medical context for the Paradoxe (1977)
II. Le Neveu de Rameau
4. Pantomime, spasm and parataxis: Le Neveu de Rameau (1984)
5. Deictics and dialectics in Le Neveu de Rameau (1992)
6. Lists, parataxis and Le Neveu de Rameau (1995)
III. Causality
7. Jacques le fataliste: the art of the probable (1985)
8. 'Nexus effectivus' and 'nexus finalis'; causality in Rousseau's Discours sur l'inegalite and the Essai sur l'origine des langues (1992)
IV. Aesthetics
9. Philosophy and Rococo style (2002)
10. Diderot's Lettre sur les sourds et muets: language and labyrinth (1976)
11. Kant, Rousseau and music (1980)
V. Measurement
12. Architecture, analogy and proportion (1991)
13. How to take the measure of a character (2002)
14. Measuring statues, or, special neutrality (2004)
Bibliography
Index