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Descartes's Fictions traces common movements in early modern philosophy and literary method. Emma Gilby reassesses the significance of Descartes's writing by bringing his philosophical output into contact with the literary treatises, exempla, and debates of his age. She argues that humanist theorizing about poetics represents a vital intellectual context for Descartes's work. She offers readings of the controversies to which this poetic theory gives rise, with particular reference to the genre of tragicomedy, questions of verisimilitude or plausibility, and the figures of Guez de Balzac and Pierre Corneille. Drawing on what Descartes says about, and to, his many contemporaries and correspondents embedded in the early modern republic of letters, this volume shows that poetics provides a repository of themes and images to which he returns repeatedly: fortune, method, error, providence, passion, and imagination, for instance. Like the poets and theorists of his age, Descartes is also drawn to the forms of attention that people may bring to his work. This interest finds expression in the mature Cartesian metaphysics of the Meditations, as well as, later, in the moral philosophy of his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia or the Passions of the Soul. This volume thus bridges the gap between Cartesian criticism and late-humanist literary culture in France.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I: Debating Poetics
- 1: Reading Rhetoric and Poetics
- 2: The Paris Context
- 3: Responses to Balzac
- Part II: 'Discourons'
- 4: Balzac's Discours à Descartes
- 5: Order and Method
- 6: Judging Well
- Part III: Changing Minds
- 7: Attentiveness and Indifference
- 8: Contemplating the Divine
- 9: Providence and the Passions
- 10: The Uses of Theatre
- Conclusion
About the author
Emma Gilby took up her current post at the University of Cambridge after a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College. Her first monograph, published in 2006, was on the concept of the sublime in seventeenth-century France. This work was recognized in 2007 with the award of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Since then she has been the Crausaz-Wordsworth Fellow for Interdisciplinary Work in Philosophy at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Cambridge, and the Scaliger Fellow at the University of Leiden. These research opportunities have allowed her to pursue her interest in scholarship that spans the disciplines of philosophy, literary criticism, and intellectual history.
Summary
Emma Gilby reassesses Descartes's writing by bringing his philosophical output into contact with the literary treatises, exempla, and debates of his age. She argues that humanist theorizing about poetics represents a vital intellectual context for Descartes's work, and offers readings of the controversies to which this poetic theory gives rise.
Additional text
... those interested in Descartes's reliance on meditative reflection and practice will find her book of interest.
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Simultaneously, however, it constitutes a very useful contribution to literary history and has lots of material for future research. Hugh Roberts, The Seventeenth Century
