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Nicholas Paige

University of California, Berkeley, French, Faculty Member

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Books by Nicholas Paige

Introduction from Technologies of the Novel (Cambridge 2021)

Based on a systematic sampling of nearly 2000 French and English novels from 1601 to 1830, this b... more Based on a systematic sampling of nearly 2000 French and English novels from 1601 to 1830, this book’s foremost aim is to ask precisely how the novel evolves. It turns out that instead of simply “rising,” as people have been saying for some sixty years, the novel is in fact a system in constant flux. It is made up of artifacts — formally distinct novel types — that themselves rise, only to inevitably fall. I argue that these artifacts are technologies, each with traceable origins, each needing time for adoption (at the expense of already developed technologies) and also for abandonment. Like technological waves in more physical domains, the many rises and falls of novelistic technologies are not unmotivated, certainly: people invent and adopt literary artifacts for many diverse reasons. But ultimately the patterns of adoption must be understood in the context of technological evolution more generally.

Before Fiction: TOC and Preface

Papers by Nicholas Paige

Histories of Fiction

Modern Language Quarterly, 2021

One shared assumption of many recent efforts to delineate a history of fiction (or fictionality, ... more One shared assumption of many recent efforts to delineate a history of fiction (or fictionality, typically understood as a mode of nonliteral reference) is that that term names a conceptual operation, be it intrinsic or culturally learned. This article argues that fiction is merely a particular type of classification, akin but not identical to the classifications performed by terms such as mimesis or verisimilitude. Thus it is nonsensical to claim that fiction qua concept does or does not exist at any given moment: fiction is foremost a way of grouping various literary practices, and it is those practices that emerge over time. The article then recasts the interest in the early novel's fictionality shown by Catherine Gallagher and others as a problem of practices rather than of concepts. It tracks trends in subject matter and assertions of literal truth through a quantitative diachronic analysis of 230 years of French novels. While these trends cannot by their very nature show the birth of the concept of fiction-which was never born in the first place-they are the type of evidence that should be central to any future history of fiction.

"The 'Willing Suspension of Disbelief': The Long History of a Short Phrase"

The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief, 2024

In one sense, the history of what has become the go-to phrase in English for describing the menta... more In one sense, the history of what has become the go-to phrase in English for describing the mental state of consumers of fictions is not long at all: Samuel Taylor Coleridge had no forerunners when in Chapter 14 of the Biographia Literaria of 1818 he defined "poetic faith" as the "willing suspension of disbelief." But in another sense, the history can be considered essentially coterminous with the entire tradition of Western mimetic speculation since Aristotle-one riff among many on the idea that something like belief, however attenuated or modulated, is involved when we read novels and epics or watch tragedies and movies. The primary aim of this chapter is to show how Coleridge's phrase plugs into this tradition of "belief talk" and insinuates itself into common parlance, at least in English. A second aim, more methodological, shadows the first, and involves the assumption that certain variations ol belief talk-be it Coleridge's or others'-mark a decisively new (or modern) understanding of fiction or fictionality. Instead, I argue that the belief idiom, already present in Plato and Aristotle, is simply built out over time: from the Renaissance on, thinkers have taken up the sketchy, sometimes marginal remarks of the Classical tradition, smoothing and systematizing where possible while introducing competing conceptualizations and ways of speaking as necessary. This process of enrichment-which characterizes so much human activity-has not stopped to this day.

La Religieuse et le problème de la sensibilité

Lecteurs et actes de lecture dans les écrits de Diderot, ed. Adrien Paschoud and Thomas Klinkert , 2023

Le problème de la sensibilité dans La Religieuse est d'abord un problème d'interprétation textuel... more Le problème de la sensibilité dans La Religieuse est d'abord un problème d'interprétation textuelle : celui de savoir si le texte doit être considéré comme un paradigme ou comme une subversion de la relation sentimentale. Mais c'est aussi, simultanément, un problème de l'ordre de l'histoire littéraire, dans la mesure où nous supposons couramment que les grands textes 'font' quelque chose à cette histoire, soit en infirmant une tradition, soit en signalant, comme des signes annonciateurs, le futur en lice. Et on présume souvent que Diderot occupe une position charnière en ce qui concerne la sensibilité : il serait son chantre, avant d'être son pourfendeur. Cet admirateur naïf des charmes de l'identification (Eloge de Richardson, Le Fils naturel...) se transformerait donc en un scrutateur lucide et moderne des rouages de la représentation (Paradoxe sur le comédien, Jacques le fataliste). Où en est La Religieuse dans ce revirement-si toutefois revirement il y a ? Cette question pourrait paraître résolue. La Religieuse, nous at on souvent dit, est précisément un texte pris entre deux esthétiques, l'une sentimentale, l'autre autoréflexive. Pour un pan de la critique diderotienne, c'est dans la relation entre les prétendus mémoires de Suzanne Simonin et la fameuse Préface-annexe choisie par Diderot pour leur servir de cadre qu'on voit le moment précis de la mutation. Selon cet argument, les mémoires sont commencés sous le sceau de la sensibilité au début des années 1760 ; ce n'est que plus tard que Diderot va s'emparer d'un texte de Grimm détaillant le complot à l'origine des mémoires pour prendre ses distances par rapport à cette sensibilité et la mettre, selon l'expression de Jean Varloot, en «italique 1 ».

Still Lives and Sublime Vistas: On the Non-Modernity of Diderot's Approach to Genre Painting

Diderot Studies 38, 2022

The most oft-cited and beloved entries in Diderots Salons must be those that deal with Chardin an... more The most oft-cited and beloved entries in Diderots Salons must be those that deal with Chardin and Verner, two painters working in the traditionally less prestigious genres of still life and landscape. The passages are familiar ones: Diderot sticking an imaginary knife in the painted pâté of Chardins Le Bocal d'olives (in the 1763 Salon; VS, IV: 265), or fantasizing a walk around Verner's landscapes (1767; VS, IV: 594-6351)-And many like to locate in them something particularly modern-compared, that is, to Diderot's effulgent praise for a painter like Greuze, whose middlebrow canvases drip with a now-dated hymn to Virtue: "Few art historians have concealed their discomfort with [Greuze's] paintings themselves or their disapproval of the audience who went into raptures before them," writes Michael Fried.2 Notwithstanding Fried's efforts to rehabilitate Diderot's taste for edifyingly domestic themes, that taste can still leave critics wondering, in the words of Christopher Braider, "what someone otherwise so shrewd and forward-looking could possibly have seen in some of the paintings he championed."3 How much safer, then, those passages on the non-moralistic Verner and Chardin, whose paintings provoke in Diderot more properly "aesthetic" musings on the very ontology of painting. "On

e-Journal Philosophie der THE HISTORY OF AN ANACHRONISM. MONTAIGNE, AUGUSTINE, AND THE BECOMING OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY Psychologie

Historians do not care much for anachronisms, and for good reason: on the one hand, anachronism s... more Historians do not care much for anachronisms, and for good reason: on the one hand, anachronism strikes at what they hold dearest, namely, rigorous attention to historical specificity; on the other hand, it serves as a disquieting reminder that interpretations of the past can be articulated only from the perspective of an inescapable present. Notwithstanding this cause for anathemaanachronism as that which must but cannot be eliminated if the historian is to exist-we should keep in mind that anachronisms, being as much the products of temporality as any other cultural formation, are open to historical inquiry. No doubt they have their stories to tell. Take the example of a book that most Montaigne scholars would regard as a particularly egregious anachronism-a volume published in 1935 by Marvin Lowenthal under the title of The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne. Lowenthal's project was as touchingly naïve as it was critically hopeless: he aimed to assemble a "continuous narrative" of Montaigne's life by extracting those sections of the Essais where the author spoke of himself, banishing thereby the digressions and "rank confusion" that for a modern public mar the reading experience: "Aided by scissors, paste, and patience, I have let [Montaigne] retell his life-story." 1 But would Montaigne really have understood what it might mean to tell his "life-story" in the form of a "continuous narrative"? As many recent commentators have hastened to point out, Montaigne's text betrays little sympathy for this steadfastly modern belief in the importance of personal chronology. 2 Armed with famous snippets from the Essais ("C'est un sujet merveilleusement vain, divers et ondoyant, que l'homme" [Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object (I, 1: 9; 5)], "Si je parle diversement de moi, c'est que je me regarde diversement" [If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways (II, 1: 335; 242)], and so on), 3 scholars of late have tried, in the face of readings such as Lowenthal's, to assert the otherness of Montaigne's view of self, a self rooted not in an organically unified life history but in contingency, exemplarity, and palimpsestic infinitude. 4 These corrections, numerous and persuasive, do make the autobiographical anachronism seem a pitfall that threatens a proper understanding of Montaigne and, more generally, of a time in which people did not yet function as self-realizing, coherent

Etat Présent: The Study of Seventeenth-Century French Literature in North America

by Volker Schröder and Nicholas Paige

The French Review, 2017

by Roland Racevskis, Russell Ganim, Nicholas Paige, Volker Schröder, Eric Turcat, Ellen Welch ht... more by Roland Racevskis, Russell Ganim, Nicholas Paige, Volker Schröder, Eric Turcat, Ellen Welch
https://frenchreview.frenchteachers.org/Archives.html
"This Etat présent constitutes a critical survey of books written in seventeenth-century French studies by North American scholars from 2010 to 2016. The bibliography is tightly circumscribed and critically selective, with the aim of bringing notable recent books to the attention of scholars, teachers, and students worldwide. A subsection includes notable scholarly editions and translations. The field has evolved over recent decades in interdisciplinary directions, and the categories we have chosen both reflect these intellectual reconfigurations (e.g., Travel and Empire) while also maintaining some of the more traditional areas of focus (e.g., Theater).

The Comforts of Tartuffe

How To Do Things with Style: Essays in Honor of Joan DeJean, ed. Roland Rascevskis and Amy S. Wyngaard (French Review Book Series, 2022), 11-28., 2022

In the later versions of Tartuffe, Molière raises the stakes of the play by putting Orgon's house... more In the later versions of Tartuffe, Molière raises the stakes of the play by putting Orgon's house at risk. This article situates this preoccupation with real estate in terms of New Paris's urban engineering projects and Louis XIV's attempts to make the city safe for the well-off. In this light, the play's real target becomes less the familiar "bad father" of comedy than the outsider, the homeless gueux who would be best locked up in the Hôpital général-newly founded by precisely the all-seeing prince so flattered in the play's closing scene.

The Artifactuality of Narrative Form: First-Person Novels in France, 1601-1830

Poetics Today, 2018

When literary scholars analyze narrative personhood historically, they typically see periods, exp... more When literary scholars analyze narrative personhood historically, they typically see periods, explained as an effect of deeper psychosocial mutations. Thus the dominant first person of the eighteenth century is the counterpart to a new bourgeois subject, while the third-person omniscience of the nineteenth might reflect an age of increasing state control. The article argues that only our impressionistic use of mostly canonical examples permits such sweeping statements and that the very notion of the period (never mind episteme or paradigm) is undermined by a quantitative examination of the literary archive and its evolution. Based on a systematic sample of French novels over twenty-three decades, this study concludes that narrative forms such as the memoir novel and the epistolary novel behave as successful artifacts. As they spread, they achieve a recognizable form that peaks at a certain point, after which use steadily declines. Because the novel as a whole is composed of multiple forms in constant flux, it becomes impossible to isolate periods of homogeneous practice that could be said to operate according to some deeper sociocultural logic.

Racine, Phèdre, and the French Classical Stage

A History of Modern French Literature, ed. C. Prendergast, Princeton 2017

Examples, Samples, Signs: An Artifactual View of Fictionality in the French Novel, 1681–1830

Historians of the novel typically use examples — a few mostly canonical works — to establish thei... more Historians of the novel typically use examples — a few mostly canonical works — to establish their desired narrative. The problem is that these chosen novels function less as true examples — representatives of a class of objects — than as signs of the invisible process (conceptual or socio-subjective) that is the coming of Modernity. This study approaches the novel’s history, and specifically the oft-debated question of its developing fictionality, by using samples of French novels from 1601 to 1830. This quantitative approach reveals that though the novel can indeed be said to “fictionalize” over the course of the eighteenth century, the customary explanations for the evolution are not supported by the record. I propose of that the novel is not one thing that modernizes, but in fact an ever-changing system of artifacts that should be understood through models provided by studies of technological innovation. Novelistic artifacts are invented, they evolve and spread, and they eventually fall into disuse, all in accordance with the values of their human inventors, and the constraints placed on the latter by the extant artifacts available for modification.

Permanent Re-Enchantments: On Some Literary Uses of the Supernatural from Early Empiricism to Modern Aesthetics

Secular Magic in a Rational Age, 2009

Grandeur et décadence des Grecs: roman et enchâssement au dix-septième siècle

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour P.U.F.. © P.U.F.. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.

Diderot démystifié: Les Lectures de La Religieuse

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour P.U.F.. © P.U.F.. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.

Rousseau's Readers Revisited: The Aesthetics of La Nouvelle Héloïse

Eighteenth-century Studies, 2008

The Storyteller and the Book: Scenes of Narrative Production in the Early French Novel

Bardot and Godard in 1963 (Historicizing the Postmodern Image

Representations, 2004

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

“L’affaire des poisons et l’imaginaire de l’enquête: De Molière à Thomas Corneille.” Littératures Classiques 40 (2000), 195-208.

“Manchette, ou le mutisme.” Poétique 120 (1999), 477-94.

Introduction from Technologies of the Novel (Cambridge 2021)

Based on a systematic sampling of nearly 2000 French and English novels from 1601 to 1830, this b... more Based on a systematic sampling of nearly 2000 French and English novels from 1601 to 1830, this book’s foremost aim is to ask precisely how the novel evolves. It turns out that instead of simply “rising,” as people have been saying for some sixty years, the novel is in fact a system in constant flux. It is made up of artifacts — formally distinct novel types — that themselves rise, only to inevitably fall. I argue that these artifacts are technologies, each with traceable origins, each needing time for adoption (at the expense of already developed technologies) and also for abandonment. Like technological waves in more physical domains, the many rises and falls of novelistic technologies are not unmotivated, certainly: people invent and adopt literary artifacts for many diverse reasons. But ultimately the patterns of adoption must be understood in the context of technological evolution more generally.

Before Fiction: TOC and Preface

Histories of Fiction

Modern Language Quarterly, 2021

One shared assumption of many recent efforts to delineate a history of fiction (or fictionality, ... more One shared assumption of many recent efforts to delineate a history of fiction (or fictionality, typically understood as a mode of nonliteral reference) is that that term names a conceptual operation, be it intrinsic or culturally learned. This article argues that fiction is merely a particular type of classification, akin but not identical to the classifications performed by terms such as mimesis or verisimilitude. Thus it is nonsensical to claim that fiction qua concept does or does not exist at any given moment: fiction is foremost a way of grouping various literary practices, and it is those practices that emerge over time. The article then recasts the interest in the early novel's fictionality shown by Catherine Gallagher and others as a problem of practices rather than of concepts. It tracks trends in subject matter and assertions of literal truth through a quantitative diachronic analysis of 230 years of French novels. While these trends cannot by their very nature show the birth of the concept of fiction-which was never born in the first place-they are the type of evidence that should be central to any future history of fiction.

"The 'Willing Suspension of Disbelief': The Long History of a Short Phrase"

The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief, 2024

In one sense, the history of what has become the go-to phrase in English for describing the menta... more In one sense, the history of what has become the go-to phrase in English for describing the mental state of consumers of fictions is not long at all: Samuel Taylor Coleridge had no forerunners when in Chapter 14 of the Biographia Literaria of 1818 he defined "poetic faith" as the "willing suspension of disbelief." But in another sense, the history can be considered essentially coterminous with the entire tradition of Western mimetic speculation since Aristotle-one riff among many on the idea that something like belief, however attenuated or modulated, is involved when we read novels and epics or watch tragedies and movies. The primary aim of this chapter is to show how Coleridge's phrase plugs into this tradition of "belief talk" and insinuates itself into common parlance, at least in English. A second aim, more methodological, shadows the first, and involves the assumption that certain variations ol belief talk-be it Coleridge's or others'-mark a decisively new (or modern) understanding of fiction or fictionality. Instead, I argue that the belief idiom, already present in Plato and Aristotle, is simply built out over time: from the Renaissance on, thinkers have taken up the sketchy, sometimes marginal remarks of the Classical tradition, smoothing and systematizing where possible while introducing competing conceptualizations and ways of speaking as necessary. This process of enrichment-which characterizes so much human activity-has not stopped to this day.

La Religieuse et le problème de la sensibilité

Lecteurs et actes de lecture dans les écrits de Diderot, ed. Adrien Paschoud and Thomas Klinkert , 2023

Le problème de la sensibilité dans La Religieuse est d'abord un problème d'interprétation textuel... more Le problème de la sensibilité dans La Religieuse est d'abord un problème d'interprétation textuelle : celui de savoir si le texte doit être considéré comme un paradigme ou comme une subversion de la relation sentimentale. Mais c'est aussi, simultanément, un problème de l'ordre de l'histoire littéraire, dans la mesure où nous supposons couramment que les grands textes 'font' quelque chose à cette histoire, soit en infirmant une tradition, soit en signalant, comme des signes annonciateurs, le futur en lice. Et on présume souvent que Diderot occupe une position charnière en ce qui concerne la sensibilité : il serait son chantre, avant d'être son pourfendeur. Cet admirateur naïf des charmes de l'identification (Eloge de Richardson, Le Fils naturel...) se transformerait donc en un scrutateur lucide et moderne des rouages de la représentation (Paradoxe sur le comédien, Jacques le fataliste). Où en est La Religieuse dans ce revirement-si toutefois revirement il y a ? Cette question pourrait paraître résolue. La Religieuse, nous at on souvent dit, est précisément un texte pris entre deux esthétiques, l'une sentimentale, l'autre autoréflexive. Pour un pan de la critique diderotienne, c'est dans la relation entre les prétendus mémoires de Suzanne Simonin et la fameuse Préface-annexe choisie par Diderot pour leur servir de cadre qu'on voit le moment précis de la mutation. Selon cet argument, les mémoires sont commencés sous le sceau de la sensibilité au début des années 1760 ; ce n'est que plus tard que Diderot va s'emparer d'un texte de Grimm détaillant le complot à l'origine des mémoires pour prendre ses distances par rapport à cette sensibilité et la mettre, selon l'expression de Jean Varloot, en «italique 1 ».

Still Lives and Sublime Vistas: On the Non-Modernity of Diderot's Approach to Genre Painting

Diderot Studies 38, 2022

The most oft-cited and beloved entries in Diderots Salons must be those that deal with Chardin an... more The most oft-cited and beloved entries in Diderots Salons must be those that deal with Chardin and Verner, two painters working in the traditionally less prestigious genres of still life and landscape. The passages are familiar ones: Diderot sticking an imaginary knife in the painted pâté of Chardins Le Bocal d'olives (in the 1763 Salon; VS, IV: 265), or fantasizing a walk around Verner's landscapes (1767; VS, IV: 594-6351)-And many like to locate in them something particularly modern-compared, that is, to Diderot's effulgent praise for a painter like Greuze, whose middlebrow canvases drip with a now-dated hymn to Virtue: "Few art historians have concealed their discomfort with [Greuze's] paintings themselves or their disapproval of the audience who went into raptures before them," writes Michael Fried.2 Notwithstanding Fried's efforts to rehabilitate Diderot's taste for edifyingly domestic themes, that taste can still leave critics wondering, in the words of Christopher Braider, "what someone otherwise so shrewd and forward-looking could possibly have seen in some of the paintings he championed."3 How much safer, then, those passages on the non-moralistic Verner and Chardin, whose paintings provoke in Diderot more properly "aesthetic" musings on the very ontology of painting. "On

e-Journal Philosophie der THE HISTORY OF AN ANACHRONISM. MONTAIGNE, AUGUSTINE, AND THE BECOMING OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY Psychologie

Historians do not care much for anachronisms, and for good reason: on the one hand, anachronism s... more Historians do not care much for anachronisms, and for good reason: on the one hand, anachronism strikes at what they hold dearest, namely, rigorous attention to historical specificity; on the other hand, it serves as a disquieting reminder that interpretations of the past can be articulated only from the perspective of an inescapable present. Notwithstanding this cause for anathemaanachronism as that which must but cannot be eliminated if the historian is to exist-we should keep in mind that anachronisms, being as much the products of temporality as any other cultural formation, are open to historical inquiry. No doubt they have their stories to tell. Take the example of a book that most Montaigne scholars would regard as a particularly egregious anachronism-a volume published in 1935 by Marvin Lowenthal under the title of The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne. Lowenthal's project was as touchingly naïve as it was critically hopeless: he aimed to assemble a "continuous narrative" of Montaigne's life by extracting those sections of the Essais where the author spoke of himself, banishing thereby the digressions and "rank confusion" that for a modern public mar the reading experience: "Aided by scissors, paste, and patience, I have let [Montaigne] retell his life-story." 1 But would Montaigne really have understood what it might mean to tell his "life-story" in the form of a "continuous narrative"? As many recent commentators have hastened to point out, Montaigne's text betrays little sympathy for this steadfastly modern belief in the importance of personal chronology. 2 Armed with famous snippets from the Essais ("C'est un sujet merveilleusement vain, divers et ondoyant, que l'homme" [Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object (I, 1: 9; 5)], "Si je parle diversement de moi, c'est que je me regarde diversement" [If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways (II, 1: 335; 242)], and so on), 3 scholars of late have tried, in the face of readings such as Lowenthal's, to assert the otherness of Montaigne's view of self, a self rooted not in an organically unified life history but in contingency, exemplarity, and palimpsestic infinitude. 4 These corrections, numerous and persuasive, do make the autobiographical anachronism seem a pitfall that threatens a proper understanding of Montaigne and, more generally, of a time in which people did not yet function as self-realizing, coherent

Etat Présent: The Study of Seventeenth-Century French Literature in North America

by Volker Schröder and Nicholas Paige

The French Review, 2017

by Roland Racevskis, Russell Ganim, Nicholas Paige, Volker Schröder, Eric Turcat, Ellen Welch ht... more by Roland Racevskis, Russell Ganim, Nicholas Paige, Volker Schröder, Eric Turcat, Ellen Welch
https://frenchreview.frenchteachers.org/Archives.html
"This Etat présent constitutes a critical survey of books written in seventeenth-century French studies by North American scholars from 2010 to 2016. The bibliography is tightly circumscribed and critically selective, with the aim of bringing notable recent books to the attention of scholars, teachers, and students worldwide. A subsection includes notable scholarly editions and translations. The field has evolved over recent decades in interdisciplinary directions, and the categories we have chosen both reflect these intellectual reconfigurations (e.g., Travel and Empire) while also maintaining some of the more traditional areas of focus (e.g., Theater).

The Comforts of Tartuffe

How To Do Things with Style: Essays in Honor of Joan DeJean, ed. Roland Rascevskis and Amy S. Wyngaard (French Review Book Series, 2022), 11-28., 2022

In the later versions of Tartuffe, Molière raises the stakes of the play by putting Orgon's house... more In the later versions of Tartuffe, Molière raises the stakes of the play by putting Orgon's house at risk. This article situates this preoccupation with real estate in terms of New Paris's urban engineering projects and Louis XIV's attempts to make the city safe for the well-off. In this light, the play's real target becomes less the familiar "bad father" of comedy than the outsider, the homeless gueux who would be best locked up in the Hôpital général-newly founded by precisely the all-seeing prince so flattered in the play's closing scene.

The Artifactuality of Narrative Form: First-Person Novels in France, 1601-1830

Poetics Today, 2018

When literary scholars analyze narrative personhood historically, they typically see periods, exp... more When literary scholars analyze narrative personhood historically, they typically see periods, explained as an effect of deeper psychosocial mutations. Thus the dominant first person of the eighteenth century is the counterpart to a new bourgeois subject, while the third-person omniscience of the nineteenth might reflect an age of increasing state control. The article argues that only our impressionistic use of mostly canonical examples permits such sweeping statements and that the very notion of the period (never mind episteme or paradigm) is undermined by a quantitative examination of the literary archive and its evolution. Based on a systematic sample of French novels over twenty-three decades, this study concludes that narrative forms such as the memoir novel and the epistolary novel behave as successful artifacts. As they spread, they achieve a recognizable form that peaks at a certain point, after which use steadily declines. Because the novel as a whole is composed of multiple forms in constant flux, it becomes impossible to isolate periods of homogeneous practice that could be said to operate according to some deeper sociocultural logic.

Racine, Phèdre, and the French Classical Stage

A History of Modern French Literature, ed. C. Prendergast, Princeton 2017

Examples, Samples, Signs: An Artifactual View of Fictionality in the French Novel, 1681–1830

Historians of the novel typically use examples — a few mostly canonical works — to establish thei... more Historians of the novel typically use examples — a few mostly canonical works — to establish their desired narrative. The problem is that these chosen novels function less as true examples — representatives of a class of objects — than as signs of the invisible process (conceptual or socio-subjective) that is the coming of Modernity. This study approaches the novel’s history, and specifically the oft-debated question of its developing fictionality, by using samples of French novels from 1601 to 1830. This quantitative approach reveals that though the novel can indeed be said to “fictionalize” over the course of the eighteenth century, the customary explanations for the evolution are not supported by the record. I propose of that the novel is not one thing that modernizes, but in fact an ever-changing system of artifacts that should be understood through models provided by studies of technological innovation. Novelistic artifacts are invented, they evolve and spread, and they eventually fall into disuse, all in accordance with the values of their human inventors, and the constraints placed on the latter by the extant artifacts available for modification.

Permanent Re-Enchantments: On Some Literary Uses of the Supernatural from Early Empiricism to Modern Aesthetics

Secular Magic in a Rational Age, 2009

Grandeur et décadence des Grecs: roman et enchâssement au dix-septième siècle

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour P.U.F.. © P.U.F.. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.

Diderot démystifié: Les Lectures de La Religieuse

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour P.U.F.. © P.U.F.. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.

Rousseau's Readers Revisited: The Aesthetics of La Nouvelle Héloïse

Eighteenth-century Studies, 2008

The Storyteller and the Book: Scenes of Narrative Production in the Early French Novel

Bardot and Godard in 1963 (Historicizing the Postmodern Image

Representations, 2004

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

“L’affaire des poisons et l’imaginaire de l’enquête: De Molière à Thomas Corneille.” Littératures Classiques 40 (2000), 195-208.

“Manchette, ou le mutisme.” Poétique 120 (1999), 477-94.

“Je, l’Autre et la possession; ou, pourquoi l’autobiographie démoniaque n’a jamais constitué un genre.” L’Autre au XVIIe siècle: Actes de Miami. Eds. R. Heyndels and B. Woshinsky. Tübingen: PFSCL, 1999, 385-92.

Pour lire les clefs de l’Ancien Régime. Anatomie d’un protocole interprétatif. By Anna Arzoumanov. Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2013. H-France Review, Vol. 15 (June 2015), No. 82

Rococo Fiction in France, 1600-1715: Seditious Frivolity (Lewisberg [PA]: Bucknell University Press, 2012). By Allison Stedman. The French Review 87.3 (2014), 280.

The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). By Erec R. Koch. Romanic Review 104.1-2 (2014), 170-72.

La France galante: Essai historique sur une catégorie culturelle, de ses origines jusqu’à la Révolution (Paris: PUF, 2008). By Alain Viala. French Studies 65.2 (2011), 252-53.

French Studies, 2011

Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). By Mitchell Greenberg. French Forum 28.3 (2003), 121-24.

French Forum, 2003

Crime Fictions (Yale French Studies 108 [2005]). Ed. Andrea Goulet and Susanna Lee. Symposium 61.3 (2007), 217-220.

Symposium-a Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 2007

The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). By Neil Kenny. MLQ 68.1 (2007), 119-22.

The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography (review

Biography, 2005