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ISBN: 9780226612218 9780226612355 022661235X Year: 2019 Publisher: Chicago University of Chicago Press
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When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism-the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci's imaginative experiments with nature's destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare's tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.
Thematology --- Comparative literature --- Psychological study of literature --- Catastrophical, The, in art. --- Catastrophical, The, in literature. --- Catastrophical, The. --- Catastrophizing. --- Catastrophizing --- Catastrophical, The --- Catastrophical, The, in art --- Catastrophical, The, in literature --- Disasters --- Ontology --- Tragic, The --- Change --- Expectation (Psychology) --- Worry --- E-books
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ISBN: 9781800856004 1800856008 Year: 2022 Publisher: Oxford : Voltaire Foundation,
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How do communities tell and retell stories of catastrophe to explain their own origins, imagine their future, and work for their survival? This book contends that such stories are central to how communities claim a position within history. It explores this question, so vital for our present moment, through narratives produced in eighteenth-century France: a tumultuous period when a new understanding of a properly 'modern' national history was being elaborated. Who gets to belong to the modern era? And who or what is relegated to a gothic, barbarous or medieval past? Is an enlightened future assured, or is a return to a Dark Age inevitable? Following barbarians, bastards, usurpers, prophets and Revolutionary martyrs through stories of catastrophes real and imagined, the book traces how narrative temporalities become historicities: visions of the laws which govern the past, present and future. Ultimately it argues that the complex temporality of catastrophe offers a privileged insight into how a modern French historical consciousness was formed out of the multiple pasts and possible futures that coexisted alongside the age of Enlightenment. Further, examining the tension between a desire to place the imagined community definitively beyond catastrophic times, and a fascination with catastrophe in its revelatory or regenerative aspect, it offers an important historical perspective on the presence of this same tension in the stories of catastrophe that we tell in our own multiple, tumultuous present.
French literature --- Narration (Rhetoric) --- Catastrophical, The, in literature --- Narrative (Rhetoric) --- Narrative writing --- Rhetoric --- Discourse analysis, Narrative --- Narratees (Rhetoric) --- History and criticism --- Catastrophical, The, in literature. --- Literature and history --- Littérature française --- Narration. --- Catastrophe (Philosophie) dans la littérature. --- Littérature et histoire --- History and criticism. --- Histoire et critique. --- Arnaud, François-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d', --- Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, --- Latude, Henri Masers de, --- Sade, --- Thematology --- anno 1700-1799
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