Sublime Cornerstones

Review of Nigel Smith, Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare; Paradise Lost, introduced by Philip Pullman; Paradise Lost, ed Barbara Lewalski; Milton and Toleration, eds. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer; Concise Companion to Milton, ed Angelica Duran.

Narrative Diagrammatik. Mit einer Modellanalyse: Die Diagrammatik des "Decameron"

Taking as a starting point the seeming inconsistency of late-medieval romances notoriously 'run wild' (verwildert), this article is concerned with the description of an abstract form of narrative coherence that is based on the notion of the diagrammatic. In a first section, this concept is illustrated in a simplified manner by an analysis of Boccaccio's Decameron based on two levels of spatial structure: that of the autograph Berlin manuscript (Codex Hamilton 90) and that of the recipient's mental visualisation of the relations between the frame and the tales of the work. It is argued that the connectivity of the work as a whole depends on the perception of those two spatial representations of the plot. A second section develops this concept in a more theoretical fashion, drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce's notion of diagrammatic reasoning as a way of perceiving relations through mental and material topological representations. Correspondingly, a view of narrative is proposed that does not depend on the traditional perspective of temporal sequence but emphasizes the spatial structure of literary narrative. It is argued that these conditions form the primary ontological mode of narrative, whereas the temporal development of a story is an aesthetic illusion that has been specifically stimulated by the narrative conventions of approximately the past three centuries and must thus be considered a secondary effect. To conclude, an interpretation in miniature of an aspect of Heinrich von Neustadt's Apollonius von Tyrland that seems to have 'run wild' is undertaken from a diagrammatic perspective.

Ethiques de la description: naissance de l'imagination typologique en France, dans le roman et la sociologie (1820-1860)

Résumé: Ce travail d'histoire comparée de la littérature et de la sociologie s'interroge sur l'émergence de la notion de type dans les pratiques de description du monde social au cours des années 1820-1860. A partir de l'analyse des opérations de schématisation engagées par Honoré Balzac dans La Comédie humaine et par Frédéric Le Play dans Les Ouvriers européens, soit deux oeuvres que tout semble éloigner du point de vue de leurs ambitions, de leur forme, et de la trajectoire de leur auteur, mais qui toutes deux placent cependant la typification au centre de leur dispositif, il s'est agi de produire une histoire de l'imagination typologique, et des ontologies, sociales ou non, qui lui furent associées. Aussi le corpus intègre-t-il des textes d'histoire naturelle, de sciences médicales, d'histoire, de chimie, de géologie, de métallurgie, et, bien évidemment, les genres du roman sentimental, du roman historique et de la littérature panoramique, ainsi que les enquêtes ouvrières et la statistique. Abstract: This work offers a compared history of literature and sociology in France between 1820 and 1860. During that period, the notion of type appears in the literary and sociological descriptions of social reality, and becomes more and more central in the apprehension of the differenciations among classes, communities or groups. Based on the analysis of Honoré Balzac's La Comédie humaine and Frédéric Le Play's Les Ouvriers européens, this study shows that these two series of novels and of workers' monographies put typification at the center of their descriptive ambition. More broadly, it proposes a history of the uses of a typological imagination and of the ontologies, above all social, that were underlying them. That is why the texts also taken into account in this study ranges from natural history, medical sciences, history, chemistry geology and metallurgy, to the sentimental novel, the historical novel and the panoramic literature, as well as social inquiries and statistics.

Review of Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. Milton and Toleration.

"Review of Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. Milton and Toleration."