Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T23:37:16.826Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Encyclopedist and the Peruvian Princess: The Poetics of Illegibility in French Enlightenment Book Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lorraine Piroux
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study focuses on the French Enlightenment's fascination with the materiality of non-Western and nonalphabetic scripts in the broader context of the history of the book. By examining definitions of writing in the Encyclopédie as well as Françoise de Graffigny's novelistic appropriation of the Inca quipu script in Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747), I argue that there emerges from these texts a conception of the literary sign capable of challenging the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment printed book: dematerialized textuality and absolute legibility. Shaped by the scriptural imagination of eighteenth-century book culture, literature was able to acquire full aesthetic legitimacy only insofar as it was defined as the other of the purely semantic text. (LP)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 1: Special Topic: The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature , January 2006 , pp. 107 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Altman, Janet Gurkin. “Graffigny's Epistemology and the Emergence of Third-World Ideology.” Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Fiction. Ed. Goldsmith, Elizabeth C. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989. 172–202.Google Scholar
Ascher, Martha, and Ascher, Robert. The Code of the Quipu. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1981.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. Le degré zéro de l’écriture. Le degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques. Paris: Seuil, 1972. 5–65.Google Scholar
Breton, André. Je vois, j'imagine. Poèmes-objets. Ed. Paz, Octavio. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.Google Scholar
Brokaw, Galen. “The Poetics of Khipu Historiography: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's Nueva corónica and the Relación de los quipucamayos.” Latin American Research Review 38.3 (2003): 111–47.Google Scholar
Brokaw, Galen. “Toward Deciphering the Khipu: A Critical Analysis of Urton's Binary Code Theory.” Rev. of Sign of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records, by Gary Urton. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Brotherston, Gordon. Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through Their Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Brotherston, Gordon. Painted Books from Mexico: Codices in UK Collections and the World They Represent. London: British Museum, 1995.Google Scholar
Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Chartier, Roger. Introduction. A History of Reading in the West. Ed. Cavallo and Chartier. Trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999. 1–36.Google Scholar
Chartier, Roger, and Martin, Henri-Jean, eds. Histoire de l’édition française. Vol. 3. Paris: Promodis, 1982–86. 4 vols.Google Scholar
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de. Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines. Paris: Vrin, 2002.Google Scholar
d'alembert, Jean. “Discours préliminaire.” Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Vol. 1. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. 75–184.Google Scholar
Darnton, Robert. Gens de lettres et gens du livre. Paris: Jacob, 1992.Google Scholar
Delon, Michel. L'idée d’énergie au tournant des Lumières (1750–1820). Paris: PUF, 1988.Google Scholar
Diderot, Denis. Éloge de Richardson. Œuvres esthétiques. Ed. Vernière, Paul. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1994. 29–48.Google Scholar
Diderot, Denis. Lettre sur les sourds et muets. Lettre sur les aveugles [et] Lettre sur les sourds et muets. Paris: Flammarion, 2000. 87–137.Google Scholar
Diderot, Denis, and d'Alembert, Jean, eds. Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. CD-ROM. Marsanne: Redon, 2000.Google Scholar
Dobie, Madeleine. “The Subject of Writing: Language, Epistemology, and Identity in the Lettres d'une Péruvienne.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 38 (1997): 99–117.Google Scholar
Doolittle, James. “Jaucourt's Use of Source Material in the Encyclopédie.” MLN 65 (1950): 387–92.Google Scholar
Douthwaite, Julia V. Exotic Women: Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Régime France. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.Google Scholar
Drucker, Johanna. Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics. New York: Granary, 1998.Google Scholar
Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–23. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Google Scholar
Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca. Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. Trans. Livermore, Harold V. 2 vols. Austin: U of Texas P, 1966.Google Scholar
Gervais, Bertrand. “Presbytère, hiéroglyphes et dernier mot: Pour une définition de l'illisibilité.” L'illisible. Spec. issue of La lecture littéraire 3 (1999): 205–28.Google Scholar
Graffigny, Françoise de. Lettres d'une Péruvienne. Lettres portugaises, Lettres d'une Péruvienne et autres romans d'amour par lettres. Paris: Flammarion, 1983. 237–363.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Burger, Thomas. Cambridge: MIT P, 1989.Google Scholar
Jaucourt, chevalier de. “Écriture.” Diderot and d'Alembert.Google Scholar
Jaucourt, chevalier de. “Hiéroglyphe.” Diderot and d'Alembert.Google Scholar
Jaucourt, chevalier de. “Quipos.” Diderot and d'Alembert.Google Scholar
Julien, Catherine. Reading Inca History. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000.Google Scholar
Kavanagh, Thomas M. Esthetics of the Moment: Literature and Art in the French Enlightenment. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornacker, David, trans. Letters from a Peruvian Woman. By Françoise de Graffigny. Introd. Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller. Texts and Trans. New York: MLA, 1993.Google Scholar
Locke, Leland L. The Ancient Quipu or Peruvian Knot Record. New York: Amer. Museum of Natural History, 1923.Google Scholar
Malesherbes. Mémoires sur la librairie. Mémoire sur la liberté de la presse. Ed. Chartier, Roger. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1994.Google Scholar
Mallinson, Jonathan, ed. Lettres d'une Péruvienne. By Françoise de Graffigny. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002.Google Scholar
Mignolo, Walter D. “Signs and Their Transmission: The Question of the Book in the New World.” Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Ed. Boone, ElizabethHill and Mignolo, . Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 220–70.Google Scholar
Miller, Nancy K. “The Knot, the Letter, and the Book: Graffigny's Peruvian Letters.” Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. 127–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Essai sur l'origine des langues. Bordeaux: Ducros, 1968.Google Scholar
Undank, Jack. “Graffigny's Room of Her Own.” French Forum 13 (1988): 297–318.Google Scholar
Viardot, Jean. “Livres rares et pratique bibliophilique.” Le livre triumphant, 1660–1830. Ed. Martin, Henri-Jean and Chartier, Roger. Paris: Promodis, 1984. 446–67. Vol. 2 of Histoire de l’édition française.Google Scholar
Wittman, Reinhard. “Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?” A History of Reading in the West. Ed. Cavallo, Guglielmo and Chartier, Roger. Trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. Amherst: U of Massachussets P, 1999. 284–312.Google Scholar