No Fixed Address: Pascal, Cervantes, and the Changing Function of Literary Communication in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

In recent years, literary criticism has focused ever more systematically on the historical development of the relationship between literary forms of communication and the cultural and political knowledge formations in which they are embedded. As a contribution to this greater trend, this essay attempts to situate the historical origins of a modern concept of literature in early modern Europe and to define its specific function in an epistemological perspective. Pascal's Pensées provide a contemporary heuristic with which the new function of fiction is analyzed, using Cervantes' Don Quijote as a paradigmatic example. Combining key elements from the social history of knowledge, systems theory, and reader-response theory, the essay discusses the methodological problems of conceiving fictionality in ahistoric terms and of attributing a system status to literature. As an alternative to these approaches, it proposes a model of discursive virtualization to describe the changing function of literary communication around 1600.