Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France by Elena Russo

Abstract

538 Reviews section answer that theperiod ischaracterized not somuch by the triumph of reason as by a crisis of confidence in reason. The relevance of some contributions is not entirely evident, but several articles stand out for their insight and acuity; Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert plots a course through Leibniz and Locke, Bayle and English gardens tochallenge Michel Foucault's account of theEnlightenment's sense of time; Antony McKenna examines the diffusion of clandestine philosophy following the Revocation of theEdict ofNantes, andMichael Moriarty, focusing onMalebranche's analysis ofprejudice, convincingly argues for that theologian's place in thecritical En lightenment tradition; Kate Tunstall proposes that the controversy sparked by Carl van Loo's Sacrifice d'Iphigenie of I757 (sadly not reproduced here), which offersup Agamemnon's now unveiled face to theviewer, hinges on themajor aesthetic debates of theday-the expressivity of thebody, the relationship between painting and poetry, and the role of the spectator; and in his clear and erudite examination of themotto sapere aude, Russell Goulbourne demonstrates how Horace was used, contested, and remodelled by thephilosophes. A number of articles in thisvolume revisit theconcept of anagnorisis or recognition, a theme central to issues of subjectivity, sensibility, and interiority (though apparently not divinity) inwritings by such figures as Prevost (Alison Roberts), Sade (Alain Schorderet), Riccoboni (Emilie Cauvin and Olivier Delers), and Voltaire (Nathalie Kremer). Two articles on Diderot are of particular interest:Olivier Tonneau deftly unravels the recognition ofMlle d'Aisnon's past in Jacques lefataliste to argue that interiority is an effectnot a cause of behaviour; and Laurence Marie unpacks the recognition scene inLe Fils naturel to discuss the limits ofmimetic representation. Questions of recognition and subjectivity return in one of the volume's two articles on the history of art:Angelica Goodden proposes that Rousseau disliked Ramsay's portrait of him because the Scottish artist, despite his own sophisticated scepticism about perception, was seemingly incapable of recog nizing and presenting his subject's individual and essentially interior personhood; and in a rich analysis of twoworks by Chardin, Kate Tunstall shows how Diderot engages with and develops Pliny's account of illusion. The diversity ofmethodology and subject-matter in this volume happily attests to the interdisciplinary nature of high-quality research into eighteenth-century thought, art, and letters. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER THOMAS WYNN Styles ofEnlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship inEighteenth-Century France. By ELENARusso. (Parallax Re-visions ofCulture and Society) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2007. 346 pp. ?36.50. ISBN 978-0-80I8-8476-4. Styles ofEnlightenment puts Pierre Carlet deMarivaux (i688-I 763) at the nexus of Enlightenment debates on ethics and aesthetics. Elena Russo skips along oft-travelled routes of Enlightenment scholarship on the public sphere, taste, and gender, then strikes off into the remote area of thephilosophes' engagement with theAugustinian tradition on the question of grace and emerges with a pioneering, well-developed story about an Augustinian literary theory.The success of the book lies inRusso's ability to stitch together eighteenth-century literaryand ethical theorywith Augus tinian theology and sociology. Over eight chapters Russo surveys the clash of the goutmoderne and the gou'tan tique through an extensive discussion ofMarivaux's corpus, and the related concerns of thephilosophes. Russo's approach to her topic is literary; she outlines the decline of goutmoderne and its eclipse by the gout antique in terms of a literarywatershed. The self-referential, discursive, often ironic and always self-conscious goutmoderne ofMarivaux gave way to the grand transporting narrativemodelled on ancient liter ary forms exemplified byVoltaire and laterphilosophes of theHigh Enlightenment. MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 539 Russo fillsout this frameworkwith a cultural history of theatre (Chapter 8), a discus sion ofMontesquieu (Chapters 6 and 7), and a particularly suggestive analysis of the continuing importance ofAugustinianism toLes Lumieres. In essence, Russo argues that theHigh Enlightenment was a response toMarivaux, and viaMarivaux, to the Augustinian tradition. This isnotRusso's most conclusive argument, and itremains a sustained but secon dary concern, with the exception ofChapters 2 and 5, ofwhich it is the central focus. Despite the status of this intellectual history as secondary toRusso's more conclusive literaryand cultural analyses, her presentation of theEnlightenment encounter with Augustinianism is themost significant of her contributions to...