This is Enlightenment

Abstract

This is Enlightenment. Ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 568 pp. $75.00.Reviewed by Matthew BinneyEchoing President Barack Obama when he said at his inauguration speech, The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether works, Clifford Siskin pushed attendees to consider new questions at 2011 meeting of American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He asked them, does our knowledge work in world? His appeal to audience isolates main focus of his co-edited book with William Warner, This is Enlightenment. That collection prompts us to ask how our modes of interacting with tools produce particular kinds of knowledge. A concern with tools animates their notion of when Siskin and Warner define Enlightenment as event in history of mediation (1). Specifically, they argue that new tools developed in eighteenth century produced new forms of knowledge, different ways of knowing, and new forms of connectivities, a word Siskin used during his presentation at ASE CS conference and one that fits well with authors' argument in book.By focusing on new forms of interaction, communication, and knowledge, Siskin and Warner challenge critics to unmoor ourselves from more-traditional critical approaches (such as seeing Enlightenment as a period denomination or as a thematic designation), which fall reductive linearity of causality (9). Instead, critics might consider Enlightenment as an event, which direct[s] attention to possibility of its singularity (9). Then critics would be sensitive to contingency of time and place and how event links to elements of which is not a product but an effect. This method requires critics to focus on practical matters such as dates, for instance, which were applied retroactively to Enlightenment label; label's ongoing usefulness lies in improving ways that we have already applied it (9). How can we make Enlightenment label useful and practical, and how can work for us? Siskin and Warner's edited collection lays out a pragmatic historicism.The final essay in collection by Michael McKeon perhaps best sketches broader possibilities of such a pragmatic methodology in describing literature as an elevated kind of (403). He argues, novels are experiments that capture of senses . . . by controlling for variables of time, place, and persons (403), and empirical nature of literature is most importantly confirmed by formality and figurative thickness of its texts, which is history of an experimental between sensible actuality and imaginative virtuality. Therefore, literary end-product of itself has character of an experiment (408). Literature is an in time, place, and persons; tests how people world and how they reflect upon that experience, which involves reflexivity (407), testing practicality of certain beliefs, principles, and practices. This method is productive because outlines and investigates material and conceptual means of producing types of understanding, especially as they relate to our own current notions of mediation.Another important essay, John Bender's Novel Knowledge, parallels McKeon's notion of literature as and laboratory, arguing the earlier novel did also participate in aspirations and uncertainties about knowledge, experience, and pervasive during scientific revolution (286). For example, Fielding's continual presence in Tom Jones . . . points to work's organization of scattered experience (290) concentrating those into focused and methodical order of experiment (290) in which Fielding puts his leading character laboratory and asks readers to observe his behavior (290-91). …