The literature and art of the French Enlightenment is everywhere
marked by an intense awareness of the moment. The parallel projects
of living in, representing, and learning from the moment run
through the Enlightenment's endeavors as tokens of an ambition and
a heritage imposing its only and ultimately impossible cohesion. In
this illuminating study, Thomas M. Kavanagh argues that
Enlightenment culture and its tensions, contradictions, and
achievements flow from a subversive attention to the present as
present, freed from the weight of past and future. Examining a wide
sweep of literary and artistic culture, Kavanagh argues against the
traditional view of the Age of Reason as one of coherent,
recognizable ideology expressed in a structured narrative form. In
literature, he analyzes the moment at work in the inebriating
lightness of Marivaux's repartee; the new-found freedom of
Lahontan's and Rousseau's ideals of a consciousness limited to the
present; Diderot's championing of Epicurean epistemology;
Graffigny's portrayal of abrupt cultural displacement; and
Casanova's penchant for chance's redefining moment. The moment in
art theory and practice is explored in such forms as de Piles's
defense of color; Du Bos's foregrounding of perception; Watteau's
indulgence in a corporeal present; Chardin's dismantling of
mimesis; and Boucher's and Fragonard's thematics of desire.
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