Lights in space

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 171-186

  Brewer, Daniel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 14844315177     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2004.0003     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989)
2. "Of Other Spaces," trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16:1 (1986), 22
3. Originally a lecture given in 1967, "Des espaces autres" was published in Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité 5 (October 1984): 46-49
4. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985)
5. The question is how to think our relation to this 'past place' without nostalgia. See Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996)
6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984)
7. The narrative of such a disciplinary reconfiguration runs through Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: Norton, 1994)
8. See Thomas Bender, "Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945-1995," Daedalus, 126:1 (1997): 1-38
9. Daniel Roche, Histoire des choses banales: naissance de la consommation, XVIIe-XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1997)
10. A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600- 1800, trans. Brian Peace (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000)
11. The forerunner in this field is Ferdinand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècles, 3 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1979)
12. Other examples include Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997)
13. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962)
14. Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976)
15. Rebecca Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000)
16. Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996)
17. Frédéric Mauro, Histoire du café (Paris: Desjonquères, 2002)
18. and N. Harwich, Histoire du chocolat (Paris: Desjonquères, 1992)
19. For a history of French historiography that provides a backdrop for this material history, see Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992). In the United States, this concern with the material object is to be understood, in part, by the development of the paradigm of cultural studies
20. Invoking a distinction made by Michel de Certeau, one could say that these places become spaces by being worked upon by a set of practices or operations. "L'espace," writes de Certeau, "est un lieu pratiqué," just as a street as defined by urbanism is tranformed into a space by the individuals who walk there. See "Récits d'espace," in L'Invention du quotidien (Paris: 10/18, 1980)
21. The groundbreaking work on this construct remains Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994)
22. A certain dizziness sets in after too many disciplinary turns are coined. Recently, see Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999)
23. Thomas M. Kavanagh, The Esthetics of the Moment: Literature and Art in the French Enlightenment (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 13
24. Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998)
25. Goldhammer makes this observation in "Man in the Mirror: Language, the Enlightenment, and the Postmodern," in Postmodernism and the Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Gordon (New York: Routledge, 2001), 37
26. See Henri Cavaillès, La Route française: son histoire, sa fonction (Paris: Armand Colin, 1946)
27. See Josef W. Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660-1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987)
28. For a more theoretical reflection, see Christian Jacob, L'Empire des cartes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992)
29. See Louis Bergeron, et al., L'Espace français (Paris: Seuil, 1989)
30. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992)
31. Parties to this scientific debate did not split according to such neatly nationalist lines, however. Maupertuis himself doubted the accuracy of the French hypothesis, put forward by Cassini; and even after Cassini's error was made clear, Fontenelle continued to defend the French position. For a compendious study of French cartography, see Numa Broc, La Géographie des philosophes: géographes et voyageurs français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1975)
32. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 34
33. Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l'espace, 4th ed. (Paris: Anthropos, 2000), 320 (my translation)
34. Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha M. Houle (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988)
35. Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine: spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Pans: Minuit, 1981)
36. Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995)
37. Elias's study of the early modern period has been instrumental in bringing about this shift. See, in particular, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978)
38. and The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983)
39. Scott, The Rococo Interior, 252
40. Lefebvre, La Production de l'espace, p. 112
41. See Georges van den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992)
42. Srinivas Ara vamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999)
43. My translation. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 17 vols. (Paris: 1751-72), 5:8. "Un idiome commun serait l'unique moyen d'établir une correspondance qui s'étendît à toutes les parties du genre humain, et qui les liguât contre la Nature, à laquelle nous avons sans cesse à faire violence, soit dans le physique, soit dans le moral. Supposé cet idiome admis et fixé, aussitôt les notions deviennent permanentes; la distance des temps disparoît; les lieux se touchent; il se forme des liaisons entre tous les points habités de l'espace et de la durée, et tous les êtres vivants & pensants s'entretiennent."
44. The Encyclopédie is thus the epistemological version of what Armand Mattelart calls the eighteenth-century's "cosmopolitan imaginary," which involves as well either a socio-economic narrative of a market-driven deterritorialization of space or an ethico-political narrative that extends national values to a universal level. Histoire de l'utopie planétaire: de la cité prophétique à la société globale (Paris: La Découverte, 1999)
45. Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 325
46. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000)
47. Timothy Reiss, Tragedy and Truth: Studies in the Development of a Renaissance and Neoclassical Discourse (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980)
48. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980)