Common sense: The rise of narrative in the age of self-evidence
Item
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Title
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Common sense: The rise of narrative in the age of self-evidence
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:9025e243aeff:11109
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identifier
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11321
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Creator
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Shanafelt, Carrie D.,
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Contributor
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David H. Richter
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | Philosophy | Epistemology | Rhetoric | Fielding | Hume | Johnson | Novel
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Abstract
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This dissertation describes the role that eighteenth-century British popular fiction played in the development of "common sense" rhetoric as an appeal to a normative, imagined community. The transformation of common sense from its classical sense, as an internal faculty that organizes sensory perception into cognition, into a normative rhetorical device occurred across a period of time in which the destabilizing effects of social upheaval during the seventeenth century gave way to the normative pressure of the rise of the public sphere in the form of a burgeoning print culture.;Imagined communities of public readers are the inventions of texts that employ a self-reflexive rhetorical strategy of common-sense rhetoric. This strategy offers the reader the satisfaction of belonging to a normative, imagined community of readers through consensus with the moral conclusions drawn from a realistic narrative, which the author insists is already familiar to the "normal" reader from experience. Although this rhetorical strategy first appears in epistemological and moral philosophy of the early eighteenth century, it is greatly impacted by the aesthetic developments of realistic fiction of the mid-eighteenth century, especially in fictional representations of sexual desire and morality.;Common Sense: The Rise of Narrative in the Age of Self-Evidence examines the relationships between the philosophical prose of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume and the literary and critical prose of Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. It explores the role of normative imagined communities of readers in sexually explicit literature of the eighteenth century, as well as in critical, religious, and literary responses to these texts. The final chapter analyzes the challenges to epistemologically and morally normative rhetoric raised by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Each of these texts demonstrates its author's unique conceptions of the imagined reader, individual subjectivity, and the possibility of establishing epistemological consensus through shared narratives of experience. Rather than attempting to describe the imagined public as containing a subset of actual historical readers, this dissertation explores a variety of rhetorical representations of the imagined reader in eighteenth-century British texts in order to compare experimental uses of narrative in philosophy, fiction, and literary criticism.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
