Plus ultra: Baroque encyclopedism and modernity.
Item
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Title
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Plus ultra: Baroque encyclopedism and modernity.
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Identifier
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AAI3024816
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identifier
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3024816
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Creator
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Luisetti, Federico.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Robert Dombroski
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Date
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2001
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Language
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Italian
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Philosophy | History of Science
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Abstract
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My dissertation---a contribution to the history of ideas---analyzes the topic of encyclopedism through the study of the Baroque encyclopedias and their influence on the totalizing books of Enlightenment, early German Romanticism and philosophical Idealism. My principal aim is to cast light on a relatively obscure phenomenon, overshadowed by the extremely well documented encyclopedic procedures of the Renaissance and of the French Enlightenment. In doing so, I discuss many philosophical conceptions of the "absolutism of the Book", such as Hans Blumenberg's interpretation of legibility and Umberto Eco's semiotic encyclopedia.;The Introduction approaches the Western encyclopedic tradition by grasping its dependance on the theoretical issue of eschatology, and by proposing a basic typology of Baroque encyclopedias: rhetorical, magical and rationalistic. The First Part ("Baroque Encyclopedism") traces the development of Baroque and modern encyclopedism out of the late Renaissance paradigms (artes memoriae, theatri and topicae) through a close textual analysis of Johann Heinrich Alsted's Encyclopaedia (1630), Athanasius Kircher's Arca Noe (1675), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz' Horizon de la doctrine humaine (1693).;The Second Part ("Nec Ultra") focuses on the French Encyclopedie (1751--1772), on Novalis's Allgemeine Brouillon (1789/99), and on the Heideggerian interpretation of the Idealistic concept of System (in the Schellings Abhandlung Uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 1936). I argue that, after Leibniz' reconsideration of the "horizon" of a knowledge (doctrina ), any modern encyclopedic attempt necessarily developed its own conception of infinity, thus reshaping the original eschatological dimension of the Book.;The conclusion indicates the dissolution of the Baroque thematic of encyclopedism in the positivistic and historicist emergence of a dictionarial lexicography, and in the nihilistic ideal of a "hollow book" shared by both Mallarme and Flaubert.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
