Reading machines: Fiction, femininity, automaton in ancien regime France.
Item
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Title
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Reading machines: Fiction, femininity, automaton in ancien regime France.
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Identifier
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AAI9510684
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identifier
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9510684
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Creator
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Liu, Catherine.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Nancy K. Miller
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Date
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1994
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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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Literature, Romance | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the ways in which the automaton is a figure for various problems of difference in the novel of ancien regime France. In the midst of this work, I have tried to demonstrate that the figuration of difference itself is shaped and formed by the ways in which sexual difference is represented in the work of Lafayette, Graffigny, La Mettrie, Rousseau and Laclos. I examine sexual difference in its relationship to classical technology as it is represented by the automaton. The automaton is a very specific sort of machine: singular, precious and aristocratic, it embodies an existence defined and limited by the parameters of its mechanics. Its limitations serve to illustrate the constraints of convention and the demands of bienseance that are so carefully respected in La Princesse de Cleves and so harshly criticized by Graffigny and Rousseau. The ancien regime's fascination with these objects can be read as a fascination for the ways in which automata mirrored and replicated something about the conditions of worldly existence. Worldliness is the rubric under which I investigate the novel and the automaton together. The novel was the form in which the tensions of worldly life were most carefully represented: the conflicts of external exigencies, internalized injunctions and passion were nowhere more carefully examined, especially insofar as they shaped the lives of women who wrote and read these early modern fictions. The early modern novel represents a certain kind of feminine initiation.;In the midst of this literary study, the career of Jacques Vaucanson, the great automaton maker and engineer is explored in some detail: as a historical figure, his success in mid-century Paris seems to be an exemplary one. The formation of early modern science and the seductions of worldly Parisian life play equally important roles in his career. He crosses paths with an extraordinary eighteenth-century woman, Therese des Hayes, the wife of Vaucanson's patron. Her story sheds a different kind of light on the various fictional narratives: its tragic and triumphant dimensions both exceeds and supports the fictional accounts of feminine destinies.;Finally, this work attempts to show that writing produces mechanical or machine-like effects. When we take into account both feminist, psychoanalytic and deconstructive strategies of literary criticism, we can show that a text functions in a mechanical way and can be read as such. Meanings are produced and reproduced, function independently and autonomously of any authorial intentionality: this is the automaton-effect of linguistic production.;In the fictions I examine, women as representatives of the feminine, seem to take the blame for the toll that sexual difference takes. The ancien regime writers that I read in this dissertation demonstrate uncanny insight into this state of affairs. The strategies that they describe in their work seem to be signs of an early modernism. The ways in which they avoid and confront the question of sexual difference, textual autonomy and mechanical reproduction of the human anticipate the ideological limitations of our own post-modernism. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).
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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.
