Abstract
In the last decades of the seventeenth and the first decades of the eighteenth centuries, European thought saw the emergence of the idea of a “world” in many fields. In Germany, G.W. Leibniz theorized the concept of “possible worlds”—the idea that our reality can be viewed as one of a nearly infinite number of possible other states of being through which God sorted in the process of deciding how the human world should unfold (1686). In Italy, Giambattista Vico proposed studying the history of human societies in contextualist terms—emphasizing, in other words, attention to the particular “world” in which people within a particular society at a particular time operated (1725).1 In France, Madame de Lafayette wrote La Princesse de Clèves (1678), often considered the first modern European novel because of its treatment of character psychology, thus ushering in an artistic period, which continues today, of constructing texts for mass consumption that transport readers into a “world” described through a character’s distinct, personal perspective.2 At about the same time as these changes, scientists began to develop modern theories of human reproduction by postulating the existence of the female egg and shortly after using the newly developed microscope to study the composition of sperm. Although it would be some time before the biology of reproduction was fully understood, the basic components of human generation were discovered by the beginning of the eighteenth century.
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1 Conceiving Modern Narrative
This is, of course, only one of many ways to define the much discussed “rise of the novel.” On the Princess de Clèves as a forerunner of the modern novelistic conflict between “private lives and public stories,” see William Ray, Story and History: Narrative Authority and Social Identity in the Eighteenth-Century French and English Novel (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990).
Michael Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), p. 104, § 349.
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 164.
Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 1.
On the incompleteness of fictional entities, see Ruth Ronen, “Completing the Incompleteness of Fictional Entities,” Poetics Today 9 (1988), pp. 497–514.
Robert Howell, “Fictional Objects: How they Are and How they Aren’t,” Poetics 8 (1979), p. 139.
For a recent overview of debates about fictional objects and paraphrase see Charles Crittenden, Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 40.
Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Avon Books, 1971), p. 80.
G.W. Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), p. 41.
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: Modern Library, 1953), p. 504.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: Penguin, 1965), p. 35.
In fact, many critics have suggested that the modern novel is inherently linked to the search for such genealogical origins. See, e.g., Christine van Boheemen, The Novel as Family Romance: Language, Gender, and Authority from Fielding to Joyce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife (New York: Harperflamingo, 1998), p. 200.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 84.
Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 161.
C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 36.
Albert Russell Ascoli, “The Vowels of Authority (Dante’s Convivio IV. vi 3–4),” Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), p. 25.
Evelyn Birge Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire (New York: New York University Press, 1989), p. 112.
Jane H.M. Taylor, “The Sense of a Beginning: Genealogy and Plentitude in Late Medieval Narrative Cycles,” Transtextualities: Of Cycles and Cyclicity in Medieval French Literature, ed. Sara Strum-Maddox and Donald Maddox (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996), p. 96.
William W. Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 9.
Carla Freccero, Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 12.
H. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of Äs If”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925).
See Alan Bewell, “An Issue of Monstrous Desire: Frankenstein and Obstetrics,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (1988), pp. 105–28.
Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 121–22.
Barbara Johnson, “My Monster/My Self,” Diacritics 12.2 (Summer 1982), p. 7.
Qtd. Howard B. Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), vol. II, p. 731.
Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 113–15; 729b 15–23.
See Joseph Needham’s History of Embryology, 2nd ed. rev. (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), which characterizes ancient embryological theories in general as denying either maternity or paternity (43).
F.J. Cole, Early Theories of Sexual Generation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 43.
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 23.
Robert Silverberg, “Foreword,” Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex, ed. Ellen Datlow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. xi.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 12.
Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 22.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 171.
François Rabelais, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J.M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1955), p. 74.
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), p. 135.
Lubomír Doleˇzel, “Extensional and Intensional Narrative Worlds,” Poetics 8 (1979), p. 196.
Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 32.
John O’Neill, Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 25.
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of An Ex-Coloured Man (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), p. 211.
Elaine K. Ginsburg, “Introduction: The Politics of Passing,” Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 4.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 162.
Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 150.
Robert Coover, “The Babysitter,” Pricksongs & Descants (New York: New American Library, 1969), pp. 206–39.
William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p. 25.
Steven Shaviro, “Two Lessons from Burroughs,” Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 40–1.
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© 2003 Daniel Punday
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Punday, D. (2003). Conceiving Modern Narrative. In: Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981653_2
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