Ressources numériques en sciences humaines et sociales OpenEdition Nos plateformes OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypothèses Calenda Bibliothèques OpenEdition Freemium Suivez-nous

Publication : “Experimental Selves : Person and Experience in Early Modern Europe”.

BRAIDER Christopher, Experimental Selves : Person and Experience in Early Modern Europe, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2018, 448 p.

Présentation de l’éditeur :

Drawing on the generous semantic range the term enjoyed in early modern usage, Experimental Selves argues that ‘person,’ as early moderns understood this concept, was an ‘experimental’ phenomenon—at once a given of experience and the self-conscious arena of that experience. Person so conceived was discovered to be a four-dimensional creature: a composite of mind or ‘inner’ personality; of the body and outward appearance; of social relationship; and of time.

Through a series of case studies keyed to a wide variety of social and cultural contexts, including theatre, the early novel, the art of portraiture, pictorial experiments in vision and perception, theory of knowledge, and the new experimental science of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the book examines the manifold shapes person assumed as an expression of the social, natural, and aesthetic ‘experiments’ or experiences to which it found itself subjected as a function of the mere contingent fact of just having them.

Christopher Braider is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Table des matières 

Introduction — Changing the Subject: Early Modern Persons and the Culture of Experiment

1 The Shape of Knowledge: The Culture of Experiment and the Byways of Expression
2 The Art of the Inside Out: Vision and Expression in Hoogstraten’s London Peepshow
3 Persons and Portraits: The Vicissitudes of Burckhardt’s Individual
4 Justice in the Marketplace: The Invisible Hand in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fayre
5 Actor, Act, and Action: The Poetics of Agency in Corneille, Racine, and Molière
6 The Experiment of Beauty: Vraisemblance Extraordinaire in Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves
7 Groping in the Dark: Aesthetics and Ontology in Diderot and Kant
Conclusion — Person, Experiment, and the World They Made

Plus d’informations sur le site de l’éditeur.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Maxime Georges Métraux (19 septembre 2018). Publication : “Experimental Selves : Person and Experience in Early Modern Europe”. Groupe de Recherche en Histoire de l'Art Moderne. Consulté le 17 février 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/p6ro


Maxime Georges Métraux

Doctorant en Histoire de l'art moderne (Université Paris IV –Sorbonne, Centre André Chastel – UMR 8150). Expert pour la galerie Hubert Duchemin et chargé d’enseignement à l'Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée. Commissaire scientifique de l’exposition "Chic Emprise : Cultures, usages et sociabilités du tabac du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle" (22 juin - 23 septembre 2019) au musée du Nouveau Monde de La Rochelle.

Vous aimerez aussi...