The Language of Nature in Buffon's Histoire naturelle
by Hanna Roman
Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2018:10
ISBN: 9781786941398, 224 pages, £65.00
Hanna Roman examines Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, arguing that the written language of natural history in the Enlightenment was itself a form of knowledge, with Buffon’s literary simulacrum of nature teaching his readers not only about the history and laws of nature, but also how to interact with nature differently.
- Underlines the importance of literary studies for understanding the sciences in the Enlightenment, enabling scholars of literature (as well as history and philosophy of science) to better conceive of a literature of the natural world in eighteenth-century France and how this would be inflected in later schools of thought.
- Advocates treating Buffon’s work as a literary endeavour so that its contemporary value as a serious scientific object can be more accurately gauged, thereby allowing for a more holistic conception of Enlightenment rationality.
- Argues that Buffon’s ideas about transforming nature into a better world produced by the heat of the imagination help to shed light on modern studies of climate change and global warming.
"In the French eighteenth century, it is difficult to understand how science worked without first studying its relationship to written language. Language was not only a way to communicate ideas. It was the foundation of worlds both real and imagined: it comprised the building blocks of both human nature and of external nature. Things in the world existed because people named, ordered and narrated them." (Read Hanna Roman’s blog on language, science and human control of nature)
Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction: Enlightenment natural history and literary invention
Style: combining rhetoric and knowledge
Harmonizing world and word
Natural history: between physics and history
The literary practice of natural history
Summary of chapters
1. Inventing natural language: the harmonization of mind and world
Mathematical rules and natural laws
Buffon and natural law: relativizing perception
Inventing and intervening: Montesquieu and the natural laws of history
Scaling the levels of perception: the evolving relationship with nature in the Histoire naturelle
2. Generating heat: the energy of natural language
Introducing heat: De l’art d’écrire
Heat: the material interface with nature
Between body and mind: the spirit of language
The energy of the natural historical text
3. Writing nature: the foundations of natural history
The ‘Discours sur le style’: translating the movement of nature
The mise-en-scène of style in the Histoire naturelle, 1749
From style to history: reading temporality into nature’s story
4. Hypothesis and the energy of invention
Hypothesis and the invention of a verisimilar world
Hypothesis and heat: inventing the hidden mechanism of nature
Making heat real: the hypothesis in the ‘Epoques de la nature’
5. Reinventing nature’s heat
Buffon’s theorization of heat
The natural history of human beings: a story of inventing the temperate
Writing the future with heat
Conclusion: preserving the heat of the Histoire naturelle
Rethinking Buffon’s intellectual legacy
Condorcet’s Eloge de M. de Buffon
Saving style for posterity
The literary experiment
Bibliography
Index
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Hanna Roman is an Assistant Professor of French at Dickinson College. She is interested in the discourses of scientific knowledge in Enlightenment France, and her new research focuses on the languages of theology and natural history in works of eighteenth-century geohistory.
The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.