Champ Lexical Des Sentiments

The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms

The fourth volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress “The Many Languages of Comparative Literature” includes articles that study thematic and formal elements of literary texts. Although the question of prioritizing either the level of content or that of form has often provoked controversies, most contributions here treat them as internally connected. While theoretical considerations inform many of the readings, the main interest of most articles can be described as rhetorical (in the widest sense) – given that the ancient discipline of rhetoric did not only include the study of rhetorical figures and tropes such as metaphor, irony, or satire, but also that of topoi, which were originally viewed as the ‘places’ where certain arguments could be found, but later came to represent the arguments or intellectual themes themselves. Another feature shared by most of the articles is the tendency of ‘undeclared thematology’, which not only reflects the persistence of the charge of positivism, but also shows that most scholars prefer to locate themselves within more specific, often interdisciplinary fields of literary study. In this sense, this volume does not only prove the ongoing relevance of traditional fields such as rhetoric and thematology, but provides contributions to currently flourishing research areas, among them literary multilingualism, literature and emotions, and ecocriticism.

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A Cultural History of Medicine in the Age of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment, as concept and time period, was haunted by ambiguities about the relationships between mind and body, humans and the natural world, and reason and imagination. The 18th century was inherently contradictory, particularly when it came to ideas about medicine and the body. The growing optimism that medicine and science could control nature and disease was counterbalanced by the hierarchies of gender, race and class being fixed on the body. Enlightenment ideals emphasized rationalism and expertise, but they existed alongside religious belief and everyday authority. Focusing on Western Europe, this volume examines disability and suffering, emotional and physical sensations, supernatural phenomena and scepticism, medical authority and expertise, biologization and power, and bodily and environmental regulation. Volume contributors have used a range of cultural history methodologies – from material history to discourse analysis – to examine the Enlightenment's tensions. The book's chapters centre on topics (Environment, Food, Disease, Animals, Objects, Experiences, Mind/Brain and Authority) that have encouraged contributors to reframe their assumptions about the history of medicine and the Enlightenment.