Description
Book SynopsisHow eighteenth-century writers stretched systems designed to explain social relations to their breaking point, showing the flaws in their design. The Enlightenment has long been understoodand often understood itselfas an age of systems. In 1759, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, one of the architects of the Encyclopédie, claimed that the true system of the world has been recognized, developed, and perfected. In Systems Failure, Andrew Franta challenges this view by exploring the fascination with failure and obsession with unpredictable social forces in a range of English authors from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen. Franta argues that attempts to extend the Enlightenment's systematic spirit to the social world prompted many prominent authors to reject the idea that knowledge is synonymous with system. In readings of texts ranging from novels by Sterne, Smollett, Godwin, and Austen to Johnson's literary biographies and De Quincey's periodical essays, Franta shows how writers repeatedly take up
Trade ReviewFranta tells an accurate and important story about how impossibility, unintelligibility, unpredictability, and disorder inform both narrative and style in the latter half of the long eighteenth century . . . Each chapter of
Systems Failure offers a worthy contribution to the criticism of its respective subject, and the book might be especially useful to students and scholars of the Romantic and Victorian eras seeking an entry point into the eighteenth century.
—Alex Solomon, Rutgers University,
Review of English StudiesThis book is at once a counterhistory of the rise of the novel and a meditation on the social world as an elusive object of knowledge . . . While many others have emphasized the novel's commitment to representing the social world, this book demonstrates that such a commitment is compatible with a keen awareness of the inadequacy of the genre to that task . . . it is an admirable feature of Franta's argument that it often points past the edges of his archive toward a century-spanning, multidisciplinary history.
—David Carroll Simon, University of Maryland, College Park,
Critical InquiryAndrew Franta's
Systems Failure: The Uses of Disorder in English Literature challenges a familiar account of the Enlightenment that views it as an age of order premised upon an overriding confidence in systems and systematic thinking . . . In Franta's compelling study, the novel becomes a kind of laboratory, or "staging ground," for Enlightenment theories that attempt to "apply principles derived from the natural sciences to the social world." What the novels that feature in
Systems Failure discover is that the terrain of fiction—social life—seems always to escape systematic attempts to explain it. Fiction, one might say, is not reducible to principle.
—Anthony Jarrells, University of South Carolina,
Wordsworth CircleBy viewing characters as products of systems, Franta is able to show how the literature of this period contributed to "the idea that society has a structure," paving the way for the development of disciplinary sociology in the nineteenth century. As its title suggests,
Systems Failure is a work whose strength lies in its author's ability to handle polarizing abstractions with nuanced attention.
—Allison Turner, Columbia University,
Modern PhilologySystems Failure is a profoundly 'human,' humanist book, attentive to explorations of failure, the contours of complex events, and the inevitable mismatch of things to ideas. And it belongs therefore on the shelf of anyone interested in the recent return to the Enlightenment not as a moment of triumphant system-building, but as a moment of encounter with difference, complexity, and the limitations of human knowledge.
—Sean Silver, Rutgers University,
Eighteenth-Century FictionTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction. Unconscionable Maps
Chapter 1. Life without Theory in the Life of Savage
Chapter 2. Sterne and the Uses of Disorder
Chapter 3. From Map to Network in Humphry Clinker
Chapter 4. Godwin's Handshake
Chapter 5. Jane Austen and the Morphology of the Marriage Plot
Chapter 6. De Quincey's Systems
Coda. The Strange System of Human Society
Notes
Index
