The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist [Hardcover]

Eighteenth-century Europe, preoccupied with both the origins and the defense of reason, was naturally concerned with what might be the root of all error. A topic any systematic account of knowledge must grapple with, error became a frequent point of debate in new scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical investigations. Taking John Locke'sEssay Concerning Human Understandingas his point of departure, Sng examines a number of such debates, focusing on literary and philosophical accounts of the relationship between language and thought. Rather than approaching its topic conceptually or historically, he takes on canonical texts of the Enlightenment and Romanticism and engages with their rhetorical strategies. In so doing, Sng elucidates how people wrote about error and how texts claimed to produce reliable and error-free modes of knowledge. The range of authors addressedLeibniz, Adam Smith, Coleridge, Kant, and Goethedemonstrates the diversity and heterogeneity underlying the textual production of the age.

The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleistis highly ambitious and shows a remarkable erudition in a broad spectrum of fields: philosophy, literature, and above all literary theory. This is theoretical thinking and literary criticism at its best. With clarity, precision, and deftness, Zachary Sng analyzes inThe Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleistthe topic of error as it is thematized and figured in an array of philosophical and literary texts from Britain to Germany in the eighteenth century . . . The topic is a demanding and potentially unwieldy one that Sng handles with athleticism and elegance. Zachary Sng is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Brown University.The Rhetoric of Errorconsiders the important role of error in eighteenth-century accounts of language, subjectivity, and epistemology in authors such as Locke, Smith, Coleridge, Kant, Goethe, and Kleist. This elegant, lucid book addresses itself to one of the mostl#-