Schrodinger’s Narratives: Denis Diderot’s and Laurence Sterne’s Manipulations of Time and Space

This article proposes connections between literature and science through the relatively recent scientific concept of chaos. I examine Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and His Master to show how these authors contradict the scientific thinkers of their time by creating narrative structures that disrupt the normal flow of time and bend the typically absolute space between reader and fictional story. Though the physical books of Jacques and Tristram Shandy have a final page, the two authors leave it to their readers to finish the stories for themselves. The narrators of both novels interact with their readers, creating a space that allows their audience to fill in the narrator’s and author's blanks. In doing this, these texts become simultaneously complete and incomplete. Thus, a narrative styled similarly to the thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat is created. In this sense these novels can be perceived as precursors to scientific thought of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Approaching Mrs. Slipslop, Uncle Toby and Mr. Bounderby from a Modern Individual Psychology Perspective

The paper examines the psychological superiority/inferiority complexes coined by Alfred Adler (1870-1937) in three selected characters from different novels: Mrs. Slipslop from Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), Uncle Toby from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) and Mr. Bounderby from Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). These complexes are traced in the characters and associated with how they are induced by the characters’ physical and social deformities. The paper attempts to demonstrate that such psychological complexes in the character make it difficult for him/her to communicate as well as interact with others around them. Such deformities become whimsical obsessions that alienate them from their society and disorder their lives particularly at communication and result in impossibility of mutual understanding. The paper also highlights such complexes on the linguistic level.

Sterne

Laurence Sterne’s masterpiece Tristram Shandy experiments with dynamics in nonverbal communication. Tonic shifts and variations in pace are systematically narrated in the interactions between characters. This chapter focuses on the moment when Walter Shandy, emotionally shocked, throws himself across his bed and lies on his stomach for a long time, Uncle Toby patiently waiting next to him. The kinesic dialogue taking place between the two men is echoed by the relationship Sterne establishes with his readers through his work. In both instances, the novel shows that making inferences about the mental states of others is practiced on the basis of unstable kinesic data. In this section of Tristram Shandy, Sterne theorizes that the meaning of movements and gestures comes from the transitions between attitudes, rather than from fixed facial or postural representations. The text prompts perceptual simulations of such dynamic transitions, leading to humorous effects involving readers.

The Painting (Composition)

This chapter scrutinizes the challenges editors confronted in their typographical composition of Dante’s poem with two beginnings. Should the first beginning be followed by the rest of the poem and then the second beginning or both beginnings and then remaining verses? The various solutions proposed in the early printed editions, nineteenth-century translations, and early modern manuscripts, show the complexity of Dante’s own poetic strategy in this poem on the anniversary of Beatrice’s death, which aims to defeat time and overcome Beatrice’s death by adding more time. Exploring the persistence of this issue in the most recent editions, the chapter considers the poem in light of Dante’s decision to represent himself in the prose as painting an angel. Connecting this remark to Dante’s reflections on angels and representation in the De vulgari eloquentia and the Commedia, this chapter examines Dante’s thinking about the materiality of texts and the relationship between word and image in the context of a larger tradition that stretches from Augustine and Petrarch to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

No bosque ficcional de Tristram Shandy: leitor e narrador nas entrelinhas

Este trabalho analisa as figurações do leitor em Tristram Shandy, de Laurence Sterne a partir das ideias de Umberto Eco, Gerard Genette e Maurice Blanchot, com foco na relação entre narrador e leitor e o efeito estético decorrente das técnicas formais. Frente a um narrador-autor-personagem autoconsciente, os jogos com os limites do real e do imaginário são recorrentes, e desafiam aos mais variados tipos de leitores ainda na contemporaneidade. Tais experimentalismos refletem as ações do leitor, que se vê constantemente instigado e desafiado. Considerada por Virginia Woolf a precursora do romance moderno, a obra recebe pontos de vista distintos no que tange à interpretação de sua forma, conforme será discutido aqui, ao ponto de ser, por vezes, melhor compreendida pelos escritores shandianos que lhe seguiram e ainda seguem o influxo de ressignificação da mimesis e da forma literária.

They Order�this Matter Better in France�. Yorick the Philosopher and Sentimental Traveller

The article highlights the existing tradition of understanding Laurence Sterne�s literary texts as philosophical. Author uses such research approaches as historical and literary, sociocultural and biographical. The reception of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey produced by the �English Rabelais� through the philosophical dominant in the poetics is a controversial theme that has its supporters and opponents. Occasionally some researchers totally negate philosophical direction of Sterne�s works, others � though do not deny his interest in the studies of contemporary philosophers, with many of whom Sterne had friendly relations (Hume, d�Holbach, D�Alembert, Diderot), nevertheless accuse the writer for inability to create a consistent system of philosophical ideas and become an original thinker (James Work). In course of time a number of literary critics convinced in inherency of philosophical themes for Sterne�s novels is widening (A. Hadfield, J. Hawley, Sh. Regan, P. Davies, Ch. Lupton). Experts declare that the attempts to distance Sterne�s texts from the intellectual climate of the century lead to the marginalization of his achievement and Sterne has become celebrated by �a coterie of enthusiasts� as �our most influential unread author� (Andrew Hadfield). On the contrary, Martin Battestin in his famous essays written in 1994 � �A Sentimental Journey�: Sterne�s �Work of Redemption� and �Sterne �mong the Philosophes: Body and Soul in �A Sentimental Journey� � insists on the inseparability of Sterne�s novels from the leading philosophical tendencies of the epoch. The first of his papers, �A Sentimental Journey�: Sterne�s �Work of Redemption�, is the subject of the analytical commentary in the present article. Battestin argues that Sterne can be considered the first philosophical novelist in English who discerns Locke�s radically subjectivist implications and demonstrates in the form of his narrative the principles of association of ideas and �durational time�. In A Sentimental Journey Sterne debates the mechanistic doctrines of La Mettrie and his followers, d�Holbach, Diderot and discovers in the passion and sympathy a way of rejecting Hume�s skepticism. Yorick�s figure in A Sentimental Journey, his ability to enjoy the moments of happiness, the restraint to the manifestation of the extremeness of passion transform the canon of travel writing and unnoticeably give it the form of personal journal and self-observation where the plunge into the description of everyday trifles predominates. Sterne�s A Sentimental Journey turns into the model of �the literature of sensibility� ensuring the author with the popularity within the wide range of reading public. The researchers view A Sentimental Journey as a variation of familiar features of Sterne�s style that correlates with the turn to the lyrical psychological form, the attention to the individual consciousness, the world of inner feelings and emotions. The text of the novel becomes refined, the author�s tone is frivolous and full of erotic hints. The narrator intrigues the reader with the insinuating intonation where the ironical, ambiguous and melancholic colors are mixed. In A Sentimental Journey Yorick�s travel notes look like an �imaginary journey� where the factual topography becomes the cause for extensive emotional reflection of the hero who is not constraint with the social conventions and the outer world turns to be the �mirror of the soul� and is reflected in the endless stream of changeable opinions. According to Battestin, Sterne�s emphasis on the liberating function of human sexuality is important. Claiming a spiritual value for eroticism Sterne turns to be the precursor of D. H. Lawrence and the famous final chapters in A Sentimental Journey, �The Grace� and �The Case of Delicacy�, can be viewed as the paradigm of the novel�s leading theme � the human yearning for relationship, the quest for union and sociability. Battestin comes to a conclusion that in A Sentimental Journey Sterne found a way to diminish the disturbing solipsistic implications of the new philosophy that had defined �the small world of Shandy Hall in terms of hobby-horsical self-enclosure�. He proposed to find in human senses, imagination and physiology the means of transcending materialist doctrines and of affirming the possibility of communion.