" ... led in 2007 to the event that generated this volume and its argument: a conference at New York University (NYU) intitled 'Mediating Enlightenment Past and Present.'"--Acknowledgments
Includes bibliographical references and index
This is enlightenment: an invitation in the form of an argument / Clifford Siskin and William Warner -- Enlightening mediation / John Guillory -- Where were the media before the media? Mediating the world at the time of Condillac and Linnaeus / Knut Ove Eliassen and Yngve Sandhei Jacobsen -- Mediation and the division of labor / Peter De Bolla -- Transmitting liberty: the Boston committee of correspondence's revolutionary experiments in enlightenment mediation / William Warner -- Modes and codes: Samuel F.B. Morse and the question of electronic writing / Lisa Gitelman -- Mediating information, 1450-1800 / Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass -- Mediated enlightenment: the system of the world / Clifford Siskin -- Romanticism, enlightenment, and mediation: the case of the inner stranger / Robert Miles -- The present of enlightenment: temporality and mediation in Kant, Foucault, and Jean Paul / Helge Jordheim -- The strange light of postcolonial enlightenment: mediatic form and publicity in India / Arvind Rajagopal -- Mediating media past and present: toward a genealogy of "print culture" and "oral tradition" / Paula McDowell -- Mediating antiquarians in Britain, 1760-1830: the invention of oral tradition, or, close reading before Coleridge / Maureen McLane -- Mediating le philosophe: Diderot's strategic self-representations / Anne Fastrup -- Novel knowledge: judgment, experience, experiment / John Bender -- The piratical enlightenment / Adrian Johns -- Financing enlightenment, part one: money matters / Mary Poovey -- Financing enlightenment, part two: extraordinary expenditure / Ian Baucom -- "The horrifying ties, from which the public order originates": the police in Schiller and Mercier / Berhard Siegert -- The preacher's footing / Michael Warner -- Mediation as primal word: the arts, the sciences, and the origins of the aesthetic / Michael McKeon
Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here--not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associat
