Hanging at the crossroads: The rhetoric of exemplification in nineteenth-century literature and philosophy

"Hanging at the Crossroads: The Rhetoric of Exemplification in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Philosophy" examines the changing place and function of examples as they appear in literary and philosophical texts. Starting with established rhetorical conventions governing the role of examples, I argue that the example in its various forms--Kant's go-cart or Melville's whales--is a narrative which conceals its structural dependence on the formal features of allegory. Examples, or allegories of exemplification, appear in a text to bolster its representation of theoretical premises and abstract principles. The moral of the exemplifying allegory, however, narrates the story of the presuppositions and desires underlying the text's argument as well as the judgments that ensue from such assumptions, complicating relations between the particular and the general while raising questions about the efficacy of classification and mimetic ethics. No longer confined to dry treatises, the possibility of philosophical inquiry becomes, with the help of the subversive, and abstractly everyday, example the stuff of which novels and essays are made. Through the analysis Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Melville's Moby-Dick, Kierkegaard's Repetition and Fear and Trembling and Pater's Plato and Platonism, I show how a renewed interest in the experience of the individual as the source and center of intellectual inquiry shifts emphasis away from knowledge as acquisition or imitation to exemplification through exploration and quest. Instead of striving for an ideal exemplar, these texts demonstrate a repeated concern for the norm-al example. This dissertation seeks, then, to extend the fine work that has been done on the example in Renaissance discourse to the nineteenth century. The basic concerns of this dissertation, however, are not solely germane to the nineteenth century (or academic discourse). Contemporary critical theory, I posit, finds its initial articulation and fundamental questions in the nineteenth-century struggle to understand how literature and philosophy can be mutually constitutive, occupying overlapping, yet markedly different, spheres of influence; this dissertation concludes that one way of thinking of this relationship, as well as the place of critical theory, is through a discursive practice the two disciplines share--the example.