Fables of knowledge: Descartes and seventeenth-century epistemological fiction

This dissertation illustrates the relevance of literary concepts to early modern philosophy and science, and conversely shows the impact of philosophical texts on the evolution of seventeenth-century literary writing.;The dissertation begins by presenting three models for epistemological fiction, that is, fiction that addresses the question of knowledge as its primary subject. These models, derived from the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Lucian, serve to illuminate and contextualize the narrative strategies employed in the seventeenth-century texts studied in the dissertation.;The first of these are Descartes' mechanist physical treatise, Le Monde (1633), and his Discours de la Methode (1637). Both of these texts are fables constructed to convey philosophical and scientific knowledge; their plot-structures are temporal models of physical processes or mental operations that take place outside the realm of time. Although Descartes believes that all temporal narratives are fictional, they nevertheless aid the human mind in grasping philosophical truth.;The second part of the dissertation is devoted to the impact of Descartes's fictional narratives on other seventeenth-century writers. I focus on novels by two writers---Gabriel Daniel and Cyrano de Bergerac---whose works address and incorporate Descartes's literary strategies. Le Voyage du Monde de M. Descartes (1690), by the Jesuit priest Gabriel Daniel, is a satire of Descartes and his writings. Daniel's novel must paradoxically employ the same narrative strategies used in Cartesian fiction in order to effectively satirize Descartes's natural philosophy. In his two-part novel, L'Autre Monde (1657--62), Cyrano borrows Cartesian narrative techniques as well as Lucianic satire. The novel employs a tension between its plot-structure and its discursive passages in order to show that philosophical knowledge is incapable of synthesizing lived experience. Cyrano's novel suggests that not only discursive philosophical knowledge but also plot-structure is unable to structure or organize human experience.