Describing Description. Database-Driven Research on Descriptive Writing
Vortrag / conférence
"Describing Description. Database-Driven Research on Descriptive Writing in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel". Session Digital Enlightenment, dir. Anne Bandry-Scubbi, 13th International Congress of Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Graz, 07/2011.
Abstract / résumé
In the novel of the eighteenth century, descriptive writing has an ambivalent status. On the one hand, the idea of the novel as a “vectorized” narrative discourse seems to place serious limitations on descriptive or other digressions (Randa Sabry). On the other hand, the important part description plays in many types of writing of the time is witness to the changing attitudes towards documenting experience and describing nature that also influence the novel. In fact, the relatively important place description actually takes in the eighteenth-century novel has now been recognized (Henri Lafon, Cynthia S. Wall). However, theoretical conceptualizations of description remain dominated by the descriptive practice observed in the realist and naturalist novel of the nineteenth century.
The research presented here is part of a completed PhD dissertation analyzing the concept, narrative poetics and pictorial esthetics of descriptive writing in a corpus of novels written from 1760 to 1800. It shows that quite specific structures can be observed in the descriptive practice of the eighteenth-century novel. This is particularly true for the conditions and modalities according to which descriptive passages are integrated into the narrative context. The approach presented here took Philippe Hamon’s theory of the “système configuratif de la description” as a point of departure but separated it into its constituent parts. Then, the corpus was analyzed for isolated occurrences and recurring combinations of these parts and as a result, Hamon’s theory was adapted to the descriptive practice of the French enlightenment novel in a data-driven, inductive manner.
With this aim, a total of about 1500 descriptive passages in thirty-two French novels published or written between 1760 and 1800 by a variety of canonical as well as minor authors were identified and entered into a database. Bibliographix was used as the database interface, because it is easy to use and provides convenient keyword, linking, and search mechanisms. Progressively, more and more precise keywords were associated with each descriptive passage. These keywords relate, among other things, to the structural features and specific means of integration into the narrative context as well as to the date of publication and the narrative form of the novel concerned.
This presentation focuses on the actual use of the database and on two key results obtained by using it: a “grammar” of the narrative motivation of descriptive passages and a hypothesis concerning the development over time of the poetics of description. When looking at the “grammar” of narrative motivation, some interesting differences and similarities appear in comparison to the nineteenth-century novel. Analyzing the systematic variation with regard to development over time and narrative form allows formulating a hypothesis concerning the long-term development of narrative motivation from the late seventeenth into the early nineteenth century.
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