Abstract

This research is concerned with the Western language of vision, and with the way visual discourse is deployed as a metaphor of cognition by authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Poe. The study's general aim is to provide, through vision, a linguistic and discursive context for the articulation of a relationship between epistemology and literature, especially in relation to issues of legitimation and mimetic representation. Chapter 1 constructs a full linguistic typology of verbs of vision, on the basis of the contrast between a dominant model and minoritary models featuring an image-subject and/or an intransitive verb. On these types are based two discourses of vision: the dominant theoretical discourse and the narrative discourse used to legitimate it . Chapter 2 analyzes these discourses as they appear in some key epistemological texts. A reading of Plato's myth of the cave shows how his hesitation in dealing with narrative vision as the legitimating force behind his theory of cognition can be placed in the context of his attacks on, and deployment of, literary art. Aristotle's Poetics can be read as revising Plato's epistemology: a "tale of vision" like Oedipus Rex has an effect that goes beyond pure cognition through mimesis. Located in the nexus that articulates theory onto narrative, catharsis is left undefined precisely because it points beyond the narrative/theory antithesis. In the Discourse on Method, however, Descartes' visual metaphors betray a heightened sense of the inability of narrative to legitimate an epistemic theory. Chapter 3 thus opens on a new historical context. A reading of Jean-Francois Lyotard's Postmodern Condition and of some key texts on vision by Diderot and Condillac shows how modern science's self-legitimating epistemology extricates itself from a non-epistemic, non-mimetic literature. The latter's predicament is revealed by Poe's tales: they outline a model of superficial, incomplete vision that avoids the mastering gaze, but not the pitfall of attributing to slavery a politically convenient invisibility. The study's conclusion discusses some alternative visual-cognitive models, both old and new