The rhetoric of error from Locke to Kleist

the long version

Taking John Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' as its point of departure, this book examines a number of debates, focussing on literary and philosophical accounts of the relationship between language and thought. Rather than approaching its topic conceptually or historically, it takes on canonical texts of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and engages with their rhetorical strategies. In so doing, the book elucidates how people wrote about error, and how texts claimed to produce reliable and error-free modes of knowledge.