Time and ways of knowing: Literature, information and daily life under Louis XIV

New uses and experiences of time affected the lives of the French nobility in the 1660\u27s and 1670\u27s. During Louis XIV\u27s reign, rites of social interaction and processes of communication followed increasingly exacting schedules while playing themselves out at an accelerated pace. Individuals relied on social gatherings, a postal system undergoing a process of reform under Louvois, and periodical publications in order to remain in the know about their world. The texts of Moliere, Sevigne and Lafayette all contain implicit and explicit reflections on the temporal dynamics that structured these practices of gathering and transmitting information. Moliere\u27s Le Tartuffe premiered as a part of a tightly scheduled royal fete in 1664. The carefully timed sequence of events through which Louis XIV represented his authority at Versailles provides a context for Moliere\u27s dramatizations of strategic timing. In Sevigne\u27s correspondence, reflections on the process of letter writing itself and on the rhythms of postal schedules illuminate a highly personal experience of time and a concern for rapidity in communication. Lafayette\u27s La Princesse de Cleves, which represents in narrative form a courtly network of communication, was itself the object of much discussion, in the pages of Jean Donneau de Vise\u27s periodical, Le Mercure galant. Exploring temporalities of information exchange, the modern novel thus emerged in parallel with proto-journalistic practices. This thesis develops close readings of time in Moliere, Sevigne and Lafayette, through a focus on figures of rhetoric, semantic fields, punctuation, uses of verb tense, and other formal elements of literary composition. These literary readings are framed within historical analyses of methods of time management at Louis XIV\u27s court, in the modernization of the postal system, and in publication practices of the Mercure galant. The combination of historical and literary analyses produces descriptions of early modern time conceptions, which were marked by increased precision in temporal administration, accelerating processes of communication, and new experiences of interiority through which individuals traced the boundaries between public and private spheres of existence