Two different accounts of Enlightenment systems can both be true: that the desire to systematize life and knowledge was a hallmark of the historical Enlightenment and that such efforts to systematize often failed. That the latter is the case—as Andrew Franta elegantly demonstrates in Systems Failure: The Uses of Disorder in English Literature—has important implications for how we understand the Enlightenment genre of system. Franta's study calls attention to the ways novels and other prose texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evinced skepticism of systematic understandings of the social world and offers thereby a compelling revision of familiar histories of the rise of the realist novel. As such, Systems Failure ends up having more to say about what constitutes novelistic realism in the period—and what novels do—than about the genre of system.
I will get my main critique—really a partial critique—of Franta's book out of the way from...
