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Abstract
The function of exemplarity, or the use of examples in logic and ethics, has long been debated in rhetoric and philosophy. In Western tradition, this history has been marked by a tension between two competing definitions of exemplarity, one Platonic and oriented towards ontology, and the other Aristotelian and oriented towards rhetoric. Plato's conception of the example relies on a deductive mode of reasoning: the example is a transhistorical model or standard, a paradigm towards which objects strive. For Aristotle, however, examples are instances that function inductively to point to a more or less coherent whole. The normative use to which examples have been put in rhetoric and literature draws, then, on a more Platonic conception of paradigms, while the emphasis on the contingency of relations between examples in Aristotle's sense (and the capacity of newly encountered examples to modify the conception one has of the whole), has served to counter this static model and put into question the boundaries marking categories and identities.
Debates within postcolonial studies, focusing on relations between the particular and the universal, have in a significant way been organized around the problematic of exemplarity. Throughout her career as a novelist, Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé has similarly engaged such problematics. Condé has displayed throughout her work a sustained concern for, and resistance to, the concept of exemplarity as a facet of literary commitment. However, while refuting the notion of literature as moral philosophy (as a heuristic device for imparting particular morals through exemplary characters and plots), Condé valorizes literature's ethical value as critique. This study examines Condé's poetics of the example, that is, the critical, aesthetic reworking of prior models that I call Condé's “altered exemplarity.” Organized around three specific problematics present in Condé's work—history and globalization, trauma and subjectivity, community and ethics—this analysis seeks to elucidate how, and to what ends, Condé engages, and alters, modes of exemplarity, staging the problematic, yet pragmatic, need to make ethical judgments in the absence of absolute knowledge and infallible criteria.
