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Rousseau's legacy : emergence and eclipse of the writer in France

Title

Rousseau's legacy : emergence and eclipse of the writer in France / Dennis Porter.

Published by

New York : Oxford University Press, 1995.

Author

Porter, Dennis, 1933-

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Status Request for on-site use Request scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	FormatText	AccessUse in library	Call numberPQ71 .P67 1995	Item locationOff-site

Details

Description

306 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

Porter combines a wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary theory and cultural history over the past two centuries in his readings of works by a number of major French writers; he situates their work in larger cultural and political transformations. In addition to the literary texts, he also touches on the "idea" of the writer as represented in paintings, engravings, and photographs. Examining the works of Stendhal, Baudelaire, Sartre, Barthes, Duras, Althusser, and Foucault, Rousseau's Legacy is of obvious interest to scholars and students of modern French literature and culture, and, given the influence of French philosophy and literary theory on literary and cultural studies in this century, it will also appeal to a broader nonspecialist readership.
Porter concludes with the provocative claim that, with the collapse among intellectuals of faith in revolution, and with the degeneration of confession into the stuff of TV talk shows, the idea of the writer as an agent for moral and political change is also in eclipse.
In modern Western literary culture, the writer who combines autobiographical witness with political critique has been the object of particular veneration, as the careers of such celebrated figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Marguerite Duras among others attest. Dennis Porter argues in Rousseau's Legacy that this cultural idea of the writer - as distinct from the more traditional "man of letters"--First emerged in France in the decades preceding the French revolution, and has continued to exercise a nominative power over intellectual life well into our own day. In Porter's paradigm, Jean-Jacques Rousseau serves as a seminal figure who combined radical critique of existing institutions with a new form of confessional writing and a suspicion of the art of literature. Rousseau inaugurated the idea of a heroic and committed writerly life in which the opposition between public and private self is collapsed.

Subject

Genre/Form

Electronic books.
Autobiography
autobiographies (literary works)
Autobiographies
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Autobiographies.

Contents

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: putting the polis in command -- Stendhal: overpoliticization and the revenge of literature -- Charles Baudelaire: portrait of the poet as antiwriter -- Jean-Paul Sartre: writer, militant, graphomaniac -- The cultural twilight of Roland Barthes -- Marguerite Duras: autobiographical acts, celebrity status -- Epilogue: From Althusser's Theory of a murder to Foucault's Aesthetics of existence.

Owning institution

Princeton University Library

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.