On Jean-Jacques Rousseau : considered as one of the first authors of the Revolution

Book

On Jean-Jacques Rousseau : considered as one of the first authors of the Revolution / James Swenson.

Summary:

"In order to grasp what it means to call Rousseau an "author" of the Revolution, as so many revolutionaries did, it is necessary to take full measure of the difficulties of literary interpretation to which Rousseau's work gives rise, particularly around such a charged term as "author."" "On Jean-Jacques Rousseau shows that Rousseau's texts consistently generate a division in their own reading, a division both designated and masked by the fiction of authorship. These divisions can occur successively - as in the narrative reversals and discontinuities characteristic of Rousseau's fictional and autobiographical works - or simultaneously, in the form of incompatible attempts to apply the lessons of a single text to an urgent historical moment. Given the structure of these texts, their "influence" can only occur in an equally paradoxical form. Rousseau's contribution to revolutionary thinking lies in his conceptualization of the constitutive function of misunderstanding and narrative discontinuity, in history and political action as well as in literature."--Jacket.

Record details

ISBN: 0804735557
ISBN: 9780804735551
ISBN: 0804738645
ISBN: 9780804738644
Physical Description: xiii, 320 pages ; 24 cm.
Publisher: Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2000.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-313) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: Intellectual, Cultural, and Ideological Origins -- History of Enlightenment and Enlightenment History -- Counting Books and Reading Texts -- Theory and Practice of the Public Sphere -- The Unnatural Order of Enlightenment Universal History -- The Debate on the Arts and Sciences -- Scottish Gradualism and French Impatience -- The Problem of Historical Causality in the Discours sur l'inegalite -- The Author of Nature -- Autobiography and Authorship -- La Nouvelle Heloise -- The Author of the Revolution -- Du contrat social and Its Vicissitudes -- Incomplete Readings -- The Two Readings in Practice -- A Revolutionary Mode of Authorship.