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On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered As One of the First Authors of the Revolution - Couverture rigide

Swenson, James

 
9780804735551: On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered As One of the First Authors of the Revolution
Couverture rigide
ISBN 10 : 0804735557 ISBN 13 : 9780804735551
Editeur : Stanford University Press, 2000

Synopsis

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.

Such misunderstandings and discontinuities are particularly well illustrated by the vicissitudes of the reading of Rousseau's texts during the revolutionary period, a moment when "readings" occurred as political programs. The Revolution enacted Rousseau precisely to the extent that revolutionaries could not agree on what action he called for. He is "one of the first authors of the Revolution" not because he was one of its causes, but because he provided the terms in which the logic of the revolutionary process becomes intelligible.

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À propos de l'auteur

James Swenson is Assistant Professor of French at Rutgers University.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
Stanford University Press
Date d'édition
2000
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0804735557
ISBN 13 
9780804735551
Reliure
Relié
Nombre de pages
344
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible