Department of Comparative Literature
 | COL 717: Rousseau's Autobiographies | |
| Registration Numbers: (A) 266500 (Seminar) (B) 262631 (Recitation) Thursday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640 | ||
| Course Outline | ||
 | Jean-Jacques Rousseau comments in a sketch for the Confessions, that "without having any status myself, I have known every condition." This remark prompts us to ask: who is this chameleon character? What exactly does the noun "Rousseau" mean? It is a term that has perhaps one of the longest and most intricate definitions in the French lexicon. Within what grammars and rhetorics of motive does it function? What are the legion aliases, pseudonyms and noms-de-plume of this infinitely complex term, synthesized across an enigmatic set of texts that meditate upon the content of the self? What are the modes of alienation from one's proper name of which the autobiographical subject is capable? What are its justifications, its excuses, and its alibis? Each of these terms: the name, the alias, the excuse, the alibi, the pseudonym denote formal structures and sub-genres that turn around questions of identity and difference, resemblance and dissemblance, and compose the drama of Rousseau's autobiographical writings.
This course will be a sustained inquiry into the semblance's and dissemblances of the name 'Rousseau' as it struggles to determine its meaning. It will also offer us the opportunity to reflect on several of the formal characteristics and problematics of autobiography as a genre. We will chart this elaborate and sustained project of self-fashioning as it unfolds across Rousseau's three principal autobiographical writings, The Confessions, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques and Reveries of a Solitary Walker. We shall also read several commentaries on Rousseau that have helped reshape theoretical idioms about his work, autobiography and related literary topics in recent times: Starobinski, Derrida, de Man, Philippe Lejeune among others. Finally, we shall read some of the texts that constitute Rousseau's precursors: St Augustine's Confessions, and selections of Montaigne's Essais. |  |
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