Approaches to Teaching Rousseau's Confessions and Reveries of the Solitary Walker
Editor(s): John C. O'Neal, Ourida Mostefai
Pages: xiii & 157 pp.
Published: 2003
ISBN: 9780873529112 (paperback)
ISBN: 9780873529105 (hardcover)
"Today Rousseau's diverse writings are listed in the syllabi of innumerable courses in many different disciplines. Thus this volume truly responds to a need on the part of teachers and students. A useful book to the specialist as well as the educated reader and a notable contribution to the profession."
Renée Waldinger, Graduate School, City University of New York
Rousseau is read, literally, all over the world. Given the enormous place autobiographical writing has come to occupy in literary studies, his influence is not surprising. The Confessions, in which Rousseau relates most of the events of his life, and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which focuses on his last few years, are his primary contributions to this form, which he essentially reinvented in modern Western literature. Together, the two writings give voice to some of the major political, psychological, literary, ethical, and environmental concerns of our day. This breadth is reflected in the wide spectrum of courses in which Rousseau's works are taught—courses on great books, world literature, political science, autobiography, travel, and women's studies, as well as courses at all levels of French studies.
Like other volumes in the MLA's Approaches to Teaching series, this book is divided into two parts. Part 1, "Materials," reviews the place of the Confessions and Reveries in Rousseau's oeuvre, assesses editions in French and translations into English, provides guidance to important background readings and critical studies, and lists an array of audiovisual resources and Web sites devoted to Rousseau. In part 2, "Approaches," contributors discuss the sources of Rousseau's confessional writings, explore the new literary mode of autobiography, and consider the problems of the public responses to his work. They also scrutinize particular passages and investigate contemporary critical approaches as well as comparative approaches linking Rousseau to other writers, including Wordsworth and Baudelaire. Rounding out the volume are two useful compendiums--a chronology of Rousseau's life and an annotated list of his other major works.
Table of Contents
Approches to Teaching Rousseau's Confessions and Reveries of the Solitary Walker
PART 1: MATERIALS
John C. O'Neal and Ourida Mostefai
- The Place of the Confessions and the Rêveries in Rousseau's Oeuvre
Editions
- Rousseau's Correspondence
- Bibliographies
- Background Reading
- Critical Studies
- Audiovisual and Other Aids
PART 2: APPROACHES
Introduction
John C. O'Neal
Teaching Rousseau's Autobiographical Writing
The Confessional Mode in Autobiography: Saint Augustine, Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin
Jean Perkins
Comparing Prefaces: Rousseau versus Montaigne
Mary Ellen Birkett
An Intertextual Approach to Teaching Rousseau's Confessions
Guillemette Johnston
Teaching Rousseau's Confessions in Translation
Christopher Kelly
From the Confessions to the Rêveries
"Tout le Monde Se Tut": Problems of Rhetoric in Rousseau's Autobiographical Works
Michael O'Dea
From Reverie to Confession: Writing and Reading a Life Story
Byron R. Wells
Problems of Reception
The Dangers of Telling It All
Patrick Coleman
Public Prosecutor Servan and the Reception of the Confessions
Raymond Trousson
The Author as Celebrity and Outcast: Authorship and Autobiography in Rousseau
Ourida Mostefai
Close Readings
Truth and the Other in Rousseau's Confessions
Christie McDonald
Rousseau's Lottery
Thomas M. Kavanagh
Genre and Feminine Duplicity in the Confessions
Sarah Herbold
The Mechanics of Language: Personification in the Rêveries
Virginia E. Swain
The Perceptual Metamorphosis of the Solitary Walker
John C. O'Neal
Comparative Approaches
The Public and the Self: Rousseau and Romanticism
Carl Fisher
Sympathy and Sensibility in Rousseau's Sixth Walk and Wordsworth's "The Old Cumberland Beggar"
Lorraine J. Clark
From the Solitary Walker to the Flâneur: Baudelaire's Caricature
of Rousseau
Jean Starobinski
Contemporary Critical Approaches
Altered States
Marie-Hélène Huet
Rêveries of Idleness
Pierre Saint-Amand
Reading Rousseau's Women: Autobiography and Femininity in the Confessions
Christine Roulston
Appendix
A Brief Chronology of Rousseau's Life, with Selected Corresponding Page References from the Confessions and Rêveries
An Annotated List of Rousseau's Other Works Mentioned in the Essays (and Discussed in the Confessions)
Works Cited
Index
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