https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4245-7319
Abstract
This article sheds light on both Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s aesthetic thought and his role in the emergence of modern ideas of littérature, by revisiting his novel-cum-treatise, Émile, ou de l’éducation (1762). Contrary to much scholarship that has minimized Rousseau’s interest in aesthetics, and in the visual arts in particular, the article reframes Rousseau as a fundamentally aesthetic thinker. With reference to Jacques Derrida’s concept (via Kant) of the parergon, it argues that Rousseau uses the image of the frame – literal or figurative – to delineate his ideas about the ideal visual and literary arts, and how they should affect spectators or readers. By reading Rousseau alongside Rita Felski, the article historicizes the affective turn in postcritique today. Focusing on Émile’s encounters with the literary arts, it shows that the modern idea of literature as aesthetically pleasing texts that (by dint of their aesthetic quality) induce an affective and ethical response, was attached to the French word littérature earlier than has been claimed, by an author often considered ‘anti-literature’.
The way we approach literature is changing. At least, so say proponents of postcritique, an approach that claims to offer ‘fresh ways of interpreting literary and cultural texts’ which depart from the well-trodden pathways of suspicious, detached, even paranoid academic criticism.1 Postcritique, instead, valorizes the bonds between texts and readers, be they aesthetic, ethical, affective or political. In Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020), Rita Felski takes such a postcritical turn, arguing that aesthetic experiences should not be seen as detached encounters with art for art’s sake, but that they forge attachments between people and art, bringing us to think, feel or act in certain ways.2
But of all the directions in which postcritique has turned, it has rarely turned to the past.3 While Felski gestures to what we might call some conceptual pre-histories of postcritique (from Plato’s view of the power of pleasing texts to the ethical criticism of Martha Nussbaum and other late-twentieth-century scholars), Hooked predominantly fixes its gaze on the present.4 And yet Felski recognizes that much ‘remains to be written’ about the history of ‘attachment’.5 This article looks backwards, then, to try to fill a gap in this history. For, somewhere between Plato and Nussbaum, in the French canon, lies a writer whose contribution to the idea of literature as affectively engaging has been, in crucial ways, overlooked: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau was by no means the only thinker of his time to conceive of literature – or the arts more broadly – in this way. The idea that the arts forged affective links between art and consumer was a common one in early modern Europe, as scholars have shown.6 Moreover, it might seem strange to suggest that Rousseau’s role in this history has been overlooked. After all, his eighteenth-century fans are among the most famous ‘hooked’ early modern readers. As Daniel Mornet, Daniel Roche and Robert Darnton have shown, Rousseau’s contemporaries sent him dozens of letters in which they expressed their attachment to his novels, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse [Julie, or the New Heloise] (1761) and Émile, ou de l’éducation [Émile, or On Education] (1762).7 One reader, Jean Ranson, used these novels as guides for his spousal and parental conduct, even naming one of his sons Émile. ‘Ranson did not read in order to enjoy literature’, Darnton writes, ‘but to cope with life’.8
Readers today might see Darnton’s claim as obvious, commonsensical, but it masks considerable complexities in the conceptualization of the written word in eighteenth-century France: complexities which turn upon the meaning of the word ‘literature’, or rather, littérature. For much of the early modern period, pleasing and instructive texts were known in France as belles-lettres or bonnes lettres (in Latin, bonæ literæ).9 Until the mid-eighteenth century, littérature commonly meant ‘erudition’, ‘knowledge of literary culture’.10 It was only from the 1680s, as Philippe Caron has shown, that littérature slowly began to encroach on the semantic terrain of belles-lettres, a process that gathered pace around 1750, symbolized by the republication of Charles Batteux’s famous literary manual, the Cours de belles lettres distribué par exercices [A Course of Belles Lettres, Distributed by Exercises] (1747–1748) as the Principes de littérature [Principles of Literature] (1755).11 Nevertheless, the Encyclopédie article, ‘Littérature’ (1765), along with many other published works, continues to describe littérature in its earlier sense.12 In the 1760s, then, littérature was at a semantic crossroads.
If littérature was beginning to mean ‘texts’ in this period, scholars have argued that the word did not come to signify aesthetically pleasing texts until the nineteenth century, propelled by Germaine de Staël’s De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales [On Literature Considered in Relation to Social Institutions] (1800).13 Into this narrative Ann Jefferson has recently brought Rousseau, and specifically his autobiographical Confessions (written 1764–1770, published 1782–1789).14 Jefferson shows that the language of this text, which appeals to readers’ senses and thus engages them aesthetically (from the Greek, αἰσθητικός [‘of sensory perception’]) with Rousseau’s experiences, came to be understood as littérature.15 She argues, however, that this was not Rousseau’s intention.16 This article offers a different account. Taking a ‘keywords’ approach, it contends that an idea much like Felski’s – that aesthetically pleasing texts affect readers’ lives ‘by dint of’ their aesthetic quality – was written into the word littérature in the mid-eighteenth century, in Rousseau’s controversial treatise-cum-novel about the ‘negative’ education of an ideal boy, Émile.17
It is in Émile, of course, that Rousseau condemns La Fontaine’s Fables, barely teaches Émile to read and proclaims his hatred for books. Yet, as critics have begun to show, literary education is more important to Émile’s (and Émile’s readers’) development than has typically been acknowledged.18 The adolescent Émile is introduced to littérature, texts with which he should engage aesthetically and affectively, as something he might ‘live by’. As he learns to approach littérature in this way, so too did Rousseau’s contemporary readers, some of whom later made defining statements about littérature, based on his conception. This article thus reframes the story of how, when and via whom, this particular modern idea of littérature emerged.
Indeed, frames play an important role in this account. In ‘Le Remède dans le mal’ [‘The Antidote in the Poison’] (1989), Jean Starobinski shows that Rousseau uses medical metaphors to describe how otherwise ‘poisonous’ culture might become a remedy for man’s corruption, if reformed and administered homoeopathically.19 This article identifies a further Rousseauian metaphorical lexicon that conveys the potential value of art (drawn from the language of art itself): that of framing.20 To describe Rousseau’s use of this trope, I draw on Jacques Derrida’s La Vérité en peinture [The Truth in Painting] (1978), which understands frames as parerga. Derrida’s notion of the parergon develops out of his reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), in which types of ornamentation such as the picture frame are described using this term. From the Ancient Greek παρά [beside, next to] and ἔργον [work], a parergon is that which is additional to, touches and interacts with the work of art.21 Neither part of the work nor external to it, the parergon frames (in other words, constitutes) art as art. The Rousseauian parergon is a similarly liminal boundary between art and life, supplement and original (to use other Derridean terms), which art must cross if it is to have any effect on people – be that to corrupt them or to remedy their social corruption.22 This article will argue that Rousseau uses the trope of the frame as a pedagogical tool, to teach Émile that the ideal visual or literary art is that which is so natural – and thus so aesthetically pleasing to those with a taste for nature – that it affects viewers or readers, thereby stepping off the page and into their lives.
By reconsidering the place of visual art and literature in Émile, this article recasts Rousseau both as more of an aesthetic thinker than has been acknowledged and as a central figure in the development of modern ideas of littérature.23 Exploring the uses to which Rousseau puts littérature in Émile’s education affords us an historical, French angle from which to reconsider the current affective turn in literary criticism. From this angle, Rousseau’s pre-Revolutionary attempts to escape dominant frameworks of reading appear to prefigure similar postcritical attempts, today. Ultimately, I argue, we find that the idea of literature as a type of aesthetically pleasing and thus ethically compelling text was written into the French word littérature, just as it was becoming modern.
The ideal art
Émile follows the education of an imagined pupil, raised away from society by a private tutor. This pupil is not taught to believe in Revelation but in ‘natural religion’, informed by his conscience and by the ‘spectacle’ of nature. He is also barred from books before the age of twelve, and for some time after the only item in his library is an abridged edition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Émile’s education is therefore very different to the public education delivered in the contemporary boys’ collèges, centred on Latin, rhetoric and memorization. Rousseau famously brands these institutions ‘risibles’ [‘laughable’].24 But for all that Émile’s education is ‘anti-collège’, it is not ‘anti-literary’, nor is it devoid of aesthetic concerns. On the contrary, in an episode in book two the tutor gives the roughly ten-year-old Émile his first lesson in aesthetics, which lays the foundation for his later engagement with books. And it starts, quite simply, with some drawing.
The tutor states that Émile will learn to draw ‘pour se rendre l’œil juste et la main flexible’ (397) [‘[to make] his eye exact and his hand flexible’ (143)]. At first, then, the lesson seems not to be about art, but about training the body.25 However, it is also about cultivating Émile’s knowledge of the natural world. When drawing, Émile is instructed to copy nature, not existing works of art, since the latter would lead him to produce an imitation of an imitation (397). The rules according to which Émile learns to draw echo the description of artisans born with genius given by the influential aesthetic thinker, Jean-Baptiste Dubos. In his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture [Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting] (1719), Dubos writes that such artisans ‘ne prennent point pour modèles les ouvrages de leurs devanciers mais la nature même’ [do not take the works of their forebears as models, but rather nature itself].26 To spur Émile to produce faithful representations, the tutor joins him in drawing, noting that ‘je le devancerai de si peu, qu’il lui sera toujours aisé de m’atteindre, et souvent de me surpasser’ (398) [‘I will be so little ahead of him that it will always be easy for him to catch up with me and often to surpass me’ (144)]. As Émile imitates nature, so he also imitates the tutor, which helps him to become a good artist.
In his critical notes on Émile, Pierre Burgelin writes that in this episode, ‘le dessin est conçu d’une manière plus pédagogique qu’esthétique’ (1397) [drawing is conceived pedagogically, more than aesthetically]. However, the two need not be opposed, for this is a lesson in aesthetics, designed to give Émile a taste for nature, which Rousseau understood to be eternally beautiful.27 This becomes clear when the tutor explains what he does with their drawings. ‘Je fais encadrer nos desseins […], [j]e les arrange par ordre autour de la chambre, chaque dessein répété vingt, trente fois et montrant à chaque exemplaire le progrès de l’auteur’ (398) [‘I have our drawings framed. […] I arrange them in order around the room, each drawing repeated twenty, thirty times, and each copy showing the author’s progress’ (144–45)]. Their drawings are framed rather peculiarly:
Aux prémiers, aux plus grossiers de ces desseins je mets des quadres bien brillans, bien dorés qui les rehaussent; mais quand l’imitation devient plus exacte, et que le dessein est véritablement bon alors je ne lui donne plus qu’un cadre noir très simple; il n’a plus besoin d’autre ornement que lui-même, et ce seroit domage que la bordure partageât l’attention que mérite l’objet. Ainsi chacun de nous aspire à l’honneur du quadre uni, et quand l’un veut dédaigner un dessein de l’autre, il le condanne au quadre doré. (398–99)
[On the first, the crudest, of these drawings, I put quite brilliant, well-gilded frames which enhance them. But when the imitation becomes more exact, and the drawing is truly good, then I give it nothing more than a very simple, black frame. It needs no adornment other than itself, and it would be a shame for the border to get part of the attention the object merits. Thus each of us aspires to the honor of the plain frame, and when one wants to express contempt for a drawing of the other, he condemns it to the gilded frame. (145)]
The desirable frame is not what readers might expect. Gold frames – celebrated by Dubos for the ‘nouvel éclat’ [new radiance] they bring to a canvas – are attributed to their first and crudest drawings.28 This arbitrary mark of distinction is of the order of ‘le prétendu beau’ (673) [‘what is claimed to be beautiful’ (341)] and would distract viewers from the representation of nature.29 The sought-after frame, rather, is the simple black one, which is given to the most mimetic art. In Émile’s art lesson, frames mean prizes. Since Émile seeks public honour, he soon internalizes the criteria of the tutor (who is both his public and his legislator-figure).30 Thus, through this framing exercise, Émile develops aesthetic judgment – that is, taste – and specifically a taste for art that closely imitates nature.
In demanding that Émile acquire a taste for such art, Rousseau was of his time. As Marian Hobson has shown, theories of representation of the second half of the eighteenth century favoured visual art that naturalistically simulates the object represented, to the point that model and copy are almost indistinguishable.31 Hobson calls this model of illusion adequatio, which she distinguishes from the more playful representational mode of the first half of the century (which she terms aleitheia), typified by Rococo papillotage, in which art calls attention to its dissimulation even as it tricks viewers into believing a representation to be real. The desire for total illusion in art during the latter half of the century is expressed by writers and art critics including Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne, the abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc and Diderot. Émile, however, is not born with a taste for mimetic art, but must be attuned to it.
As it happens, attunement is one of Felski’s three forms of attachment. It designates the honing of taste, whether by education or a sudden revelation.32 In describing attunement, Felski cites Zadie Smith’s account of gradually becoming attuned to Joni Mitchell. As Smith explains, her friends had for many years insisted on the beauty of Mitchell’s music, but Smith resisted, persisting in her dislike of this ‘white woman, wailing, picking out notes in a non-sequence’. Then, one afternoon in her thirties, while visiting Tintern Abbey, she writes of a ‘breach’ in her defences: of suddenly coming to love Mitchell.33 Smith’s description of attunement as a breach – of art into life, via the aesthetic and affective responses it generates – is apropos. For in Émile frames are the boundary that art must cross if it is to affect the spectator. Frames have what Derrida calls ‘a thickness’ that distinguishes the art as ergon, separating it from its real-world surroundings.34 As Émile’s drawings become more natural, the parergon symbolically retreats: from ornate gold frame to simple black surround. As the frame’s thickness thins out, the distance between art and life is reduced and the defence lies ready to be breached.
Philip Robinson argues that in this episode ‘Rousseau envisages in the pupil a process in which the very idea of art is absent’.35 But the parergon never disappears: the ever-presence of a frame, albeit a modest one, underscores that even the most naturalistic art is still art. This point is strikingly proven in Rousseau’s later herbaria, made for Julie Boy de La Tour (1772) and her cousin Madeleine-Catherine Delessert (1774).36 Although the frames Rousseau draws around his plant specimens are millimetre-thin red lines, and although the artfully displayed flora are allowed to creep beyond these lines – seemingly threatening to escape – the fact is that they cannot.37 For the herbaria do not present the plant as living plant (nature in a state of nature), but as extracted specimen, artfully arranged and framed (nature in a state of art). As scholars have shown, their aesthetically pleasing quality enables them to affect the lives of their young female recipients: to attune them to the beauties of nature, to give them a taste for botanizing and to remind them of Rousseau.38 Thus, a herbarium may just be Rousseau’s ideal art form: not a simple representation of nature (aleitheia), nor even a naturalistic replica (adequatio), but a re-presentation of nature itself – art, but only thanks to its display. One wonders what Rousseau would have made of Damien Hirst’s shark.39
Émile’s drawing lesson, then, is less about nature than it is a lesson about the ideal art, which is such a faithful representation of nature that it looks as if it might come to life, jump the bounds of the frame, and – by affecting the spectator attuned to the beauties of nature – step into their life: like Galathée in Pygmalion, scène lyrique [Pygmalion, A Lyrical Scene] (1762), who steps off her plinth; like the herbaria specimens that seem ready to escape their bounds; or like Pere Borrell del Caso’s famous trompe l’œil, Huyendo de la crítica [Escaping Criticism] (1874). This is what happens in Émile’s first encounter with a book.
Pere Borrell del Caso, Huyendo de la crítica (1874), oil on canvas, 75.7cm x 61cm. Image courtesy of Colección Banco de España.
The ideal book
Shortly after Émile’s first lesson in aesthetics, he and the tutor step out of one framework and into another. Having crossed the ‘pays des sensations’ [‘land of sensations’], the tutor explains, ‘le premier pas que nous allons faire au delà doit être un pas d’homme’ (417–18) [‘the first step we are going to make beyond these boundaries has to be a man’s’ (158)]. Moving from book two to three (‘l’âge de la force’ [‘the age of strength’], from twelve to fifteen years old), Émile’s education starts to become ‘positive’. It is now that he is introduced to his first book. But, initially, it hardly sounds like a book at all.
‘[J]e hais les livres’ [‘I hate books’], the tutor begins; ‘ils n’apprennent qu’à parler de ce qu’on ne sait pas’ (454) [‘they only teach one to talk about what one does not know’ (184)].40 Rather than via books, he says, ‘si l’on peut inventer une situation où tous les besoins naturels de l’homme se montrent d’une manière sensible à l’esprit d’un enfant, […] c’est par la peinture vive et naïve de cet état qu’il faut donner le prémier exercice à son imagination’ (454) [‘if one can invent a situation where all man’s natural needs are shown in a way a child’s mind can sense, […] it is by the lively and naïve depiction of this state that the first exercise must be given to his imagination’ (184)]. In place of books, the tutor wants a ‘situation’ or ‘painting’ that is naïve (from the Latin nativus, ‘natural’) and lively (vivere, ‘living’). The ideal literary art, like the ideal visual art, is so natural it comes to life by moving the senses of readers who – like Émile – find nature beautiful. This book-painting-situation, in short, is to be experienced aesthetically. And as luck would have it, this situation already exists: in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
For Émile to access it, however, something has had to be removed. ‘Ce roman débarrassé de tout son fatras, commençant au naufrage de Robinson près de son Isle, et finissant à l’arrivée du vaisseau qui vient l’en tirer sera tout à la fois l’amusement et l’instruction d’Émile’ (455) [‘this novel, disencumbered of all its rigmarole, beginning with Robinson’s shipwreck near his island and ending with the arrival of the ship which comes to take him from it, will be both Émile’s entertainment and instruction’ (185)]. Scholars have disagreed about what this ‘fatras’ is. Burgelin understands it as everything prior to Crusoe’s shipwreck and after his rescue (1430). These bookends of the novel recount Crusoe’s life in society. Émile has barely yet encountered society; introducing it in a book would teach him about what he does not already know – precisely the reason for Rousseau’s bibliophobia. Moreover, like literal gold frames, Crusoe’s narrative frame would only teach Émile about social practices.
My conceptual hop from picture frame to figurative frame is one that Rousseau himself makes, later in Émile. When describing the adolescent Émile’s dress, Rousseau writes that he may take care over his dress, not so as to seem a man of taste, but so as to please others. He summarizes, ‘il n’aura point recours au cadre doré, et jamais l’enseigne de la richesse ne souillera son ajustement’ (669, my emphasis) [‘He will not resort to the gilded frame, and his clothing will never be stained by the mark of riches’ (338, my emphasis)]. The mention of the golden frame gestures back to its first appearance, in Émile’s drawing lesson, when it served as the symbol of artifice and contingent social tastes. Retaining these connotations, the image is here applied metaphorically to signify expensive, fashionable clothing.41
The ‘fatras’ of Robinson Crusoe can thus be viewed as yet another figurative, ornamental gold frame (indeed, contemporary dictionaries define ‘fatras’ as ‘des choses […] frivoles & inutiles’ [frivolous and useless things]).42 Émile has no need to learn of such things. Instead, he is to learn life lessons by aesthetically engaging with the representation of Crusoe’s island life. To aid this crossing between mimetic art and life, then, the book’s narrative parergon – its ‘fatras’ – is stripped back. Yet John T. Scott suggests that the ‘fatras’ has not been entirely removed; while Crusoe’s island life might seem the epitome of a natural existence, the protagonist still prays, steals money and has a friend, Friday.43 Scott contends that it is up to Émile (and Émile’s reader) to identify this unhelpful social ‘fatras’ and recognize it as superfluous to Émile’s needs. This interpretive exercise constitutes an education in reading and judging.44 Thus, although the narrative parergon that butts up against Crusoe’s island existence has been reduced, like the black picture frame around Émile’s drawings, it remains in some form. Like Derrida’s parergon that touches and interacts with the ἔργον, like the sea that laps Crusoe’s shore, social practices wash up in Crusoe’s not-quite-natural island life.45
For as Émile learned that the most mimetic drawings are still art, so he must learn that Crusoe’s life is an imitation of a natural state. The reminder that this is another encounter with art allows Émile to avoid ‘becoming’ Crusoe and instead facilitates his ethical learning. The tutor explains:
Je veux […] qu’il pense être Robinson lui-même, qu’il se voye habillé de peaux, portant un grand bonnet, un grand sabre […]. Je veux qu’il s’inquiette des mesures à prendre si ceci ou cela venoit à lui manquer, qu’il examine la conduite de son Heros; qu’il cherche s’il n’a rien omis, s’il n’y avoit rien de mieux à faire; qu’il marque attentivement ses fautes, et qu’il en profite pour n’y pas tomber lui-même en pareil cas. (455)
[I want […] him to think he is Robinson himself, to see himself dressed in skins, wearing a large cap, carrying a large sabre […]. I want him to worry about the measures to take if this or that were lacking to him; to examine his hero’s conduct; to investigate whether he omitted anything, whether there was nothing to do better; to note Robinson’s failings attentively; and to profit from them so as not to fall into them himself in such a situation. (185)]
Rather than read to acquire socio-professional skills, as boys did in the contemporary collèges, to fit them for elite professions in the Church, law, or medicine, Émile reads to learn how to live. But this does not mean his reading is uncritical.
Felski’s typology of identification can elucidate the differences between Rousseau’s own famous juvenile – and uncritical – identification with the heroes of Plutarch’s Lives and Émile’s identification with Crusoe.46 While Rousseau feels unalloyed ‘recognition’ and ‘allegiance’ with the Roman statesman Mucius Scaevola, and goes so far as to imitate his actions, Émile’s affinity with Crusoe is partial, his empathy critical.47 He ponders what the character could have done better, thus learning how he might act (differently) in such a situation. Although less systematically than Felski, Rousseau appears to understand identification as a similarly broad category of response that involves some kind of ‘transpersonal crossing or connection’ between art and consumer.48 Whereas Scaevola steps off the page and into Rousseau’s body and mind, it is Émile who enters Defoe’s world, to better understand his own.49
Like his drawing lesson, then, Émile’s first reading lesson is another encounter with art that imitates nature. The social parergon around the painting of Crusoe’s island life has been reduced so that Émile’s aesthetic experience of it induces a life experience. This seems to be literature that Émile can live by. Or is it? For, among the many terms Rousseau uses to describe Robinson Crusoe (‘situation’, ‘peinture’, ‘livre’, ‘traité d’éducation naturelle’, ‘texte’, ‘roman’), it is never littérature. It is only in book three, when he is between fifteen and twenty years old, that Émile is finally faced with something designated by this term.
The ideal ‘littérature’
The word littérature occurs six times in Émile, in several senses, illustrating the term’s contemporary semantic flux.50 On four occasions it refers broadly to ‘texts’, while retaining connotations of its earlier sense, ‘erudition’. In the preface, for instance, Rousseau contends that ‘[l]a littérature et le savoir de notre siècle tendent beaucoup plus à détruire qu’à édifier’ (241) [‘the literature and learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification’ (33)], and in book five, he claims that of all the ‘siècles de littérature’ (826) [‘literary ages’ (450)], we have never read as much as we read today, nor have we ever been less knowledgeable. Two further uses of the word occur during misogynistic condemnations of women, in which Rousseau ridicules their self-assigned role as ‘arbitres de la littérature’ (673) [‘arbiters of literature’ (341)]. Advising Émile about his choice of wife, the tutor favours a ‘simple’ girl from a rustic background over a learned woman who might establish ‘un tribunal de littérature dont elle se ferait la présidente’ (768) [‘a tribunal of literature over which she would preside’ (409)]. The female-led ‘tribunal de littérature’ evokes the salons, at which Rousseau famously felt so out of place.51 Jefferson notes that this idea of littérature as a social sphere is particularly common in the Confessions.52
These instances of the word littérature describe everything Rousseau deplores about the state of contemporary learning, texts and the literary world. Littérature is destructive, spreads ignorance and allows women to assume authority. It appears that nothing could be more corrosive than littérature – until, that is, we consider two uses of the word in book four, when Émile is aged between fifteen and twenty. The tutor announces, ‘voici le tems de la lecture et des livres agréables; voici le tems de […] le rendre sensible à toutes les beautés de l’éloquence et de la diction’ (675) [‘this is the time for reading, for reading enjoyable books. This is the time to […] make him sensitive to all the beauties of eloquence and diction’ (342)]. Émile must learn to feel the beauty of eloquent texts, since his passions are now emerging. Indeed, once entrenched, these passions can only be controlled using other passions, particularly ‘amour propre’, Émile’s nascent desire to imitate and surpass those considered beautiful or honourable, to receive such accolades himself. But he must wish to imitate the right, virtuous models.53 Julie, in Rousseau’s earlier novel, is one such beautiful model of virtue, whom those around her cannot help but imitate.54 But what must Émile’s models be, what pleasing books must he read?
Perhaps surprisingly, given Rousseau’s opposition to collège literary teaching practices, Émile is given a syllabus of classical works.55 However, he is not to read them for their words, or to learn Latin but – as he read Crusoe – for their content and as models of taste:
Il y a […] une certaine simplicité de goût qui va au cœur et qui ne se trouve que dans les écrits des anciens. Dans l’éloquence, dans la poésie, dans toute espéce de littérature, [Émile] les retrouvera comme dans l’histoire abondans en choses et sobres à juger. (675)
[There is […] a certain simplicity of taste that speaks straight to the heart and is found only in the writings of the ancients. In eloquence, in poetry, in every kind of literature Émile will again find the ancients – as he found them in history – rich in facts and sparing in judgments. (342)]
Here, ‘littérature’ initially seems to mean ‘texts’, once again. However, the claim that in ‘littérature’, as in history, Émile will find ancient texts a rich, non-judgemental source suggests that ‘littérature’ excludes works of history. Moreover, following references to eloquence and poetry, the phrase ‘toute espèce de littérature’ appears to designate aesthetically pleasing genres such as these. ‘Littérature’ thus seems to mean something approximating belles-lettres.
‘Littérature’ recurs a few lines later. The tutor notes that ‘Émile prendra plus de gout pour les livres des anciens que pour les nôtres, par cela seul qu’étant les prémiers, les anciens sont les plus près de la nature’ (676) [‘Émile will get more of a taste for the books of the ancients than for ours, for the sole reason that the ancients, since they came first, are closest to nature’ (343)]. Émile’s taste for nature, acquired during his drawing lesson and honed during his first reading lesson, seems to have endured. Nonetheless, Émile will be exposed to modern texts: ‘Après l’avoir ainsi fait remonter aux sources de la pure littérature je lui en montre aussi les égouts dans les reservoirs des modernes compilateurs, journaux, traductions, dictionnaires; il jette un coup d’œil sur tout cela, puis le laisse pour n’y jamais revenir’ (676) [‘After having thus helped Émile ascend to the sources of pure literature, I also show him its sewers in the reservoirs of modern compilers, newspapers, translations and dictionaries. He casts a glance at all this, then leaves it never to return’ (343–44)].
A breach within littérature is revealed. Running beneath the natural wellspring of virtuous, classical ‘pure littérature’ are its modern sewers, filled with the sorts of texts Rousseau decries in his Discours sur les sciences et les arts [Discourse on the Sciences and Arts] (1750), which are embellished by ‘vils ornements’ [vulgar adornments] – frivolous parerga that please social tastes but are immoral (OC, iii, 7). As Rousseau earlier framed ‘le vrai beau’ as a core surrounded by ‘le prétendu beau’, so ‘la pure littérature’ is a natural spring surrounded by sewers. Like the ‘cadre doré’, these sewers teach Émile about sullied, social tastes.
Furthermore, while littérature in this episode initially seemed to be synonymous with belles-lettres, we soon find that belles-lettres also belong in the sewers of littérature. This becomes evident when Émile’s mode of reading classical texts (‘la pure littérature’) is contrasted with that of a collège pupil:
Figurez-vous d’un côté mon Émile, et de l’autre un poliçon de collége, lisant le quatriéme livre de l’Eneide ou Tibulle ou le Banquet de Platon; quelle différence! Combien le cœur de l’un est remué de ce qui n’affecte pas même l’autre. Ô bon jeune homme! arrête, suspends ta lecture, je te vois trop ému. Je veux bien que le langage de l’amour te plaise mais non pas qu’il t’égare. Sois homme sensible mais sois homme sage. Si tu n’es que l’un des deux, tu n’es rien. Au reste, qu’il reussisse ou non dans les langues mortes, dans les belles-lettres, dans la poesie, peu m’importe. (677)
[Picture my Émile, on the one hand, and a young college scamp, on the other, reading the fourth book of the Aeneid, or Tibullus, or Plato’s Banquet. What a difference! How much the heart of the one is stirred by what does not even affect the other. O good young man, stop, suspend your reading. I see that you are too moved. I certainly want the language of love to please you, but I do not want it to lead you astray. Be a sensitive man, but also a wise one. If you are only one of the two, you are nothing. Moreover, I care little whether he succeeds or not at the dead languages, at letters, at poetry. (344)]
Belles-lettres is both the scholarly discipline – associated with the collèges – in which one learns to produce eloquent texts, and the socio-professional field of writers that a gifted collégien might later join.56 Whereas the collège pupil treats littérature as a compendium of rhetorical devices dispassionately to be memorized in his quest to succeed ‘dans les belles-lettres’, Émile’s senses are engaged and his aesthetic response induces an emotional one.
It is worth noting that the texts that Émile and the collège pupil read are far from traditional collège classics. Staples such as Cicero are replaced by littérature that foregrounds the erotic passions. The fourth book of the Aeneid recounts Dido and Aeneas’ tragic love affair; the Roman poet Tibullus’s elegies celebrate his lovers; and Plato’s Banquet (commonly known as the Symposium) presents eloquent speeches in praise of eros.57 This is a syllabus for ‘l’âge des passions’, as Émile’s sexuality is emerging and he is readied to meet his future wife, Sophie.58 His encounter with littérature must allow him to practise controlling his nascent passions with his nascent reason. He will need this faculty, for instance, when the tutor compels him to leave Sophie, to embark on two years of educational travel. But Émile’s passions threaten to overtake him during this trial run.
His emotional reaction may be preferable to that of the detached collégien, but it is still concerning. It recalls Rousseau’s dangerously passionate response in the Confessions to his own childhood novel-reading, which he describes as having incurably afflicted him with ‘des notions bizarres et romanesques’ [strange and novelesque ideas] (OC, i, 8). Scholars have traced Émile’s delayed encounter with littérature to Rousseau’s fear of replicating his experience in his fictional student.59 But, whether or not Émile rises to the challenge of littérature, the only littérature of any potential value is that which pleases his aesthetic tastes, thus moving his senses and inducing an emotional response that will – hopefully – prepare him for life.
Of course, Rousseau’s originality lies not in suggesting that pleasing texts can affect readers’ lives. We need only look to Plato’s banishment of the poets from the Republic to prove that pleasing texts have long been considered persuasive. But what sets Rousseau apart is that he labels this sort of text littérature, as few had done before. Given that people have long conceived of this idea, but in different terms, we might question the importance of this word. Yet, this word – not just the ideas attached to it – seems to be a ‘keyword’, insofar as it is a ‘strong, difficult’ word, a perennial site for ‘deep conflicts of value and belief’.60 This much is clear in the famous titular question of Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? [What is Literature?] (1948); in the twentieth-century literary theory which, as Jefferson shows, took this question as its ‘raison d’être’; and in recent studies that suggest an ongoing, twenty-first-century desire to define littérature.61 As Roland Barthes has argued, however, to understand this word and its concepts, it must not only be a matter for critics and philosophers, but also for historians.62 And something overlooked by the few existing histories of ideas of littérature is that in book four of Émile – surrounded by uses of the word ‘littérature’ that describe everything Rousseau deplores about literary culture – littérature emerges as a word for aesthetically pleasing texts that induce an affective, and then an ethical, response.
Living by Rousseau’s ‘littérature’
Rousseau’s contemporary readers engaged affectively and ethically with his novels. ‘[J]’aurois voulu Etre chacun des deux [personnages] que vous m’avés peint’ [I would have liked to be each of the two characters you painted for me], Jean-Joseph-Pierre Fromaget wrote to Rousseau, after reading Julie.63 If, as Darnton describes, Rousseau wished to use his novels to persuade corrupt readers to become virtuous, such letters suggest that the message was indeed transmitted, ‘passing beyond the printed page from his soul into theirs’.64 But the message was not just about how to read: it was also a message, seized upon by gens de lettres [people of letters], about what littérature is. Some of these latter readers went on to write texts that publicized Rousseau’s idea of littérature as aesthetically, affectively and ethically compelling writing. These texts, in turn, have been considered among the foundational statements of modern ideas of littérature.
One such is De la littérature et des littérateurs [On Literature and Literary Men] (1778), by the man known as the ‘singe de Jean-Jacques’ [Jean-Jacques’s ape]: Louis-Sébastien Mercier. Mercier praises Rousseau throughout his œuvre; Émile is taught in Mercier’s reimagined Collège des Quatre-Nations, in his futuristic utopian novel, L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais [The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One] (1771) and Mercier later co-edited an early edition of Rousseau’s complete works. Rousseau’s influence on De la littérature is also clear.65 In this essay, Mercier describes the power of gens de lettres. Contemporary writers, he argues, are more useful to the nation than Ancient ones, since they persuasively teach virtue and spread ‘les lumières’ [enlightening ideas].66 Under Mercier’s pen, littérature is a modern, French corpus that conveys civic virtue and useful philosophical insights.
While this corpus differs from Émile’s classical ‘pure littérature’, Mercier nonetheless conceives of littérature as a type of text that appeals to the senses and thereby has moral and social power. In his later laudatory work, De Jean-Jacques Rousseau considéré comme l’un des premiers auteurs de la révolution [On Jean-Jacques Rousseau Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution] (1791), he describes Rousseau’s eloquent, moving texts in the way he earlier described littérature. In Émile, for instance, Rousseau is ‘à la fois peintre et législateur du cœur humain’ [both the painter and legislator of the human heart]; appealing to readers’ sensibilities, he makes them feel the desire to act virtuously.67 This is how littérature, Mercier argues, helps improve society.68 In January 1778, the Mercure de France’s review of De la littérature publicized this idea of littérature, defining its objectives as ‘l’instruction du genre humain, la peinture de la vertu qu’elle doit présenter si belles, qu’on ne puisse appercevoir le moindre de ses traits sans en devenir amoureux’ [the instruction of humankind, the portrayal of virtue – which it must describe so beautifully that one cannot glimpse its slightest features without falling in love with it].69 Via Mercier and the Mercure, Rousseau’s conception of littérature is transmitted to a wide audience.
As is well-known, Staël’s De la littérature similarly publicizes and extends a Rousseauian notion of littérature. Staël had previously described her passion for Rousseau and what she – like Mercier – saw as the social benefits of his œuvre, in her Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau [Letters on the Works and Character of J.-J. Rousseau] (1788–1789).70 Her description of Rousseau’s novels as aesthetically pleasing and thus persuasive ethical models anticipates her definition of littérature. Defending Julie against those who criticize it for portraying passionate love, for instance, she writes that ‘la véritable utilité d’un roman est dans son effet […]. Pardonnons à Rousseau, si à la fin de cette lecture, on se sent plus animé d’amour pour la vertu, si l’on tient plus à ses devoirs’ [the true utility of a novel lies in its effect […]. Let us forgive Rousseau if, when we have finished reading, we feel greater love for virtue, we care more for our duties].71
Like Émile’s tutor, Staël argues that readers must hone their tastes so that they find only morally good littérature beautiful: ‘en perfectionnant même son goût en littérature, on agit sur l’élévation de son caractère’ [by perfecting one’s taste in literature, one works on elevating one’s character].72 And littérature can improve not just individuals, but societies, since ‘[c]’est par les progrès de la littérature qu’on peut combattre efficacement les vieux préjugés’ [it is via the progress of literature that one can effectively tackle old prejudices].73 Like Mercier, Staël also argues that modern littérature is more socially useful than its ancient counterpart, since it benefits from humankind’s greater accumulated moral and intellectual ‘perfectionnement’.74 Staël’s littérature, then, although in several ways different to Rousseau’s, draws on his core idea of littérature as a text that is affectively compelling.75
Mercier’s and Staël’s attachment to Rousseau can be ‘glimpsed in the margins’ of their texts, just as Felski argues that scholars’ attachments can be glimpsed in their supposedly detached academic criticism, today.76 To put it differently, Felski might argue that Mercier and Staël took up Rousseau’s idea of littérature because they had essentially taken in Émile’s lesson about how to read aesthetically pleasing texts in an affective and effective way. Nevertheless, their attachment does not prevent them from critically reworking Rousseau’s idea of littérature, for instance, by figuring it as something that necessarily produces ethical and political change. Neither Rousseau nor indeed Felski have this conception; for Rousseau, misreading or mis-reacting (as in Émile’s overly emotional response) is always possible, while both Rousseau and Felski see that some aesthetic attachments produce no lasting consequences for individuals or societies.77
While Mercier, Staël and others clearly helped to stabilize and publicize this idea of littérature, Rousseau played a crucial (if less obvious) role in this process. If Jefferson contends that the Confessions somewhat unintentionally founds modern ideas of littérature as both a type of writing that appeals to the senses and as a category that is always contested, a close reading of Émile suggests that we can extend and nuance this account.78 For we see, in that work, that these ideas emerge some twenty years before the Confessions was published, and that Émile is explicitly taught to feel aesthetically attached to texts called littérature, such that they might alter his life.
Escaping criticism
This article has shown that, in Émile, existing ideas of littérature and its close synonym belles-lettres are rejected, and out of these steps a new idea of littérature as aesthetically pleasing and therefore affectively compelling texts that might teach Émile how to live. Rousseau teaches this lesson by curating a gallery of aesthetic experiences through which Émile and Émile’s readers must pass, so as to understand the pièce de résistance, littérature. Many of Rousseau’s readers came to live by this idea of littérature inasmuch as they described being ‘hooked’ by his novels, but also in that some went on to publicize and stabilize this Rousseauian sense of the word. The history of the idea of littérature looks rather different, then, when we see that this modern idea – which shares affinities with postcritical ideas of literature – was proposed before the Revolution, in a text more often known for its statements against literature.79
As Rousseau’s littérature emerges from his contestation of the literary world around him, so Felski’s notion of literature emerges from her reaction against what she perceives to be the prevailing mode of detached scholarly criticism. As such, Felski frames her postcritical turn as doing something rather like the title of Borrell del Caso’s painting, Escaping Criticism.80 But why should that escape lead to uncharted territory? By studying Rousseau’s eighteenth-century redefinition of littérature, we see that today’s postcritical turn is in many ways a re-turn to one of the earliest French ideas of littérature, attached to that word just as it was becoming modern (in other words, signifying not ‘erudition’, but a kind of text). Of course, the return is not exact. Rousseau’s misanthropy, his rejection of the scholarly world and his desire to use littérature to inculcate are not shared by Felski. And in any case, as Joni Mitchell says (and as Rousseau says too in other words in the second Discours), ‘we can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came’.81 In doing just that, this article has noticed a few new things: about Rousseau’s language, about his aesthetic thought and about the history of the idea of literature as a type of aesthetically and ethically engaging text.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks go to Kate Tunstall, Catriona Seth, Caroline Warman and Karolina Watroba, and to the anonymous reviewers, for their valuable feedback on the ideas in this article. The piece also benefitted from stimulating conversations with attendees of the Twenty-First Rousseau Association Colloquium on ‘Rousseau and Aesthetic Experience’. I would also like to thank the Leverhulme Foundation for its generous financial support.
Endnotes
Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, in Critique and Postcritique, ed. by Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 1–28 (p. 1).
Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020), p. 15. Hooked builds on Felski’s The Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), and The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Critique and Postcritique addresses the history of critique, but there is little consideration of the history of postcritical modes of reading.
See, for instance, Plato, Republic, trans. and ed. by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), chapters 4 (pp. 70–114) and 13 (pp. 344–62); Martha Nussbaum, ‘Reading for Life’, in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 230–44.
Felski, Hooked, p. 38.
See, for instance, Marian Hobson, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); and, in relation to theatre, Joseph Harris, Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Daniel Mornet, ‘L’Accueil du grand public’, in La Nouvelle Héloise, 4 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1925), i, 247–67; Daniel Roche, ‘Les Primitifs du Rousseauisme. Une analyse sociologique et quantitative de la correspondance de J.-J. Rousseau’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 26.1 (1971), 151–72; Robert Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity’, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, rev. edn (New York: Basic Books, 2009), pp. 215–56.
Darnton, ‘Readers Respond’, p. 241.
Bonnes lettres (more common than belles-lettres before c. 1640) generally designated ancient, secular texts, read to confer erudition and spiritual edification; belles-lettres emphasized a more worldly, often modern, canon read to confer eloquence and manners. For more, see Philippe Caron’s lexical history, Des ‘belles-lettres’ à la ‘littérature’: Une archéologie des signes du savoir profane en langue française (1680–1760) (Louvain: Peeters, 1992) and Jean-Claude Arnould, ‘Bonnes ou belles lettres. Le Discours sur l’utilité des lettres au milieu du XVIe siècle’, in Bonnes lettres/Belles lettres: Actes des colloques de Centre d’études et de recherches Editer/Interpréter de l’Université de Rouen, ed. by Claudine Poulouin and Jean-Claude Arnould (Paris: Champion, 2006), pp. 13–31.
See, for instance, ‘Littérature’, in Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel, contenant généralement tous les mots françois tant vieux que modernes, et les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts, 3 vols (The Hague: Leers, 1690), ii, n.p.
While my focus is on the French word littérature, the meaning of the word in other European languages also changed during this period. On this, see ‘Literature’, in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn (London: Fontana, 1983), pp. 183–88; Trevor Ross, ‘The Emergence of “Literature”: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century’, English Literary History, 63.2 (1996), 397–422.
Louis de Jaucourt, ‘Littérature’, in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, 28 vols (Paris: Le Breton, Briasson, David, Durand, 1751–1772), ix (1765), 594–95.
See, for instance, Robert Escarpit, ‘La Définition du terme “littérature”’, in Le Littéraire et le social (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), pp. 259–72 (p. 261); Alexandre Gefen, L’Idée de la littérature: De l’art pour l’art aux écritures d’intervention (Paris: Corti, 2021), pp. 13, 28–29, 43.
Ann Jefferson, Biography and the Question of Literature in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 46–56.
Aesthetics was an emerging field in this period, with the word having first been used by Baumgarten in 1735, in Latin, to discuss writing that appeals to the senses (see Jefferson, Biography, pp. 43–44). For a summary of eighteenth-century aesthetic thought, see Kate Tunstall, ‘Enlightenment Aesthetic Thought’, in The Cambridge History of French Thought, ed. by Michael Moriarty and Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 256–62.
Jefferson, Biography, pp. 47–49.
Felski, Hooked, p. 14. The ‘keywords’ methodology, pioneered by Williams, posits that attending to semantically rich words that reflect and shape cultures can help us better understand these cultures. Studies of early modern European culture that fruitfully use this method include Neil Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: Word Histories (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag; Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 1998) and Renaissance Keywords, ed. by Ita Mac Carthy (Oxford: Legenda, 2013).
See Sylvain Menant, ‘La Place de la littérature dans les idées d’Émile’, in Rousseau, l’Émile et la Révolution: actes du colloque international de Montmorency, 27 septembre–4 octobre 1989, ed. by Robert Thiéry (Paris: Universitas, 1992), pp. 43–49; Laurence Mall, ‘Émile’ ou les figures de la fiction (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002); Alain Viala, Lettre à Rousseau sur l’intérêt littéraire (Paris: PUF, 2005); and John T. Scott, Rousseau’s Reader: Strategies of Persuasion and Education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Jean Starobinski, ‘The Antidote in the Poison: The Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, in Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 118–68.
Although I focus on Émile, this trope recurs across Rousseau’s works, and would merit further study.
Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 63.
Rousseau famously considers that the arts can have either effect, and indeed are more often deleterious to morals, as the Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750) highlights. For an alternative reading, which suggests that the Discours in fact posits that man’s corruption led to the development of the arts and sciences, see Sally Howard Campbell and John T. Scott, ‘Rousseau’s Politic Argument in the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts’, American Journal of Political Science, 49.4 (2005), 818–28.
Among the few studies of Rousseau’s aesthetic thought are Philip Robinson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Doctrine of the Arts (Bern: Peter Lang, 1984) and James F. Hamilton, Rousseau’s Theory of Literature: The Poetics of Nature (York, SC: French Literature Publications, 1979). The theme of the 2019 Rousseau Association Colloquium, ‘Rousseau and Aesthetic Experience’, testifies to renewed interest in this subject.
Émile, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), iv, 250. French quotations are from this edition; subsequent quotations will be given to page numbers in the text. English translations of Émile are from the translation by Allan Bloom (London: Penguin, 1991), here p. 40. Subsequent quotations will be given in the main text. Further references to texts in the Œuvres complètes will be given as ‘OC’, by volume and page number. All other translations are my own, unless otherwise stated.
Robinson and Michel Termolle advance this conclusion. See Robinson, Rousseau’s Doctrine of the Arts, p. 273; and Michel Termolle, ‘La Connaissance par le dessin’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les arts visuels: actes du colloque de Neuchâtel, Association Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by Frédéric Eigeldinger (Geneva: Droz, 2003), pp. 357–75.
See Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (first published 1719), ed. by Dominique Désirat (Paris: ENSBA, 1993), p. 77. The idea that imitations of imitations are deceptive is an old one; see, for instance, discussion in book ten of Plato’s Republic.
Richard Glauser makes this point in ‘“De tous nos sens le plus fautif”. Infirmité naturelle et expérience de la vue dans l’Émile’, in Rousseau et les arts visuels, ed. by Eigeldinger, pp. 37–58 (p. 56). Rousseau draws on classical ideas on beauty and mimesis as advanced in Aristotle’s De poetica and Horace’s Ars poetica, and on their eighteenth-century development by writers such as Charles Batteux, with his related (though distinct) idea that man’s natural sentiment of taste is moved by representations of ‘la belle nature’. See Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (1746).
Dubos, Réflexions, p. 137.
In the Critique of Judgement, Kant explicitly criticizes the gold frame, ‘[introduced] merely to win approval for the picture by means of its charm’. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. by Nicholas Walker, trans. by James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 57. Kant famously read and admired Rousseau’s work, including Émile. While further research is needed, it seems possible that Kant’s comments, which influenced Derrida’s, were themselves influenced by this very passage from Émile.
The tutor’s aesthetic guidance is an instance of cultural censorship, of the kind Rousseau identifies in the Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750) as being exerted by literary academies via their concours prizes (OC, iii, 25–26), or by the legislator’s redirection of public tastes in the Contrat social (1762) (OC, iii, 458–59).
See Hobson, The Object of Art.
Felski, Hooked, pp. 55–56.
Zadie Smith, ‘Some Notes on Attunement’, in Feel Free: Essays (New York: Penguin, 2018), pp. 100–16 (pp. 101, 112).
Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 60.
Robinson, Rousseau’s Doctrine of the Arts, p. 273.
Rousseau produced other herbaria, but these two stand out for their similar visual appearance. For more on the aesthetic dimensions of these herbaria, see Timothée Léchot, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les présents botaniques: l’éloquence muette des herbiers’, Revue historique neuchâteloise, 149.3–4 (2012), 221–40 (p. 234) and Célia Abele, ‘Rousseau’s Herbaria: Leaves of Self, Books of Nature’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 54.2 (2021), 401–25 (p. 405). On the aesthetic foundation of Rousseau’s early botanical practices, see Alexandra Cook, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau s’initie à la botanique: science et art dans le manuscrit des Plantes herborisées avec M. Neuhaus’, Bulletin de la Société neuchâteloise des sciences naturelles, 139 (2019), 5–44.
Abele reads the frames in these herbaria as ‘an [artificial] intervention in the natural’, which serves to focus the viewer’s attention on the natural plant: ‘Rousseau’s Herbaria’, p. 414. I see the frames, rather, as helping reframe the specimen as an art object, curated by Rousseau to give the illusion of its being a natural plant in its natural state.
It is in this sense of serving multiple purposes and inhabiting intersecting fields that Cook defines the herbaria as a ‘boundary object’. See Alexandra Cook, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Botany: The Salutary Science (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012), pp. 253–95. Léchot develops the idea (suggested by Rousseau) of the herbaria as a stand-in for a portrait miniature: ‘Rousseau et les présents botaniques’, p. 237.
Hirst’s piece consists of a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde, displayed in a glass tank with a white, steel frame. See Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, tiger shark, glass, steel, formaldehyde solution, private collection.
This is part of Rousseau’s wider claim that signs are meaningless without prior knowledge of their referent (Émile, in OC, iv, 347), an idea central to Derrida’s reading of Rousseau in De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967). This is also why Rousseau denies that second language learning or La Fontaine’s Fables are appropriate for children.
Following Kant, Derrida also writes of the clothes adorning a statue as ‘hors-d’œuvres’, parerga that both decorate and veil its nudity: The Truth in Painting, p. 57.
Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, 4th edn, 2 vols (Paris: Brunet, 1762), i, 723.
Scott, Rousseau’s Reader, pp. 217–26. Specifically, Scott sees this social content as regarding religion.
Scott’s analysis builds on those of Janie Vanpée and Denise Schaeffer, who see Émile as educating its readers, just as books educate Émile. See Janie Vanpée, ‘Rousseau’s Émile, ou de l’éducation: A Resistance to Reading’, Yale French Studies, 77 (1990), 156–76; Denise Schaeffer, Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).
I follow Schaeffer, Rousseau on Education, pp. 72–84, who sees Crusoe as a social man in a solitary state; his story provides Émile with a tentative experience of another person, before he comes fully to identify with others.
Felski divides identification into alignment, allegiance, recognition and empathy in Hooked, pp. 94–111. Hobson notes that the term ‘identification’ was first used in an aesthetic sense in the eighteenth century: The Object of Art, p. 299.
See Rousseau’s Confessions (OC, i, 9). Christopher Kelly analyses this episode in Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The Confessions as Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 22–23, 93–94. Felski argues that empathy renders critical reflection possible: Hooked, pp. 107–08.
Felski, Hooked, p. 84.
Kelly also notes this in Rousseau’s Exemplary Life, pp. 79–80.
I focus on the word as it occurs in Émile, but these senses recur throughout Rousseau’s œuvre.
On Rousseau’s malaise in salon society, see Antoine Lilti, Le Monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005), pp. 196–204.
Jefferson, Biography, pp. 51–54. For such uses, see Rousseau, OC, i, 286, 347, 368, 416, 514, 515, 601, 608.
Elsewhere, Rousseau contends that to stimulate people to be virtuous, they must be taught to esteem virtuous people, and to find virtue beautiful (Contrat social, in OC, iii, 501).
See the comments to this effect by Saint-Preux and, in the second preface, by ‘N’ (OC, ii, 28, 585).
This is less surprising, of course, in that Rousseau was a famous ‘ancien’.
These senses of the word are common in Rousseau’s works; see OC, ii, 961; iii, 65, 100–01; iv, 32, 51.
This syllabus has received little scholarly attention. For a recent consideration, see Nelson Lund, Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy (London: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 203–07.
Although this article will not discuss Sophie’s literary education, studies have shown that her reading (of François Fénelon’s Télémaque) similarly prepares her to fall in love with Émile. See Barbara de Negroni, ‘La Bibliothèque d’Émile et de Sophie: la fonction des livres dans la pédagogie de Rousseau’, Dix-huitième siècle, 19.1 (1987), 379–90; Jan Crosthwaite, ‘Sophie and Les Aventures de Télémaque: Amorous Nymphs and Virtuous Wives in Rousseau’s Émile’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15.2 (1992), 189–201.
See Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life, pp. 22–23; Mall, ‘Émile’ ou les figures de la fiction, p. 127; Viala, Lettre à Rousseau, p. 19.
Williams, Keywords, pp. 14, 23.
See Jefferson, Biography, p. 8; Gefen, L’Idée de la littérature.
Roland Barthes, ‘Littérature et signification’, in Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1981), pp. 258–76 (p. 265) (first publ. in Tel Quel, 16 (1963)).
Jean-Joseph-Pierre Fromaget to Rousseau, 5 June 1761, Letter 1426 in Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by Ralph Leigh, 52 vols (Geneva: Institut et musée Voltaire, 1965–1998), ix (1969), 3.
Darnton, ‘Readers Respond’, pp. 234, 244.
On Rousseau’s influence on Mercier, see Olivier-Henri Bonnerot, ‘Louis-Sébastien Mercier: lecteur et éditeur de Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, in Rousseau, l’Émile et la Révolution, ed. by Thiéry, pp. 415–23; Jean-Claude Bonnet, ‘L.-S. Mercier et les “Œuvres complètes” de Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, in La Notion d’œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean Sgard and Catherine Volpilhac-Auger (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999), pp. 111–24.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier, De la littérature et des littérateurs (Yverdon: [n. pub.], 1778), pp. 3–4.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier, De Jean-Jacques Rousseau considéré comme l’un des premiers auteurs de la révolution, ed. by Raymond Trousson (Paris: Champion, 2010), p. 95.
Mercier, De la littérature, p. 30. For more on Mercier’s conception of literature as socially transformative, see Michel Delon, ‘La Révolution et le passage des Belles-Lettres à la Littérature’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 90 (1990), 573–88.
[Anon.], review of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, De la littérature et des littérateurs (1778), Mercure de France, ii, January 1778, pp. 98–102 (p. 98).
On the similarities between Mercier’s and Staël’s definitions, see Gérard Gengembre, ‘Mme de Staël: De la littérature ou des belles lettres?’, in Bonnes lettres/Belles lettres, ed. by Poulouin and Arnould, pp. 429–37.
Madame de Staël, Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau, ed. by Marcel Françon (Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), pp. 20–21.
Madame de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, in Œuvres, ed. by Catriona Seth and Valérie Cossy (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), pp. 1–303 (p. 16).
Ibid., p. 24.
This idea of ‘perfectibilité’ originates in Rousseau’s Discours sur les origines et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755): see OC, iii, 142.
On Staël’s ambivalence towards Rousseauian ideas in De la littérature, see James Hamilton, ‘Structural Polarity in Mme de Staël’s De la littérature’, The French Review, 50.5 (1977), 706–12; and on her broader practice of reworking Rousseau’s aesthetic discourse, see Tili Boon Cuillé, ‘Revoicing Rousseau: Staël’s Corinne and the Song of the South’, in Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music, ed. by Delia da Sousa Correa (Oxford: Legenda, 2006), pp. 100–11.
Felski, Hooked, p. 134. My own attachments are probably visible in the parerga of this article, too.
Felski, Hooked, pp. 105–06, 118–19. There are notable examples of mis-reaction among the socially corrupted modern theatre audiences discussed in the Lettre à d’Alembert (1758), who mistakenly identify with immoral characters, or who experience the theatre as such an artificial space (with its unnatural language, clothing and staging) that they are unable to transfer any virtuous moral lying behind these parerga into their lives. For more on Rousseau’s concerns about spectatorial identification, see Harris, Inventing the Spectator, pp. 198–222.
Jefferson, Biography, pp. 47–49.
As I have shown elsewhere, Rousseau was certainly not the only writer to drive the emergence of other modern ideas of littérature (such as ‘a national canon’) during the Ancien Régime. For a study of the ways in which mid-eighteenth-century debates about literary teaching contributed to the development of modern ideas of littérature, see Gemma Tidman, The Emergence of Literature in Eighteenth-Century France: The Battle of the School Books (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023).
The painting has been seen as an attack on the constraints imposed by nineteenth-century art critics, and the fashion for Romanticism. In different ways, Borrell del Caso, Felski and Rousseau all take an interest in escaping dominant critical frames of reference. See The Frame Blog, ‘How Artists Have Used the Frame in the Past, and How they Use it Now’, The Frame Blog, 9 June 2016 <https://theframeblog.com/2016/06/09/how-artists-have-used-the-frame-in-the-past-how-they-can-use-it-now/> [accessed 30 November 2022].
Joni Mitchell, ‘The Circle Game’, Ladies of the Canyon (Reprise Records, 1970).
