Poetic Fiction Research Articles

The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind by Timothy M. Costelloe

Reviewed by: The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind by Timothy M. Costelloe Saul Traiger Timothy M. Costelloe. The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 312. Hardback. ISBN: 9781474436397. $107.00. If anything about Hume’s philosophy can be characterized as widely accepted, it is that the imagination is front and center in Hume’s account of the mind. The aim of Timothy Costelloe’s book is to fully develop the observation, that the imagination, as Hume understands it, is “the canvas of the mind.” Costelloe amply demonstrates that the imagination is a broad canvas, ranging from Hume’s epistemology and metaphysics, to his aesthetics, moral and political philosophy, history, philosophy of religion, and his general conception of philosophy itself. Seven substantial chapters cover these areas, and show how Hume takes the imagination to play a pivotal role in each. One of the many strengths of this book is that Costelloe responsibly mines the secondary literature, carefully explaining the interpretations he seconds and those he finds wanting. The attention to the relevant secondary literature is apparent from the start, where Costelloe laments the surprising dearth of book-length treatments of Hume on the imagination, but helpfully highlights both the lesser known Hume-centric monographs on the imagination by Furlong and Wilbanks, as well as more widely read interpretations. The introductory chapter makes important distinctions and introduces some main concepts. Hume differentiates the imagination’s “combinatory power” from its “creative power.” While the uninhibited ability to concatenate ideas might also be seen as a creative act, Costelloe sees the creative power where the imagination [End Page 173] “generates a class of ideas—‘fictions’ of a certain sort—independent of experience and according to its own inner logic” (21). This characterization makes sense when viewing the imagination’s function as directed towards a goal, such as achieving coherence or creating an aesthetically pleasing effect. Costelloe suggests that achieving an aesthetically pleasing effect is an element in any exercise of the imagination’s creative power. The imagination creates easy transitions among ideas where there were none, where doing so is pleasurable, or aided by the passions. Costelloe introduces his account of Hume’s fictions as errors of the imagination whereby ideas are formed in a manner different from the standard derivation from antecedent impressions. He insists, helpfully, that fictions are not illusions, but rather errors of a different kind. Though both involve error, fictions, unlike illusions, are not described in terms of jest or irony (30). Though he acknowledges that Hume does not describe any fictions as “artificial,” Costelloe finds it helpful to draw a distinction between natural and artificial fictions. Natural fictions are generated without reflection. Artificial fictions, such as those created by poets and philosophers, issue from “the voluntary act of imagination” (31). Costelloe holds that artificial fictions “are rarely taken to refer to objects with real existence and that any professed belief is really a matter of people being persuaded of something and taking the ideas in question as having real referents, thus only lending themselves to their existence for one reason or another” (31). This is a bit unclear. Certainly, poetic fictions are voluntary creations not intended to refer to real objects. But substance, and the double existence of ideas and external objects, as philosophical fictions, surely both involve belief and the corresponding existential commitments on the part of the philosophers who are committed to them. It is also difficult to see the purported contrast between belief and taking ideas to have real referents. Chapter 2, on metaphysics, is the longest chapter in the book, and it addresses the fictions of the imagination in Hume’s account of space and time, continued and distinct existence, liberty and necessity, and personal identity. Costelloe is sensitive to the worry that classifying Hume’s subject in Book 1 of the Treatise as metaphysics may appear to be slighting the central epistemological concerns and failing to appreciate Hume’s nascent cognitive psychology. Such worries fall away as Costelloe explores the roles that the imagination plays in the formation of our conception of duration without change, and the identity...

LUCRETIUS’ DIDACTICS OF DISGUST

The plague that closes Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura is a spectacle of disgust. Throats sweat with blood (6.47f.); tongues drip with gore (6.1149); breath reeks like rotten cadavers (6.1154f.); drinking water is contaminated when the sick dive into it (6.1174f.); black discharge pours from stomachs (6.1200); foul blood seeps from noses (6.1203); the sick slice off their own hands, feet, and genitals (6.1209f.); dead bodies are entombed by ulcers (6.1271). Again and again Lucretius hits upon domains that have been identified as key disgust elicitors. In Book 6, more than in any other book of the epic, we encounter what is taeter, ‘disgusting’. This adjective appears nine times in the final book (22, 217, 787, 807, 976, 1154, 1200, 1205, and 1266) after showing up one time each in Books 1 (936), 3 (581), and 5 (1126); six times in Book 2 (400, 415, 476, 510, 705, 872); and five times in Book 4 (11, 124, 172, 685, 1176). The vast majority of these instances describe disgust working upon our senses of taste, smell, sight, and even hearing (OLD s.v. 1); that is, ‘primary’ or ‘core’ disgust. At 2.510f., for instance, Lucretius speaks of a substance that is taetrius… / naribus auribus atque oculis orisque sapori (‘more disgusting to noses, ears, eyes, and the taste of the mouth’). But the word can also carry an ethical or moral nuance (OLD s.v. 2), suggesting ‘secondary’ disgust. At 5.1126, for example, the word describes Tartarus, into which thunderbolts ‘scornfully’ hurl sinners (contemptim in Tartara taetra). Here, Lucretius wants his reader to feel a sense of moral aversion to the idea of the Underworld, which throughout the epic he is at pains to prove is nothing but a poetic fiction.

Lyrical liars, animal desires and figurative kinship: Robert Henryson's defence of poetry in the prologue to The Morall Fabillis

This article cites Robert Henryson's Fables in order to contextualise the history of the medieval notion that the world of imaginary, poetic fiction, needs justification; and examines the theological sources which served as the foundation of that debate and provided the validation for the use of fable animals as moral exemplars.

Time, torture and Manus Island: an interview with Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian

Former asylum seeker detainee and journalist Behrouz Boochani (author of No Friend but the Mountains) and his collaborator Omid Tofighian speak about the experience of indefinite incarceration on Australia’s Manus Island and the psychological toll of waiting. They compare this form of detention to prison and the existential impact to torture. This Kyriarchal System, they argue, strips the individual of identity and humanity and they explain how such a system can perhaps be questioned better through the poetic fiction that Boochani has used in his path-breaking narrative than through appeal to dry rational facts and figures.

Luke, Widows, Judges, and Stereotypes by Febbie C. Dickerson

Reviewed by: Luke, Widows, Judges, and Stereotypes by Febbie C. Dickerson F. Scott Spencer febbie c. dickerson, Luke, Widows, Judges, and Stereotypes (Womanist Readings of Scripture; Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019). Pp. 223. $95. This work marks the first installment of a new series, Womanist Readings of Scripture, edited by Mitzi J. Smith and Gay L. Byron. Dickerson’s volume, an outgrowth of her doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University, treats Jesus’s parable of a widow and judge in Luke 18:2–5. D. provides a critical, multilevel analysis of this story, attending to (1) Luke’s context in 18:1–8, (2) the broad history of interpretation, and (3) particular African American readings. In chap. 1, D. challenges common stereotypes, both ancient and modern, of the helpless widow and heartless judge. In short, “[a]ll widows are not vulnerable and needy, and [End Page 138] all judges are neither uncaring nor impervious to justice” (p. 3). The parable’s brevity and limited character descriptions warrant resisting stock presumptions that foreclose wider interpretive options. In chap. 2, D. delineates a set of nine critical “problems” that this parable raises: The Problem of Place: Which City?; The Problem of a Judge with No Respect for People; The Problem of the Stereotyped Widow; The Problem of the Widow’s Question: Vengeance or Justice?; The Problem of Interior Monologue; Another Problem of Translation: A Threat of Violence or a Misunderstanding?; The Problem of the Inscribed Subject and Redaction Criticism; The Problem the Text Creates for Theodicy; Problems with the Text in African American Church Traditions. I list these headings in full because of their clear focus and comprehensive scope. Such issues pertaining to setting, characters, translation, rhetoric, readers, theology, and ethics provide a model framework for investigating other parables and other parts of Gospel narratives. In the next two chapters D. considers the parable’s reception history. Chapter 3 tracks reading trends across the patristic (Ephrem of Syria, Augustine of Hippo, Cyril of Alexandria), medieval (Venerable Bede, Hugh of St.-Cher), Reformation (Erasmus, Luther), and modern eras. Overall a dominant stereotypical pattern emerges: “The increasingly common portrayal of the widow as desolate—whether as the desolate church, or the desolate soul— eventually becomes, for the modern interpreter, the widow as epitomizing the desolate socially vulnerable” (p. 50). In this prevailing image of the widow as a “desolate” victim, she seeks justice rather than vengeance (ἐκδικέω, used in Luke 18:7, allows both meanings) through virtuous rather than violent means. A few modern scholars, however, have dared to challenge this helpless-widow pigeonhole, such as Wendy Cotter, who marshals evidence of wealthier, more self-sufficient women, including widows, representing themselves in ancient courts (“The Parable of the Feisty Widow and the Threatened Judge [Luke 18:1–8],” NTS 51 [2002] 323–43), and Barbara Reid, who sees the parable’s widow as a God-figure in Luke’s narrative (“A Godly Widow Persistently Pursuing Justice: Luke 18:1–8,” BR 45 [2000] 25–33). Both Cotter and Reid, however, still view the judge in wholly negative terms—another stereotype that D. aims to shake, if not shatter. To this end, she calls attention to Charles W. Hedrick’s provocative study of the legal system underlying the parable (Parables as Poetic Fictions: The Creative Voice of Jesus [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994]). In Hedrick’s view, the judge’s absent “fear” of God and others reflects objectivity and impartiality, qualities of a “thoroughly honest man” (Hedrick, p. 197); conversely, the widow’s “demand for vengeance violates Torah” (Hedrick, p. 102), and her disrespect for the court makes her a dishonorable character. Chapter 4 zeroes in on the first and most formative interpretation of the parable—that of Luke’s Gospel—which D. regards as a tendentious, constrictive reading against the wider grain of Jesus’s original story. In short, via the introduction in 18:1 and Jesus’s commentary in 18:6–8, “Luke’s narrative frame turns the widow into a prayerful petitioner” and “turns the judge into a negative image of the divine . . . a bad judge who yields to prayer” (p. 88). Such counter-“turning” fits Luke’s overall gendered stereotypes of widows...

On Poetic Fiction and Historical Truth: Concerning a song composed by Yu.G. Vinogradov

On Poetic Fiction and Historical Truth: Concerning a song composed by Yu.G. Vinogradov

“Forgers of Falsehood, Physicians of Nought”: Retailing Fictions in Boccaccio’s <i>Decameron</i>

Whereas Petrarch’s portrait of his doctor in Invectives Against a Physician is deliberately caricatural and seized at a glance, Boccaccio’s attitude towards doctors in the Decameron is far harder to grasp and easily overlooked. Yet, doctors and medical science are a central concern of the Decameron, whose first significant action (the brigata’s movement from the plague-afflicted city to the countryside) and activity (storytelling) are predicated on the Florentine doctors’ failure to find a remedy for the plague. Throughout the Decameron, the doctors’ glaring incapacity to help their patients is implicitly contrasted with the poets’ success in offering some measure of solace—if not a definitive cure—to those afflicted by the plague. The conventional view that poets retail fictions, and doctors, real cures, is repeatedly cast into doubt as Boccaccio reveals that all too often the real difference between doctors and poets is that doctors hawk medical fictions (their arsenal of exotic powders and decoctions) as true cures, whereas poets cloak true cures in poetic fictions. Medical fictions sicken the healthy and kill the sick; poetic fictions quicken the spirit and promote life. This counterpoising of doctors and poets (or painters), medicine and fiction in the Decameron both anticipates and contributes to Boccaccio’s lifelong defense of poetry that culminates in the 14th and 15th books of the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods.

Аллегория, поэтрия, риторика: к понятию поэтического вымысла во Франции конца XV в.

Аллегория, поэтрия, риторика: к понятию поэтического вымысла во Франции конца XV в.

Poetic Fiction as a Means of Choosing a Fairytale in Educational Process for Different Aged Groups of Readers

The research paper is concerned with the correct choice of magic texts based on a poetic fiction for getting useful information for future situations in life. The fairytale explains to the reader in simple and understandable language about the universe. It is no secret anymore that our ancestors laid in simple children’s fairytales a much deeper meaning than it seems at first glance. In addition, fairy tales set a very strong bond between parents and children, especially if mom or dad is reading or telling a bedtime story, explain and comment on the story.

Reanimating Archiving/Archival Corporealities: Deploying “Big Ears” in De Rigueur Mortis Intervention

Abstract This article considers the ways in which the constrictions of archiving bodies mirror the conscription of archival bodies. I advocate using transtemporal polyphony, irresolution, and ambiguity as a means to incorporate corporealities, historiographically intervening in lesser-known or seemingly “complete” queer histories. Drawing on state documents that usually exclude or suppress queer corporealities and from queer poetic fiction, I work to reanimate reading room intimacies. I offer the term de rigueur mortis to identify and disrupt the codified historical narrative of Progressive Era trans politician Murray Hall. Using Langston Hughes’s ASK YOUR MAMA, I document the ways in which ambiguity and irresolution provide space for queer performing bodies in the often heteronormative historiography of “the dozens.” Imagining and enacting queer historical futures requires us to reenvision tangible archival material; I discuss the role that a comedic ethics toward historiography might have in expanding our present-past for future-pasts to come.

The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt (review)

Reviewed by: The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt Matthew Fisher David Watt, The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series.” Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2013. $99.95. Writing poetry about writing poetry is a temptation that few poets have resisted. Thomas Hoccleve is not among that select few. In the middle of [End Page 347] the twentieth century, Robert Graves dismissed “what passes as English poetry” as “the product of either careerism, or keeping one’s hand in: a choice between vulgarity and banality.” David Watt’s book, The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series,” attempts to uncover where along that spectrum we can place Hoccleve’s literary labor and its products as aesthetic and material propositions. Watt takes as his primary subject the process, not the product, of Hoccleve’s writing, and to that end interrogates its material remnants and the poetic fictions of its composition. Watt begins his book with a bold observation: “This is not the book I initially planned to write. The version of this book that I had in my head was never the version on the page in front of me” (1). Such a statement is honest, and draws attention to the chasms between intentionality and execution that are at the heart of all creative and critical endeavors. At the same time, Watt implies that the book escaped his control in some way. Though he thus sets up a parallel for his arguments about the complexities of Hoccleve’s compositional difficulties, it is a disturbing beginning. His frank honesty about the potential failures of process suggest that the product, too, may be problematic. The book offers a sustained engagement with the entirety of Hoccleve’s Series, and though many of its points are locally persuasive, it does not quite succeed in offering a critical framework that can make compelling sense of the gap between anticipation and execution it perceives in Hoccleve’s poetry. More successful is Watt’s attempt to focus on both the ephemeralities and the materialities of the poetic process. As Watt argues in the book’s introduction, “the Series offers a reflection on, not a reflection of, his [Hoccleve’s] conception of book production” (4). To this end, Watt marshals paleographical evidence along with careful close readings of the entirety of Hoccleve’s Series, a sequence of five distinct and interrelated Middle English poems, the best known of which are the first two, the “Complaint” and “Dialogue.” “Learn to Die” has occasioned some more recent criticism, but the remaining two poems, “The Tale of Jereslaus’s Wife” and “The Tale of Jonathas,” have warranted little critical attention over many years. A book-length study of Hoccleve’s Series is a welcome contribution to the field. Watt is to be commended for his sustained focus on Hoccleve’s complexly allusive poetry, and his careful encounter with the manuscript instantiations of that verse. The three autograph manuscripts of Hoccleve’s poetry (or possibly four, as Linne Mooney has recently argued in these pages) have been [End Page 348] disproportionately subject to the kind of paleographically and codico-logically grounded literary criticism that Watt assays. The first chapter of The Making attempts to construct Hoccleve’s likely audience “in and for the Series” through the lens of San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111. Watt reads the claims of Hoccleve’s narrator persona “Thomas” as reflecting and responding to the issues faced by Hoccleve and his poetry, and its reception by a coterie readership among the clerks of the Privy Seal. Watt argues Hoccleve’s poems “are meant to circulate among those at work in the Privy Seal and elsewhere in Westminster Hall” (31). That “elsewhere” ultimately covers quite a bit of ground, deriving from Ethan Knapp’s exposition of Hoccleve’s bureaucratic vision and Emily Steiner’s Langlandian documentary imagination, and stretching back to the coterie audiences of Piers Plowman described by Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and others. Watt asserts an imagined audience ranging from the king, to the upper echelons of the nobility, to Hoccleve’s fellow clerks. His depiction of a stratified and plural audience for the Series, its multiple valences carefully crafted...

Die Redlichkeit des Betrugs – Literarische Erinnerung und Totalitarismus bei Herta Müller und Vladimir Vertlib

“Die Redlichkeit des Betrugs” – Poetic Remembrance and Totalitarianism at Herta Müller and Vladimir Vertlib. The article deals with poetic remembrance of totalitarianism, taking a closer look at two contemporary authors from the German speaking literature, Herta Müller (born 1953) and Vladimir Vertlib (born 1966). Both authors’ concepts of memory re-pose the question of remembrance as related to historical facts and literary fiction as they try to overcome both the congealed memory and the primacy of experience, understood as a one-to-one translation into memory and literary speech. Herta Müller and Vladimir Vertlib do not approach the reality of totalitarianism using psychological realism but through strategies of poetic fiction. Although the term “fiction of truths” may sound paradoxical, both poetic concepts, however, prove adequate for poetic remembrance of the past as linked to fiction in narratives. By evoking and irritating the readers’ expectations with the help of the construction of his novels, the shifts of perspective and disruptions, Vladimir Vertlib writes against preformed stereotypes of memory, be they subjective or collective. Herta Müller develops a poetic language of abbreviated comparisons, in which words, objects and gestures, on the one hand, are abstracted from being self-evident and, on the other hand, are able to express the destruction of people and to refuse obedience against totalitarianism that extends into our language. The article shows on the example of two novels, Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel (2008) and Vladimir Vertlib’s Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur (2001) how these concepts of memory are realized and how they detach themselves from the victim-perpetrator-scheme. Both novels prove that psychic damages cause people to become mute, but do not deprive them of language.

Winthrop Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the PoetsThe Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets. Winthrop Wetherbee. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Pp. xi+304.

<i>Winthrop Wetherbee</i>, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets<i>The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets</i>. Winthrop Wetherbee. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Pp. xi+304.

“Ficción y verdad según la teoría literaria de Alfonso Reyes”

Fecha de recepción: 9 de septiembre de 2011.Fecha de aceptación: 1 de marzo de 2012.En su Deslinde. Prolegómenos para una teoría literaria, Alfonso Reyes describe la relación entre el ente metafísico y la ficción poética como clave para comprender la dimensión ética de la ficción. En su discurso queda claro que la noción de mímesis no se reduce a cánones de imitación formal del logos, o realidad, y que la creación artística consiste en un dia-logos que puede dar lugar a formas inexistentes pero que no son ajenas al ser. Reyes armonizalas concepciones poéticas de Aristóteles y de Platón al intentar definir la relación entre verdad y ficción.

Sorrow never leaves us where it found us

Sorrow’s Reward. Robert Allan Bear. Kingsley Publishing; 2011 Early in his medical training Robert Allan Bear came upon a copy of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology . That book, published in 1915, is a work of poetic fiction about the inhabitants of the small American town of Spoon River

Um faro para a modernidade: breves notas sobre o(s) outro(s) mundo(s) de Cyrano de Bergerac

A posteridade literária bem o conhece, é verdade, em razão de seu grande nariz. Entretanto, tal nariz o permitiu farejar em conhecimento de causa algumas questões ligadas ao literário que são eminentemente modernas, e que chegam mesmo a ultrapassar o registro das Belas Letras do século XVII. Como negar, por exemplo, que os Les Entretiens Pointus lançam a suspeita sobre o unitário da verossimilhança dos gêneros icásticos? Como não reconhecer em L’Autre Monde, que projeta o leitor em estados que não são mais aqueles desse mundo terreno, a exuberância da lua e do sol literários mergulhados no genus phantasticum, em franca oposição, uma vez mais, ao gênero icástico? Esse artigo dá-se como objetivo percorrer os textos de Cyrano de Bergerac procurando ali sublinhar os elementos constitutivos de uma poética da ficção plenamente apoiada sobre a oposição, ora direta ora indireta, entre mimesis icástica tal qual concebida por Platão no Sofista e mimesis fantástica, oposição esta que abre o debate literário nesse século XVII percorrido pelas querelas sobre as possibilidades de uma ficção liberta dos cânones clássicos.

Persona en Apocalipsis apócrifo de Armando Uribe Arce

This article proposes a synthesis of problematic of the passage by the death -aporia in Derrida- in the context of the poetic fiction presented in the book A...

Commentary on an Unacknowledged Text: Chaucer’s Debt to Langland

This essay examines Chaucer’s formal and ideational tribute to his older contemporary in the figure and performance of the Pardoner, a tribute enacted not primarily in local adversions and echoes, but in the sustained appreciation of the poetics of Langland’s enterprise, and of its dilemmas of literary form and modes of address. Chaucer also displays, in the improprieties of gender, age, and vocation that characterize this virtuoso of penitential rhetoric, his anatomy of the structural as well as affective hazards of Langland’s complex literary project, and its implications for his own, perhaps equally unfinishable, long poetic fiction.

Fortune la contrefaite: L'Envers de l'ecriture medievale

In this book Attwood discusses the portrayal of Fortune as a figure of literary inspiration and creation in late medieval French literature, with some reference to Italian and British authors (Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch; Chaucer, Oton de Grandson, James I of Scotland). The book takes a thematic approach, rather than one based on the characterization of individual texts or authors through sustained close readings. However, certain authors do naturally receive more attention than others, resulting in more in-depth analysis of their corpora. Christine de Pizan is among the most important authors in the study, along with Machaut, Jean Regnier, Chartier and Charles d'Orléans. Jean de Meun, Villon, Froissart, Olivier de la Marche and of course key Latin writers such as Alain de Lille and Boethius also figure prominently. The book begins with a comparison of Fortune and Nature as tutelary figures presiding over literary creation. As Attwood points out, the ‘book of nature’ is timeless and descriptive, while Nature's gifts are focused on principles of form; Fortune, associated with deformation and dialectic, ‘authors’ the diachronic, ever-changing ‘book’ of historical events. Moving on to comparisons of Fortune with Love, and of Fortune with Misfortune, Attwood points out that Fortune shares with Love the qualities of being blind, capricious and variable; but the inconstance and moodiness of Fortune—and in particular the tribulations and melancholy brought on by Misfortune—are potent sources of poetic inspiration for late medieval authors. It is in the fourth chapter that the study really comes into its own, with some very interesting comparisons of Fortune and the authorial persona in the works of Christine de Pizan and Guillaume de Machaut; particular attention is given to the Mutacion de Fortune and the Voir Dit. The femininity of Fortune, for example, fosters identification with the capricious female love object; but Machaut also exploits identification between Fortune and the emasculated, weepy, semi-blind lover-narrator of the Voir Dit. Christine, for her part, exploits the theme of variability, metamorphosis and disguise to elaborate an image of the author as a de-feminised figure of both grief and fortitude, hiding her true self beneath poetic fictions just as deeper meaning lies hidden in the metaphors and allegories of poetry. Through these complex moves, both Machaut and Christine develop a kind of androgynous or hermaphroditic writing that is the very expression of the paradoxical and oxymoronic goddess Fortuna. Attwood builds on these insights in her final chapter, exploring the bi-partite, complementary and adversarial nature of so much late medieval poetry, from the complainte-confort structure of many dits amoureux, to the plethora of debate poems on all manner of topics. Fortune in her duality ultimately emerges as a figure both for the ‘écriture double’ of the late medieval author and for the author him or herself as one capable of comprising and orchestrating these diverse and mutually contradictory perspectives.

Le Monument Poétique de J.-J. Rousseau:L’ile de St. Pierre

The unstable genre of Rousseau’s Reverie set in motion a movement between biography and narration, testimony and poetic fiction in the wake of Montaigne. In his Reverie , Rousseau builds up a space where he is composed by refraction and displacement. The autobiographical process of writing is a kind of dialectical process between the subject writing about himself and the grammatical person that pertains to language.