for the moral benefit of humanity, rather than publishing for money as many professional writers did. In the first chapter,“The Business of Making,” she provides a survey of Geneva’s tradition of craftsmanship, with a particular emphasis on horology and Rousseau’s family’s contribution to it. In the next chapter,“Writing (Down) Music,”she notes that his preoccupations with craft during his boyhood, along with his artisanal training, allowed him to get by financially later on in life when the written word fell short. His artisanal leanings also gave him the peace of mind to stop writing when it suited him, instead pursuing what he viewed as more worthwhile endeavors. Copying music in the 1760s in Paris, for example, and the automatism it entailed, provided him with great relief from the ordeals to which he was subjected as a writer and creator. In the following two chapters, “Art or Craft” and “Drama and Life,” the author elegantly shows how Rousseau was at times contradictory and at others consistent in his stance on the arts.She provides a rigorous chronological and formal analysis of his writings on the arts and craftsmanship and an overview of his activities as an artisan. The inclusion of Gravelot’s illustrations from Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse would have been useful here, since Goodden gives such a detailed account of Rousseau’s impossible demands on the artist without providing the images themselves. In chapter five, “Émile, Wealth and Wellbeing,” she decodes Rousseau’s contradictory stance on the relationship between social hierarchy and manual labor in his pedagogical treatise: although the young Émile, of genteel birth, is taught to respect the dignity of manual labor, he learns trades in a superficial manner and to respect certain trades more than others. In “Crafting a Self,” the author deconstructs Rousseau’s critique of imagery via an analysis of his distaste for Allan Ramsay’s portrait of him. She concludes that he was territorial in regards to his ownership of the representation of his inner self. In the final chapter, “The Order of Insight,”the author illustrates how Rousseau’s predilection for botany can be revealed as a reflection of his overall philosophy of man and the self. A compelling and accessible work for students and scholars of French literature and eighteenth-century studies, this monograph is a significant contribution: Goodden successfully disentangles the complexity of Rousseau’s navigation of the paradoxical relationships between antimaterialism and craft, useful artistic creation and leisure, and his condemnation of the excesses of modernity versus the modern as it appears in his works. Christopher Newport University (VA) Michael J. Mulryan Gorrillot, Bénédicte, et Alain Lescart, éd. L’illisibilité en questions: avec Michel Deguy, Jean-Marie Gleize, Christian Prigent, Nathalie Quintane.Villeneuve d’Ascq: PU du Septentrion, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7574-0741-7. Pp. 313. 28 a. There is much to recommend in this detailed, precise, often conversational study, which explores from numerous vantage points unreadability as a conceptual underpinning in contemporary poetry. First, the editors’ underlying vision makes these 218 FRENCH REVIEW 89.2 Reviews 219 proceedings from the 2008 colloquium“Liberté,licence, illisibilité poétiques”especially coherent. Structured as a book whose main chapters foreground poets’ critical views and compositional methods,the volume shares dialogue with—and among—outspoken writers of several generations, as well as central questions kept open and carefully framed. It moves smoothly from prefatory notes, to “Prologues” from each guest of honor (17–58), to material on their poetics accompanied by multiple entretiens, to studies of other “dis-lisibilités” (211), to concluding remarks. Its critical apparatus materializes as much within the overall presentational structure as in the lucid commentary from the four poets on how and why we should read contemporary texts. Second, L’illisibilité takes what can seem a puzzling theme and clarifies its validity diachronically and synchronically. We are reminded that authors of all eras seek alternative communicative strategies amid changing norms, that unreadability has increasingly interested academics and the media since the mid-1990s, and that the contemporary French poetic horizon offers many modalities of (un)readability, for instance as examined in the closing chapter on Pierre Alferi...