Rousseau's legacy

by Dennis Porter

In modern Western literary culture, the writer who combines autobiographical witness with political critique has been the object of particular veneration, as the careers of such celebrated figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Marguerite Duras among others attest. Dennis Porter argues in Rousseau's Legacy that this cultural idea of the writer - as distinct from the more traditional "man of letters" - first emerged in France in the decades preceding the French revolution, and has continued to exercise a nominative power over intellectual life well into our own day. In Porter's paradigm, Jean-Jacques Rousseau serves as a seminal figure who combined radical critique of existing institutions with a new form of confessional writing and a suspicion of the art of literature. Rousseau inaugurated the idea of a heroic and committed writerly life in which the opposition between public and private self is collapsed. Porter combines a wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary theory and cultural history ov