Aimances in Rousseau: Julie or The New Heloise as Treatise on the Passions
Aimances in Rousseau: Julie or The New Heloise as Treatise on the Passions
This chapter looks at how writing and theory are superimposed in Rosseau's novel, Julie or the New Heloise. Drawing upon two of Paul de Man's readings of the novel in his Allegories of Reading, the chapter embarks on a discussion regarding passion, which is generally considered to hold the philosophical key to the novel, by deriving from two assertions. The first is that that “passion is not something which, like the senses, belongs in proper to an entity or a subject but, like music, it is a system of relationships that exists only in the terms of this system;” it is a relational notion. De Man's second assertion defines the literary category of allegory as a “narrative of the second degree,” which includes the deconstruction of its own immediate, apparently realistic signification.
Keywords: Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Julie or the New Heloise, Paul de Man, allegory, passion, deconstruction, Allegories of Reading, relational notion
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