[Download] "By Way of an Epilogue (Essay)" by Annali d'Italianistica ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: By Way of an Epilogue (Essay)
- Author : Annali d'Italianistica
- Release Date : January 01, 1997
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 157 KB
Description
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been praised and blamed for so many of the developments of the modern world, that it would do no great harm to lay another one at his door, and to begin this brief epilogue with a discussion of an as yet unacknowledged aspect of his thought: his mythographic imagination. When in his First Discourse the uprooted Genevan attacks the moral value of the great historical centers of Western culture, he clearly has in mind, as a countervailing ideal, the rugged simplicity of Sparta; but behind Sparta he is remembering Geneva, the nostalgically recollected Geneva of his childhood in the unassuming artisan district where his father had been a clockmaker. Past and present merge in the thought of this peripatetic and solitary figure, and in their fusion accumulate proliferating layers of meaning around any one single event. Similarly, when the feminization of culture (as distinguished from feminism) introduced by the predominance of the Parisian salon threatened to undermine the manly virtues of an heroic literature, Rousseau objects because he once again recalls the divided labors among men and women in the Geneva of his youth, which division becomes hypostatized in his mind into the much larger mythic and complementary Male/Female polarities that are sustaining of human existence. There is little need to point out that in almost every instance of his later life Rousseau was rejected by the real Geneva (the lukewarm reception of his Second Discourse dissuaded him from settling there in 1755-56, and it dismayed him that Protestant Geneva followed the lead of Catholic Paris in banning, confiscating, and burning his books in 1762--a double whammy which in this country would be similar to books being banned in Boston and New York some forty years ago). At the same time, and even after the edict against him and his works, he was adopted, feted, and lionized by the Parisian culture he pretended to deplore. Like many of the counter-cultural figures of our own day, he made his living by biting the hand that fed him (yet, in one of the strange paradoxes of modern culture, the bitten hand seemed to beg for more) and by idolizing the culture that had changed so markedly from the one he had created in his mind.