Robin Howells

Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality

On Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s personal sexual dispositions there is no shortage of evidence to orient the enquiry, because he tells us about them. Here (as in so much else) he inaugurates modernity. He is historically the first to examine closely his own sexuality, and to perceive it as an essential element of the ‘self’. He is also the first to trace his proclivities back to his childhood. More exactly, he is the first to write all this down, in a literary subgenre which he also inaugurates, for the public (eventually) to read — the Confessions. The notable section in Book I was composed when he was in his early fifties, around 1765. He had however already projected models of sexuality and sexual relations in his epistolary novel, Julie, or The New Heloise (published at the start of 1761). The freedom of fiction allows him to explore and debate the relation of sexuality to desire, virtue, social and metaphysical order. Sexuality is formally theorised, especially in relation to nature, socialisation and imagination, in the latter part of Emile, or On Education (published in 1762). In Book 5 of Emile, notoriously, he argues that woman is intended to be subordinate to man. Between his theoretical stance and his personal imperatives however there is a considerable tension.

Seeing through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault@@@Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Marvelous Storytelling: 1. Marvelous realities: toward an understanding of the merveilleux 2. Reading (and) the ironies of the marvelous 3. The marvelous in context: the place of the contes de fees in late seventeenth-century France Part II. Marvelous Desires: 4. Quests for love: visions of sexuality 5. (De)mystifications of masculinity: fictios of transcendence 6. Imagining femininity: binarity and beyond Afterword Notes, Selected bibliography Index.

Esch-sca(r)-tology: R udy Wiebe's "A n Indication of Burning"

Wiebe’s short story &dquo;An Indication of Burning&dquo; is another bout with the angels. However, within an oeuvre that has often treated its own concerns with insistent seriousness, the prevailing tone here is comic irony. At the same time this story is clearly a trial piece for A~y Lovelv Enemv ( 1983 ), the last and most ambitious to date of Wiebe’s novels. The central anecdote is very similar. In both fictions a middle-aged and bearded teacher at a tertiary institution in Alberta has an intense affair with a ravishingly beautiful young woman. She seeks, and offers him, some kind of absolute. Its significance is extensively discussed in the novel. In the short story the explication is much less. Clusters of images are foregrounded and we are left, with some hints, to sort out their meaning. Perhaps we should therefore call it not a short story -

Paysages reves, Paysages vecus dans 'La Nouvelle Heloise' de J.-J. Rousseau

Landscape is a factor which, in the case of la nouvelle heloise, is inseparable from the authors life and the various events which punctuate it. These events testify to the fact that rousseau often utilized his own reminiscences in his novel. Rather then being a faithful reproduction of experienced scenes, however, la nouvelle heloise represents a symbiosis of real sites and landscapes which serve to construct an ideal landscape. La nouvelle heloise is neither the ermitage nor savoie nor switzerland, but all three at once; so that the univers thus engendered is nourished successively, or simultaneously, by the past, the present and the hopes of the author. An addition, an attentive examination of hid life and his novel brings out the presence of certain natural elements. The mountain, water and the garden thus constituate essential elements of the rousseauistic landscape. The quest for happiness which permeates la nouvelle heloise places a value on a pastoral, simple and primitive style of life. Throughout his novel rousseau establishes a dialectic involving geography, ecology, economics and morality. An analysis of the elements and various aspects of the rousseauistic landscape reveals that they seek to signify something beyond themselves, surpassing the bounds of simple geography. They strive to maintain a relationship with the moods, the angnish and the recollections of the author of la nouvelle heloise.