TY - JOUR TI - The binary of Rousseau DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3QR4VQG PY - 2013 AB - This dissertation began as a study of the relatively conventional, 18th century method of literary composition by rewriting the sentences of other writers. Rousseau imitated sentence structure to compose with diverting rhythms and appropriate ideas from the literary canon. The term “the binary of Rousseau” broadly means two writers coming together to make a passage; and words being defined in a way that contradicts their common signification. The dissertation is essentially comparative because classical and modern writers were compared to Rousseau’s works. From this perspective, Rousseau is understood as an Enlightenment author: his oeuvre encompasses the standard philosophy of empiricism, rationalism, materialism and sensationalism, political theory and history. My theory of composition with archetypes and prototypes is technical in the context of criticism about 18th century literature. The first chapter evaluates Rousseau’s translation of Tacitus’s Le premier livre, a Roman historian. Principles from the posthumously published Essai sur l’origine des langues are applied to aesthetics and linguistics. In Chapter Two, more sentences of Rousseau’s translation of Tacitus are compared to Les confessions. The formulaic practice of prototypal composition mystifyingly resembles that of translation which entails the systematic substitution of French words for Latin ones. These chapters relied upon Genette’s Palimpsestes, a critical explanation of literature having to do with authors erasing words of original writers to compose over them. Aristotle’s Poetics was an influence on Rousseau’s binary procedures, we know, because of his response to D’Alembert. The third chapter about Romanticism, the epistolary novel, and sentimentality again takes up copying of the literary canon. It compares Julie ou La Nouvelle Heloïse to The Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar. In the fourth chapter, I take Chomsky and other linguists into account with portions of Du contrat social and Rousseau’s translation of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis. The final chapter about Dom Joseph Cajot’s Les plagiats and L’Émile ou de l’éducation describes how Rousseau digested Plato, Plutarch, Locke, Defoe, Condillac, etcetera and provides perspective about Rousseauian criticism from the 18th century to the present. KW - French KW - French literature--18th century--Criticism KW - Binary principle (Linguistics) LA - eng ER -