The pursuit of laziness Saint-Amand, Pierre; Gage, Jennifer Curtiss
2011., 20110509, 2011, 2011-05-09, 20110101
eBook
We think of the Enlightenment as an era dominated by ideas of progress, production, and industry--not an era that favored the lax and indolent individual. But was the Enlightenment only about the ...unceasing improvement of self and society? The Pursuit of Laziness examines moral, political, and economic treatises of the period, and reveals that crucial eighteenth-century texts did find value in idleness and nonproductivity. Fleshing out Enlightenment thinking in the works of Denis Diderot, Joseph Joubert, Pierre de Marivaux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean-Siméon Chardin, this book explores idleness in all its guises, and illustrates that laziness existed, not as a vice of the wretched, but as an exemplar of modernity and a resistance to beliefs about virtue and utility.
After completing his Ph.D., he spent a year at Yale, several at Stanford University, and the next three decades at Brown University, where he was Francis Wayland Professor of French and Comparative ...Literature and Chair of the Department of French Studies, before returning to Yale in 2016. Saint-Amand has research interests in the literature of the eighteenth century, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and literary criticism and theory. ...interdisciplinarity is a natural inclination, the continuation of a passion. "1 This might also be read as foreshadowing your own writing, as you are currently at work on a book-length project on the literature of the night in the eighteenth century.
Disclosures of the Boudoir PIERRE SAINT-AMAND
A History of Modern French Literature,
02/2017
Book Chapter
The eighteenth-century novel was written in a variety of forms over the course of the century: the picaresque novel, the first-person novel, the epistolary novel. These forms evolved in parallel, ...each with its highs and lows. There is, however, one feature that is common to all these forms. I shall call it “interiorization.” The latter is one way of naming a broader social and cultural development: alongside the eighteenth-century preoccupation with public space and the qualities of “public man” (at the heart of the idea of the “citizen” that was to play such an important role in the French Revolution),
Diderot et le temps Alvarez, Cécile; Baron, Konstanze; Blanc, Jan ...
2016
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
Le rapport de Diderot au temps est profondément original : à bien des égards il déconcerte une approche classique de son œuvre ; à bien d’autres, il nous fait entrer d’emblée dans la profonde ...modernité de sa pensée et de ses pratiques d’écriture. C’est d’abord parce que le temps diderotien n’est ni seulement, ni même proprement narratologique. Diderot réfléchit au temps long, se confronte à l’atemporalité pure de l’éternité théologique, s’engage dans le débat sur la postérité, médite sur les ruines, imagine la création et l’évolution des espèces. Il aime à s’installer dans la pluralité des temporalités : celle de l’ennui et celle du songe, celle de la conversation et celle de l’expérience, celle de l’imagination et celle de la poésie, celle de la peinture et celle du spectacle. Rarement chez Diderot le temps est donné de l’extérieur. Il est plutôt saisi dans le jeu entre action et réaction, et se mesure, s’appréhende alors, non sans interférences, en termes de passion, de caractère, de physiologie, de chimie, mais aussi de hiéroglyphe poétique. Dans le temps de la réaction, un report se fait : report de pensée, report d’altérité, par quoi l’œuvre se dialogise et se défait comme œuvre même pour devenir coopération des temporalités. Ce temps défait et projeté, fragmentaire et multiple, définit et oriente une pratique poétique qui est une herméneutique, une expérience esthétique qui est une expérience de la philosophie. C’est cette pratique et cette expérience que le présent ouvrage entend interroger.
Diderot is fond of his dressing gown. The writer’s study is an extension of his nighttime cocoon, where moments of creativity take the slippered philosopher by surprise. This is the same space that ...Louis-Sébastien Mercier, already known for hisTableau de Paris, conjures up inMon Bonnet de nuit(My Nightcap), an anthology of his midnight musings. Here scraps of paper are pieced together during the respite from the daily hubbub. Before entering into the realm of sleep, the writer welcomes the final ruminations of his waking hours. These are the thoughts that will accompany him to bed: “How sweet
Paradox of the Idler Pierre Saint-Amand
The Pursuit of Laziness,
05/2011
Book Chapter
Like Marivaux, Diderot makes the idler into a figure of modernity—but he adds an intriguing twist. Like his close ancestor, the Indigent Philosopher, Diderot’s idler appears in urban space. In the ...title character ofLe Neveu de Rameau(Rameau’s Nephew, 1762–1777), the author offers an example of alternative subjectivation. The dialogue between the philosopher and the vagabond brings face to face two opposing figures of idleness—and two opposing relationships to the work. On the one hand there is the philosopher, addicted to his philosophical promenade, his meditative strolls: “Come rain or shine, my custom is to go
Idleness is one of the contradictory figures that weave through Rousseau’s works. He rings all imaginable changes on the notion of inactivity, taking care to tease out the slightest nuances. The ...problem of idleness pervades Rousseau’s philosophical writings and dominates his autobiographical works. My intention here is to trace the various paradoxes that inhabit the question for Rousseau and to explore why it engages him as political philosopher, moralist, and writer alike. After considering his anthropological ruminations on work,¹ as well as his praise of labor, we will see how Rousseau creates a radical esthetics ofdésœuvrement(lack of occupation),
