In modern Western literary culture, the writer who combines autobiographical witness with political critique has been the object of particular veneration, as the careers of such celebrated figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Marguerite Duras among others attest. Dennis Porter argues in Rousseau's Legacy that this cultural idea of the writer - as distinct from the more traditional "man of letters" - first emerged in France in the decades preceding the French revolution, and has continued to exercise a nominative power over intellectual life well into our own day. In Porter's paradigm, Jean-Jacques Rousseau serves as a seminal figure who combined radical critique of existing institutions with a new form of confessional writing and a suspicion of the art of literature. Rousseau inaugurated the idea of a heroic and committed writerly life in which the opposition between public and private self is collapsed. Porter combines a wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary theory and cultural history over the past two centuries in his readings of works by a number of major French writers; he situates their work in larger cultural and political transformations. In addition to the literary texts, he also touches on the "idea" of the writer as represented in paintings, engravings, and photographs. Examining the works of Stendhal, Baudelaire, Sartre, Barthes, Duras, Althusser, and Foucault, Rousseau's Legacy is of obvious interest to scholars and students of modern French literature and culture, and, given the influence of French philosophy and literary theory on literary and cultural studies in this century, it will also appeal to a broader nonspecialist readership. Porter concludes with the provocativeclaim that, with the collapse among intellectuals of faith in revolution, and with the degeneration of confession into the stuff of TV talk shows, the idea of the writer as an agent for moral and political change is also in eclipse.

Focusing on travel journals by writers, navigators, philosophers, scientists, and anthropologists--from the eighteenth-century grand tour to the modern period--Dennis Porter explores how male authors at different historical moments conceptualized and represented the lands they encountered. Efforts to portray unfamiliar peoples and cultures are shown to give rise to rich and complex works, in which individual psychic investments frequently subvert an inherited cultural discourse. In exploring the various uses and pleasures of travel, Porter interprets it as a transgressive activity animated by desire and haunted by different forms of guilt.

Broad in its historical scope and interdisciplinary in its approach, the book draws on literary theory, psychoanalysis, gender criticism, and the social history of ideas. Texts analyzed include works by Boswell, Diderot, Bougainville, Cook, Stendhal, Darwin, Flaubert, Freud, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Gide, Lvi-Strauss, Barthes, and V. S. Naipaul.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Focusing on travel journals by writers, navigators, philosophers, scientists, and anthropologists--from the eighteenth-century grand tour to the modern period--Dennis Porter explores how male authors at different historical moments conceptualized and represented the lands they encountered. Efforts to portray unfamiliar peoples and cultures are shown to give rise to rich and complex works, in which individual psychic investments frequently subvert an inherited cultural discourse. In exploring the various uses and pleasures of travel, Porter interprets it as a transgressive activity animated by desire and haunted by different forms of guilt. Broad in its historical scope and interdisciplinary in its approach, the book draws on literary theory, psychoanalysis, gender criticism, and the social history of ideas. Texts analyzed include works by Boswell, Diderot, Bougainville, Cook, Stendhal, Darwin, Flaubert, Freud, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Gide, Lvi-Strauss, Barthes, and V. S. Naipaul. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Lacan dedicates this seventh year of his famous seminar to the problematic role of ethics in psychoanalysis. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions and "the attraction of transgression," Lacan illuminates Freud's psychoanalytic work and its continued influence. Lacan explores the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy (a reading of Sophocle's Antigone), and the tragic dimension of analytic experience. His exploration leads us to startling insights on "the consequence of man's relationship to desire" and the conflicting judgments of ethics and analysis.