Blind love, Romanticism, and Rousseauʼs novel Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse

Blind love, Romanticism, and Rousseauʼs novel Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse

Authors

  • Alexandra Schamel Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14195/2183-847X_7_12

Keywords:

epistolary novel, romanticism, obscurity, supplément, eye

Abstract

The article examines to what extent Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse modifies the visual paradigm of eighteenth-century anthropology, as seen in Rousseau’s ideology of substantial nature, by introducing dynamics which produce obscurité, an unattainable dimension of inwardness. The argument leads to the proposal that the subject’s strategies of hiding, masking and transforming its epistemological darkness in the penetrating regime of virtue create central aspects of the romantic mind. The term obscurité is illustrated as a dynamic of semantic “desubstantialisation” originated from the love-wound which permanently requires the supplément (Coelen, Derrida). The need for subordination under Wolmar’s “omniscient eye” effects a process of sublimation, in which the obscure semantics of love are transferred into legitimate areas of ontological diffusion, such as dreams, memories, wistfulness and even sacrifying death, the very precursors of romanticism. Respective examples, set in the context of romantic painting, illustrate how Rousseau constructs these threshold phenomena as semantic (and specter-like) substitutes for the love affect which is also more and more transmitted into the rhetorical dimension of the letters.

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Author Biography

Alexandra Schamel, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Alexandra Schamel studied in Munich and Rennes and obtained an MA in General and Comparative Literature, French and History at the University of Munich. Alexandra Schamel is author of the book “Der Schelmenroman als Antiromanze: Frauenbild und Liebesthema” (2003) [“The Picaresque Novel as Anti-Romance: Love and Gender”]. Her dissertation, titled “Die ästhetische Schwelle: Räume der Allegorie bei Baudelaire und Proust” [“Aesthetic Threshold: About Allegory in Baudelaire and Proust”], was published in 2015. She was a visiting scholar at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley in 2017 and currently has a teaching assignment as lecturer at the Institute of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Munich. ’s research focuses on nineteenth and early twentieth century French literature and culture in the European context. She works on European Enlightenment and on its philosophical and anthropological background. In this context, she follows a book project about mask and authenticity in 18th century France (Marivaux, Rousseau, Laclos).

Published

2017-07-27

Issue

Section

Secção Não-Temática