Abstract

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.