Title: Narcisse philosophe
Description: At the beginning of the eighteenth century, first-person accounts abound in French letters. Among the narrators anxious to retranscribe the progress of their lives are more specifically characters of philosopher. From 1721 to 1731, readers discover, for example, Usbek, the French spectator, the indigent philosopher and Cleveland, four fictional fictional characters who are as much journalist, journalist or memorialist philosophers. Authors, they exercise their thoughts on the background of their intimate experiences. Our work tends to examine how, in the days of Marivaux, Montesquieu and Prévost, fictional literature in the first person places the philosopher in front of himself, new Narcissus supposed to reflect the meaning of an existence. Integrated with the narrative, the philosopher (or the moralist) of the first eighteenth century is no longer that observer of a detached objectivity which is hidden behind discourses: he himself becomes a figure, that is to say, an observable form delivered to the appreciation readers. They will not fail to point out the ambiguities of this paradoxical figure who does not always manage to reconcile the imperatives of sensibility and those of reason. Precisely the works of the corpus question the conditions of the deployment of thought in the human mind and in the world of concrete things. The implications - literary and philosophical, but still poetic, aesthetic, moral or cognitive - of the figuration of the philosopher in fiction thus constitute the object of our study.--http://www.theses.fr/2013PA030117
Subjects: French literature, History and criticism, In literature, Philosophy in literature, Narcissism in literature, Literature and myth, Myth in literature, Criticism and interpretation, French fiction, Philosophers in literature, First person narrative
People: Narcissus (Greek mythological character)
Time periods: 18th century