Rousseau's Hand The Crafting of a Writer
Rousseau's Hand The Crafting of a Writer
- ISBN 13:
9780199683833
- ISBN 10:
0199683832
- Format: Hardcover
- Copyright: 12/31/2013
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
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Summary
Taking as its point of departure the moral and monetary economy of craftsmanship in eighteenth-century Switzerland, this elegant and original study shows how family tradition and his own unfinished apprenticeship to an engraver led Rousseau to a radical questioning of central issues of the day, particularly in light of the moral utilitarianism of his age. Rousseau's Hand highlights the vital place of handwork in the artistic and social writings of his middle years -- from novels and plays to treatises and other forms of discourse -- illuminating many matters traditionally seen as inconsistencies in his ?uvre as a whole.
Abandoning creative writing for music copying in middle life, Rousseau celebrated homo faber's integrity along with the practicality and usefulness of handwork in the face of depersonalizing technological advance; yet the writings in which he extolled these virtues won him persecution as well as European celebrity. The paradox of craft's material essence in what he thought a world of abhorrent materialism and the problematic mechanization of ordinary existence exercised him throughout his life. Rousseau's Hand explores these preoccuptions.