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Recent Trends in Montaigne Scholarship: A Post-Structuralist Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Richard L. Regosin
Richard L. Regosin*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Abstract

Montaigne scholarship has traditionally drawn its impetus from the identification of life and work and its sense of the overwhelming presence of Montaigne as the subject of his text. Bolstered by the essayist's own protestations of sincerity, of good faith and mutual trust between writer and reader, scholars have read the first-person discourse as affirming the truth of the “I” inside the writing and its unequivocal coincidence with its historical referent. The authorial voice announcing itself as self-portraiture, bearing its own name, has been taken to represent the man, his character and ideas, and to reflect the broader sixteenth-century intellectual and social context.

This long-standing reading practice, with its conviction of mimesis, has undoubtedly achieved useful biographical and historical results. Scholars interested in the evolution of Montaigne's thought have shed light on his mode of composition through textual accretion by studying the successive additions and emendations which are identified as strata in the body of the work: A(1580, 1582), B(1588), C(after 1588).

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Spring 1984 , pp. 34 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1984

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References

1 Translations are from Donald Frame's The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford, 1958).

2 The significance of my debt to my colleague David Carroll and to his The Subject in Question: The Languages of Theory and the Strategies of Fiction (Chicago, 1982) will emerge clearly in the course of this essay.

3 Mary B., McKinley, Words in a Corner: Studies in Montaigne's Latin Quotations (Lexington, Ky., 1981);Google Scholar Robert D., Cottrell, Sexuality/Textuality: A Study of the Fabric of Montaigne's Essais (Columbus, Ohio, 1981).Google Scholar I would also like to signal two recently published books which reached me too late to be included: Jean, Starobinski, Montaigneen mouvement (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar and Floyd Gray, La balance de Montaigne (Paris, 1983. See p. 124 for a review of Gray's book.)

4 Jules, Brody, Lectures de Montaigne (Lexington, Ky., 1982).Google Scholar See the review of this book on p. 125.

5 Lawrence, Kritzman, Destruction/Découverte: lefonctionnement de la rhetorique dans les Essais de Montaigne (Lexington, Ky., 1980).Google Scholar

6 Terence, Cave, The Comucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979).Google Scholar

7 Michel, Beaujour, Miroirs d'encre: Rhetorique de Vauto-portrait (Paris, 1980).Google Scholar

8 Antoine, Compagnon, La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris, 1979).Google Scholar

9 Antoine, Compagnon, Nous, Michel de Montaigne (Paris, 1980).Google Scholar