Montaigne and the Self Portrait in the Renaissance
Tilde Sankovitch, Northwestern University, emerita
In his preface to the Essais, the “Avis au Lecteur,” Montaigne addresses himself implicitly, indirectly, and in a typically deprecating way to a hypothetical “ideal reader,” which is what, in reading his work, we must want to be. But is it possible? Are we stil capable of reading Montaigne? And if so, how do we read him? What protocol must we follow to read him in ways suited to the anture of his self-representing and deeply reflexive text?
In this course participants read a substantial group of essays from a variety of critical perspectives, while confronting the above-mentioned pitfalls (and others), in order to arrive at a reading based primarily on a network of methodological clues and indices mentioned pitfalls (and others), in order to arrive at a reading based primarily
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