The Dialogue of Writing: Essays in Eighteenth-Century French Literature

Catherine M. Grise was Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto.

This volume analyzes dialogue as a literary genre and examines how, in certain works of Rousseau and Diderot, dialogue itself establishes a model of reading and, in fact, succeeds in establishing new criteria for interpreting texts. The book is divided into three parts. In the first part the concepts of dialogue and writing are examined chiefly through the eyes of deconstructionist critics. Part Two confronts the problem of the function of dialogue in Rousseau’s Dialogues and Pygmalion. Christie V. McDonald demonstrates that the Dialogues are “an extremely complex commentary on the relationship between the author and his text and the reader and the problem of dialogue as writing” (p.41). Pygmalion is a metaphorical dialogue that not only expresses the relationship of the artist towards his work but questions in a radical way “the genetic quest through the practice of writing” (p.59). In the third part, three works of Diderot are explored as further manifestations of the dialogue genre. Le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville becomes an example of short-circuited meanings and constantly displaced referents. The article entitled “Encyclopédie” highlights the Encyclopédie as a dialogue in itself; the Neveu de Rameau focuses on the reader as interlocutor and raises the problem of dialogue and intertextuality.

This is a highly specialized work of literary theory that will be of interest particularly to those who are well-versed in the approaches of modern deconstructive criticism. However, one somewhat frustrating aspect of the volume must be pointed out. It has a rather disjointed quality, perhaps attributable to the fact that about half of the chapters were previously published elsewhere as separate articles, but also due to the lack of a conclusion to each part and even to the book as a whole.