The publication of Harvard’s New History of French Literature prompts the query: to whom is it addressed? According to the Introduction, it is intended for the general reader. This elusive character must have become singularly erudite of late, and much concerned with the latest critical views, or at least those of the day before yesterday. Perhaps it might be more reasonable to anticipate that the prospective readers of this work, with its varied essays by diverse hands, would be graduate students and possibly fellow academics.
Take the chapter by Richard L. Regosin concerned with Montaigne’s self-questioning Essais (1588), one of the most diverting, profoundly human, and humane documents in world literature. The trouble is that in certain circles, sometime during the last thirty years or so, words like “human,” “humane values,” and “humanism” have become terribly old hat. To approach Montaigne, we are now invited to follow “Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Heidegger, and Derrida” (who are among the veritable saints of the cult of present-day literary criticism). We are also urged to question the existence of a “self-sufficient subject” and to regard form, subjectivity, and history “as part of a dynamic and multilayered textual system.” Such rebarbative jargon has become all too familiar. As part of an ideology, it works to reduce the role of the author or mere human being to zero.
All the same, Montaigne’s random probings into his contradictory being have proved endlessly provocative to readers down the ages, without the need of any sustaining theory.
