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Books Like Les Confessions
Best books to read after Les Confessions by Rousseau
Rousseau's Les Confessions (published posthumously 1782-89) is the founding text of the modern secular autobiography — the first work to attempt a complete and honest account of an inner life, beginning with the declaration 'I am forming an undertaking which has no precedent.' Simultaneously one of the most self-revealing and most self-justifying autobiographies ever written, it has generated two centuries of response in the tradition of secular self-examination.
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Buy on AmazonLa Nouvelle Héloïse
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The fictional companion — Julie d'Étange and the other female ideals of La Nouvelle Héloïse are the idealized versions of the women Rousseau describes in Les Confessions, and the autobiography illuminates the novel's emotional sources just as the novel illuminates the autobiography's emotional aspirations.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Confessions
by Saint Augustine
The founding text in the Western autobiographical tradition that Rousseau both imitates and transforms — Augustine's confessions to God are the model that secular self-revelation transforms into confession to the general reader, and the comparison shows the depth of the transformation.
- 3Buy on Amazon
Essais
by Michel de Montaigne
The other founding text of modern self-examination in French — Montaigne's essays are the first extensive attempt to think about the self as a subject of inquiry, and Les Confessions inherits the project while transforming its essay form into autobiography.
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Buy on AmazonÀ la recherche du temps perdu
by Marcel Proust
Proust's great novel of memory and the recovered past is the fullest fictional transformation of the autobiographical impulse that Rousseau's Confessions inaugurates — the comparison shows the distance between Rousseau's declaration of sincerity and Proust's understanding that memory itself is reconstruction.
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Buy on AmazonAdolphe
by Benjamin Constant
The most ironic French successor in the Rousseauvian tradition — Constant's analysis of his own inability to love (thinly disguised as fiction) shows what the self-examination of Les Confessions becomes when the subject refuses Rousseau's self-justifying frame.
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Buy on AmazonLe Neveu de Rameau
by Denis Diderot
The contemporary philosophical contrast — where Rousseau insists on his own transparency and integrity in Les Confessions, Diderot's 'Him' in the dialogue refuses all claims to integrity and argues for amorality, and the two works together define the range of Enlightenment self-consciousness.
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La Religieuse
by Denis Diderot
Diderot's novel of a woman who cannot understand the institutions that shape her — the contrast to Rousseau's insistence on his own transparent self-knowledge shows the range of Enlightenment attitudes toward whether the self can know itself.
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Buy on AmazonSteppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
Hesse's twentieth-century parallel study of a man who cannot reconcile his social identity with his inner life — the confession form's descendant in the modernist tradition, showing the long reach of the project Rousseau inaugurated.
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