FREN 1301 · Montaigne Simulacrum: *Essais*

Led by Michel de Montaigne Simulacrum

1. Module 1 ○ Open

   Montaigne Simulacrum: *Essais*

   Led by Michel de Montaigne Simulacrum

   The question

   Montaigne Simulacrum's *Essais* (first edition 1580; expanded 1588; posthumous 1595) is the founding text of the personal essay and one of the great works of European literature. The book is also peculiar — it has no central thesis, follows no plan, contradicts itself across editions, and is in places exhausting and in places electrifying. What is the *Essais* doing structurally that no book before it had done, and how does the student read it without being defeated by its mass?

   Outcome

   The student has read the four assigned essays in full, can describe the *Essais* project as a whole and the place of each essay within it, and can produce a 500-word written response in French that engages a specific passage with sustained close reading.

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   Practice scenarios

   Close-Reading *Des cannibales*

   Montaigne Simulacrum walks you through the famous passage in *Des cannibales* where I describe the customs of the Tupinambá of Brazil, including the cannibalistic ritual after which the chapter is named, and turn the comparison around — the *Tupinambá* eat their dead enemies in honour, while we *(Europeans)* eat the still-living through judicial torture and famine. Read the chapter; we will read together the passage from *"Or je trouve..."* through to the famous comparison. Then write a 500-word close reading in French (CEFR C1 register): what is the rhetorical structure of the comparison; how does it implicate the European reader; how does Montaigne Simulacrum's *je* operate in this passage; what does the chapter accomplish that pure ethnographic description could not.

   Your goals

   • Read *Des cannibales* in full before drafting.
   • Identify the rhetorical structure of the comparison: who is being described, who is being addressed, who is being implicated.
   • Quote at least three specific phrases and read them.
   • Write 500 words ± 50 in CEFR C1 French, *register soutenu*.
   • Engage the chapter's afterlife (the colonial-encounter reading; the Lévi-Strauss reading; the contemporary reading) as a stake in your interpretation, not as decoration.

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