UCLA

The dialogue genre in eighteenth-century France played a significant role in shaping literary discourse and social commentary. This form of writing allowed authors to convey ideas indirectly, often through the dialectical interaction of characters, and explore the relationship between philosophy, literature, and art. By employing the dialogue form, particularly didactic dialogues, writers could explore complex themes and voice their criticism of societal norms in a nuanced and cleverly constructed manner which protected their authorship from being immediately identified and guaranteed their safety from the censors. My project focuses on artifice in literature. A crucial aspect of artifice is indirection, a writing technique employed mainly in didactic dialogues to disseminate knowledge inconspicuously. This allowed the philosophers to engage in contentious philosophical debates and discussions using diverse voices, thus blurring the source of their identity to avoid problems with the censors, or persecution by the Church and the Monarchy. This phenomenon has been studied by Stéphane Pujol in Le dialogues d’idées au dix-huitième siècle (2005), Vittorio Hosle in The Philosophical Dialogue: A Poetics and a Hermeneutics (2012), Frédéric Cossutta in Le Dialogue: Introduction à un genre philosophique, (2004), Chistie McDonald in The Dialogue of Writing (1984), and I draw on this scholarship while paying closer attention to questions of didacticism and literary form. Following Pujol’s approach, my project begins with Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) and ends with Sade’s Dialogues entre un prêtre et un moribond. (1830) While philosophical dialogues decline gradually by the end of the eighteenth century, the notion of artifice remains and influences our lives to this day, and this project studies both the dialogue form and the notion of artifice in an intertwined manner.