The Design of Montaigne's Essais
Series: Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs;
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 12 March 2026
- ISBN 9780198985488
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages240 pages
- Size 240x165x18 mm
- Weight 548 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 22 b&w illustrations 695
Categories
Short description:
This book offers a reading of Montaigne's Essais through the prism of visual art, chiefly the notion of 'design' (dessein), in both its sixteenth-century meanings and its modern usages. In tracing the range of dessein, the book foregrounds the importance of the visual and the spatial in Montaigne's writing, recasting the Essais in a new light.
MoreLong description:
What can design tell us about literature? What can literature tell us about design? The Design of Montaigne's 'Essais' provides a model for answering these questions by analysing the uses and function of the termdessein. Wresting design free from its intentionalist connotations and focusing instead on the polysemy of the term in its early modern usage, which connoted both a mental plan or intention, and a material drawing or sketch, this study emphasises the open-ended design of the Essais, placing particular importance on its affinities with the practice of sketching. Looking across the Italian border at theories and practices of drawing, the book places Montaigne's dessein in dialogue with its Italian counterpart disegno, arguing for the importance of the visual dimension in Montaigne's thinking, and in his writerly imagination. The dynamism and restlessness of dessein allow us to reconsider the visual metaphors used by Montaigne to characterise the project of the Essais in light of the errance of the drawn line.
Vittoria Fallanca offers a fresh way to capture the essentially gerundive nature of the Essais, constructing a visual and spatial perspective on a text by tracking multiple lines of thought that are, paradoxically, designed to escape its author's intention and control. In following the vagaries of dessein as it operates in Montaigne, the book also offers a perspective on the relationship between design and literary studies, the ways in which design can be put in our critical approaches as readers of literature, with a focus on the text as an object of use. Far from an end-oriented practice of self- or artistic control, design emerges in this book as a chancy, experimental encounter between mind and world.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: essein, Centre Stage
Painterly Designs Self-Portraiture Reimagined
Writerly Designs: Montaigne and the Language of dessein
Montaigne’s Maniera
Designed Objects
Epilogue: Essaying Design
