Diderot and the image of the reader: From 'L'Eloge de Richardson' to 'La Religieuse'

Throughout his oeuvre, Diderot described the experience of reading as one of emotional intensity. In this sense, he represents the wave of feeling that dominated the novels, poetry and theater of the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet Diderot also underscored the importance of critical distance from any one text and the value of judgment. Readers of Diderot's works were to experience an interplay between sensibilite and sang-froid. Their position was thus a paradoxical one. They existed at once inside and outside of the fictional world. Diderot added a further dimension to this paradox, however, by bringing his own reading experience into play. This self-staging further complicated a reader's relationship to text and author.{09}The ironies and self-dramatization involved in this procedure are the subject of this thesis.; The first section explores Diderot's role as literary critic in his readings of Richardson's novels Clarissa and Pamela. Here Diderot seeks to redefine the novel but also to examine his place in posterity. The second part looks at two of Diderot's texts on theater, Les Entretiens sur le Fils naturel and Le Paradoxe sur le comedien. These works explore the relationship between playwright, actor and audience as they re-create fictional scenes from his own plays. A third chapter examines the Preface-Annexe portion of Diderot's novel La Religieuse. Part fiction and part fait divers, the Preface-Annexe recounts the elaborate hoax Diderot and his co-conspirators played on the Marquis de Croismare through the fictional correspondence with an imaginary nun, Suzanne Simonin. The Preface-annexe is a unique critical text, as it reverses the reading process described in the Eloge and the Paradoxe. For it describes the process of a hoax's transformation into a novel.; Diderot's literary aesthetic is thus a vital or dynamic one motivated by the critical irony endorsed throughout his oeuvre. It is designed to dramatize a fresh view of reading and the position of readers. Readers were to be awakened from a passive acceptance of fiction. Their task was now an active engagement or "dialogue" with a text.