Between Montaigne and Goethe: The birth of modern individual in the autobiographical work of Diego de Torres Villarroel
Item
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Title
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Between Montaigne and Goethe: The birth of modern individual in the autobiographical work of Diego de Torres Villarroel
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:e4c50a805732:10202
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identifier
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10459
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Creator
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Mitsche-Sepulveda, Jay,
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Contributor
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Jose Munoz-Millares
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Romance literature | Philosophy | Modern literature | Autobiography | Existential ontology | Modernity | Postmodernism | Rhetoric | Subject philosophy
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a study on the overwhelmingly autobiographical work of Diego de Torres Villarroel (1694-1770), and has as its main objective to demonstrate that contrary to the time-honored and almost universally held belief, the history of modern autobiography has its origin in Vida, his autobiography, and not in Les Confessions, the autobiography of Jan-Jacques Rousseau. Herein is shown the unprecedented break that Vida brings about respective to the traditional confessional mode of autobiography, as bequeathed by Saint Augustine, a canonical mode that Rousseau, despite his claims to the contrary, continues and reinvigorates, and how that is carried out. At the same time, since this main thesis is posited on the ground that to break with this canonical tradition presupposes assuming a worldview that makes individual self-determination, autonomy and freedom central to it, by implication, herein Vida is proposed as one of the literary birthplace of the historical Enlightenment in Europe, and as the most original contribution of Spain to this movement. Taking into account that in dealing with the problematic he is confronted by in his resolve to render a truthful story of his selfhood Torres takes as his departing point the question of the phenomenology of his Being as a manifestation of the ontology of Existence, this study moves forward through a consistent discussion of the question of the concept of the Self, to probe into the fundamental way in which he faces, and solves, some of the most incandescent problems of self-representational discourse.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Hispanic & Luso Brazilian Literatures & Languages
