French Literature Reviews - 2026
É. Beaulieu, La fatigue romanesque de Joseph Joubert
Other Literary Studies
Étienne Beaulieu, La Fatigue romanesque de Joseph Joubert
Presses de l'Université Laval - éditions de l'IQRC, 2008, 348 p.
EAN : 9782763784069
$45.00
Publisher's Note:
The work of Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) remained largely overlooked for a long time, as much of it went unpublished during his lifetime and long after his death, until the "complete" publication of his Carnets in 1938 by André Beaunier (reissued in 1994). Thanks to this new format of his reflections, an entirely new Joubert emerged: no longer viewed simply as a "moralist," as depicted by Sainte-Beuve in a portrait that remained authoritative for decades, but also as a "diarist"—someone recording his thoughts day by day in the bourgeois tradition of household account books and journals. Yet something else reveals itself in Joubert's writing. As Maurice Blanchot observes, Joubert’s journal, "while still anchored in the days, is not merely their reflection; it strains toward something beyond them" (*The Book to Come*). Toward what? On the one hand, as Georges Poulet suggests, Joubert "is not a philosopher, a moralist, or an aphorist, [but] a marvelous poet of light" (Studies in Human Time). On the other hand, in a surprising and hitherto unexplored way, Joubert is also a thinker who engaged with the concept of the novelistic—that is, the Hegelian world and the rapidly expanding realm of prose. Viewing the movement of novelistic thought as a collapsing of essence into existence, and as an attempt to rediscover the former within the latter (which makes the novel the very site where the question of human salvation is raised, through the experience of fatigue, in a world where religious resources remain veiled), this study embarks on a reading of the Carnets. It first focuses on the various forms that the return to thought takes in Joubert, before tracing the unfinished circles of detours through which what Jacques Rancière termed "the Book of Life" (*Mute Speech*) is forged. Thus, Joubert’s Carnets offer readers one of the earliest figures of what we today, with all the inherent contradictions the term entails, call literature.
Table of Contents:
The intellectual legacy of Joseph Joubert has long been defined by his status as a moralist, a reputation solidified by nineteenth-century critics like Sainte-Beuve. The publication of his private notebooks, particularly the 1938 edition of his Carnets, shifted this perception, highlighting his role as a diarist who documented his daily reflections. Readers interested in the evolution of eighteenth-century thought and the development of the diary as a literary form may find this analysis of his notebooks relevant.
Joubert’s writing engages with the concept of the novelistic, which involves the expansion of prose and the tension between essence and existence. In a world where religious resources remain veiled, the Carnets reflect the movement of thought and the attempt to rediscover essence within existence. This study examines the various forms that the return to thought takes in Joubert, tracing the detours through which what Jacques Rancière termed the Book of Life is forged.