Reading Voltaire''s Contes: A Semiotics of Philosophical Narration
ISBN: 9781469642772
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of North Carolina Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Voltaire 1694-1778 -- Fictional works; Philosophy in literature; Narration (Rhetoric); Semiotics and literature;

Questioning a particular tradition of reading, Carol Sherman writes a series of metacritical essays that revise many of our assumptions about Voltaire's stories, substantiate others, and attempt to account for the phenomenon of interpretation for the paradoxical case of fictions that proffer truths. Micromegas , Zadig , Candide , and L'Ingene constantly guide the interpreter to a single reading; nonetheless, these tales deconstruct their premises at the hands of readers who are conscious of their own status as text .


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