Abstract

Rousseau displaced the classic academic discourse with elements of the meditative essay in the Premier discours and created a model meditative essay in the Second discours to engage more completely in a dialectical process of describing alienation. He experimented with modern autobiography in the Dialogues and the Reveries by transforming narrative, time and content to reveal more thoroughly the innermost nature of the alienated self. ;Diderot revived Menippean satire and created an open dialogue in the Neveu de Rameau to contrast more fully otherness with conformity. He combined fictional autobiography with early Gothic novelistic features in La Religieuse to show how an oppressive environment alienates. ;These genre transformations, experiments, revivals and combinations are directly related to the texts' content of otherness, and show how marginal forms can produce paradoxical, alienated texts. Such paradoxes are precisely what inform the reader of the writer's own alienation in Rousseau's case, or of the characters' otherness in Diderot's case. ;These texts operate in an existential mode and derive their ideas primarily from experience, not from scholarly and scientific sources. Subjectivity reveals the inconsistencies and complications of the self. Uneven textual structures create opposition or contrasts through social criticism which may disorient or confuse the reader. Elaborate strategies in the dialogue between writer and reader which create a written orality manipulate reader response through an urgent appeal to the reader's sympathy. ;The goal of this study is to expand the modern reader's understanding of the writing practices of Rousseau and Diderot by asking that the reader abandon the usual focus on paradox and perceive textual contradictions as inherent to the content of otherness inscribed in these transformed literary structures. The importance of otherness as the unifying feature in the Premier and Second discours, the Dialogues and Reveries, the Neveu de Rameau, and La Religieuse and the evolution of literary form to portray otherness more efficiently open these texts to a more integrated interpretation