“After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen?” asks Virginia Woolf in her 1925 essay on the father of the essay, Michel de Montaigne.

Unsurprisingly, she contends that Montaigne is one such victor. “The pen is a rigid instrument,” she writes, “it can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and ceremonies of its own. It is dictatorial too: it is always making ordinary men into prophets, and changing the natural stumbling trip of human speech into the solemn and stately march of pens. It is for this reason that Montaigne stands out from the legions of the dead with such irrepressible vivacity. We can never doubt for an instant that his book was himself.”

This seminar on a wide selection of Montaigne’s essays will consider how they communicate the self of Montaigne and why that peculiar self is nevertheless a mirror for man more broadly.

Image: Jacques-Louis David, Two Studies of the Head of a Young Man Crowned with a Laurel Wreath, 1775/1780

Faculty

Neco Donohue

Neco Donohue is a doctoral student in political theory at the University of Texas at Austin and editor at large of The Vital Center. His research focuses on early modern and Enlightenment political philosophy, moral judgment, and political psychology.

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