January 25, 2008
Creative Class, Dismissed
Students take the arts' nobility as gospel until they meet a heretic named Jean-Jacques
Recently I've been teaching, in a couple of undergraduate seminars, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre (1758), the most provocative essay on the arts ever written. It is about the unintended effects of theater — which, for Rousseau, stands in for all of the arts — on an audience. The essay is an impassioned rebuttal to the 1757 entry on Geneva, written
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