| This dissertation investigates the cultural and literary status of the Mentor in eighteenth-century France. The scene of instruction, a commonplace of Enlightenment fiction, is shown to be a privileged site wherein the dangers and inevitability of pedagogical excess are enacted. The unprecedented literary and cultural success of Fenelon's Les aventures de Telemaque (1699) set in motion the Enlightenment cult of the pedagogue. I thus propose the "Mentor idea" as a label for the anxiety provoked by an overdetermined Mentor figure; it is a lens through which I read Enlightenment fictions of apprenticeship, for fictional teachers after Telemaque are never far removed from Fenelon's all-knowing Mentor. This larger-than-life Mentor acts as a screen on which changing fantasies and anxieties about teaching and authority are projected throughout the century.; As a backdrop to fictional pedagogical excess, I analyze educational treatises published throughout the eighteenth century. I then trace the trajectory of illustrated editions of Telemaque to show how Mentor's cultural status evolves in the visual realm. I read Rousseau's Emile, ou de l'education (1762) as a chronicle of the narcissism inherent to the closed space of the master-disciple couple, a couple ultimately doomed to fail, as revealed in the book's unfinished sequel, Emile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires. I then turn to Enlightenment livres obscenes, in which the scene of instruction is at the same time a scene of seduction. These texts demonstrate how mastery of the corporeal body becomes the object of the pedagogical enterprise. Therese philosophe (1748), a popular pornographic work, interrogates the process of becoming a female philosophe, making explicit the bonds connecting desire and learning, voyeurism and philosophy. Finally, a confluence of literary events in 1771---an essay contest for the best Eloge de Fenelon, the publication of Mercier's L'An 2440 and the writing of Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son maitre---brings the Mentor idea to the fore, revealing anti-pedagogies and absent teachers that dispute the very possibility of instruction. |
