Emile's Missing Text: Les Aventures De Télémaque

Abstract

The final book of Rousseau's Emile—in which Emile's education draws to an end as he meets, courts, and marries Sophie—relies on repeated allusions to Les Aventures de Télémaque. Emile, who has not read Fénelon's best-selling novel, is excluded from the intertextual references and, consequently, is ignorant of his tutor's strategic use of the pedagogical couple of Mentor and Télémaque to position himself at once as an omniscient Mentor figure and as the mediator of Emile and Sophie's erotic life.

Keywords:

• Les Aventures de Télémaque
• Emile
• ou De l'éducation
• intertextuality
• mentor
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• François Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon
• Sophie