Description:
<p> Recent polemics in the American academy over the personal mode in criticism have visibly affected French studies through the popular memoirs of French scholars such as Kaplan and Suleiman. This article considers similar issues from the French tradition of literary querelles. Looking through the lens of French cultural memory as cultivated by dictionaries of quotations, it takes as point of departure Pascal's famous pronouncement about le moi haïssable, examining canonical confrontations between Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, and Rousseau, and showing Pascal as forerunner of the modernist, anti-Romantic mistrust of the personal. </p>