Download or read book Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Doctrine of the Arts written by Philip Robinson and published by Peter Lang Group Ag, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1984 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to set out comprehensively Rousseau's theoretical statements on the arts: music and opera, theatre, fiction, poetry, the visual arts and dance. These statements are seen in terms of the phases of his intellectual development: the early years, the social criticism of the 1750s, the future-orientated theory of Emile and other texts, and finally the increasing self-scrutiny. This approach, conscious at all times of the element of personal commitment in his thinking, permits a sympathetic understanding, if not a resolution, of the famous paradoxes. The chief of these, his simultaneous condemnation and practice of drama, music and literature, is seen less as a personal contradiction than as a pointer to the ills of society which outrage him. Despite the huge social, political and economic upheavals since his death in 1778, Rousseau emerges as a thinker who has much to teach those concerned for the health of the arts in a modern world and for the moral values which attend them.