For more information
Call 1-800-351-0222
Call 1-800-351-0222
VOLTAIRE.
Term Paper ID:29242
Get This Paper Free! or
Essay Subject:
Analysis of "CANDIDE" from a biographical point of view.... More...
8 Pages / 1800 Words
10 sources, 18 Citations,
MLA Format
$32.00
More Papers on This Topic
Paper Abstract:
Analysis of "CANDIDE" from a biographical point of view. Intellectual energy of the Enlightenment period. "CANDIDE" as Voltaire's social and historical criticism. The work as a satiric attack on the philosophy of Leibniz. Voltaire's cultural concerns. Thematic concerns in "CANDIDE." Voltaire's use of characters and situations to dramatize unreason. His exile from France.
Paper Introduction:
This research provides an analysis of Voltaire's Candide from a biographical point of view. What must be understood about Candide is that any reading of it entails acknowledgment that it was an artifact of the Enlightenment. The deliberate self-consciousness with which professional intellectuals of the 17th and 18th centuries developed a secular discourse and consensus of reason is the Englightenment's distinguishing feature. Voltaire, to whose "smile of reason" Clark (245) refers in identifying the period of time, was very much central to the intellectual energy of the age.
No less important is that the content of that energy was secular, the Peace of Westphalia having ended the Thirty Years War in 1648 and having disposed of the last great religious war in continental Europe. It is ironic that Candide, born and reared in We
Text of the Paper:
The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper.
And Voltaire. Christopher Hibbert. He continued to writesocial criticism, much of it anticlerical, in the form of novels, poetry,letters, and essays to the end of his life. One suspects he might have welcomed it, buthe may not have anticipated that, unlike its American progenitor, it woulddescend into the Terror. London: Penguin, 1979.--- [Boswell.e]. Pangloss's refrain "in the face of ghastly and meaninglessdisasters" (Hampshire 168) that this must be the best of all possibleworlds (Voltaire 119, et passim) exposes the antique quality of the yieldin an age that was to be distinguished in chief and by its intellectualcommunity by its valorization of reason. Both novels, he says, arecritiques of "the system of Optimism," and he quotes Johnson to the effectthat "if they [the two novels] had not been published so closely one afterthe other that there was not time for imitation, it would have been in vainto deny that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from the other"(Boswell.e). Voltaire uses characters and situations to dramatize--show ratherthan explain--their unreason, an exercise far more achievable in a fictionnarrative than in a discursive nonfiction essay. Voltaire, for his part, describedJohnson as a "superstitious dog" (Boswell.e). Works CitedBoswell, James. Even Pangloss is obliged to belie his multiple and fatuousendorsements of Leibniz's ideas. However, he didhate and despise Hume and, with "intemperate vehemence of abuse" (Boswell255), the whole of revolutionary America. What must be understood about Candide is thatany reading of it entails acknowledgment that it was an artifact of theEnlightenment. Explain that to theveterans of the Seven Years' War. Philosophy in Literature: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Tolstoy & Proust. Boswell, a familiar ofVoltaire, Hume, and Johnson who visited Voltaire in Switzerland, seems tohave wanted nothing so much as for Johnson and Voltaire to beprofessionally and personally reconciled. By 1758, when Voltaire completed Candide, he was permanentlyinstalled in Switzerland chateau near the French border, where as"Innkeeper of Europe" he hosted such figures as Boswell, Gibbon, Casanova,and Madame DuBarry (Pomeau). The Age of Reason: The 17th Century Philosophers. Such themes may have been risky enough to takeon in the divided culture of Europe. The fact that Leibniz is widelyacknowledged, even in the modern period, to have been foundational to 18th-century rationalism, to the very ethos of the Enlightenment, and "the mostuniversal genius of the modern world, comparable in insight with Newton,wider in range and lesser only in ultimate achievement . By the time Candide appeared in 1748, Voltaire was nothing if notinured to exile. Candide remains Voltaire's acknowledged literary masterpiece,surviving the vicissitudes of his personal life. He described himself as an "autodidact," and it may be thecase that only he could have taught himself everything he knew. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University PressHampshire, Stuart. This research provides an analysis of Voltaire's Candide from abiographical point of view. Weitz (11) remarks thatCandide, as a clever combination of fiction and philosophy, was by far therunaway best-seller of the 18th century and that some 5 editions of thetext were in print when Voltaire died in 1778. Detroit: Wayne State U P, 1963. "Voltaire." Britannica 2 1 Deluxe Edition CD. "What Do We Mean by Europe?" Wilson Quarterly 21 (Winter 1997): 12-29.Pomeau, René Henry. . Oxford: Oxford UP, 19 4. . Thesecular progeny of the Thirty Years War may be perceived as a corrective toprevious cultural inadequacies, but Candide does not look toward a utopianfuture; the hero barely achieves the insight that cultivation of a gardenis as worthy a human pursuit as perpetual war. "Hequarreled continuously," Holmes says (5 ), "with the Church, theGovernment, the Law, and the intellectual Establishment of his time."Indeed, Voltaire broke with Rousseau over the former's criticalEncyclopédie article about Calvinist rule of Geneva (Pomeau). The method that Candide uses to sight the limits of both limitlessfaith in the harmony of the universe and the autodidactic is to lampoonthem. Set all of this literary-biographical gossip beside the account of Dr.Johnson's only visit to France, during which he made a project of speakingLatin and not French and which appears to have marked him before Frenchsociety as "abundantly ludicrous" in "figure and manner" (Boswell 19 ). . This was well after both Rasselas and Candide and well intothe high careers of both Voltaire and Johnson. and it is a shame that he is protected in this country"(Boswell 132). The deliberate self-consciousness with which professionalintellectuals of the 17th and 18th centuries developed a secular discourseand consensus of reason is the Englightenment's distinguishing feature.Voltaire, to whose "smile of reason" Clark (245) refers in identifying theperiod of time, was very much central to the intellectual energy of theage. Toward the close of the novelPangloss confesses "that he had always suffered dreadfully; but having oncemaintained that all things went wonderfully well, he still kept firm to hishypothesis, thought it was quite opposed to his real feelings" (Voltaire18 ). G. Ed. Civilisation. Voltaire was on friendly terms with David Hume, whom he met in Parisbefore his first exile (Gay passim). Initially he declares that he (Pangloss)could not as a philosopher contradict his idea that the experience of evilis outside the experience even of one being (for example) severely beatenby pirates. A. In that regard, Pocock remarks that Voltaire and his exactcontemporary David Hume (whether as novelist or historian) were not so muchpreoccupied with religious wars per se, or even with the decisiveness ofthe Peace of Westphalia, as with "their aftereffects," i.e., with "the lastphase of religious fanaticism [and] an age of enlightened sociabilityfostered by both courtly monarchy and commercial refinement" (Pocock 22-3).Candide is not unique in this regard. Because Voltaire died in 1778--only two years into the AmericanRevolution and eleven before the French Revolution--and because, despitehis reputation as a social critic Voltaire functioned as sometime emissaryfor the French and Prussian kings in a cultural context of Continentalmonarchism, it is impossible to determine with certainty what he might havemade of the French Revolution. The Life of Samuel Johnson. That was in 1759, the date of publication of Rasselas, a year afterthe appearance of Candide. However, bythe late 176 s, Johnson was equating Voltaire with Rousseau--"one of theworst of men . But Boswell explains that whereas the anticlericalist Voltairesought to make a critique of religion, Johnson--pious soul that he was--sought to discredit faith in "things temporal, to direct the hopes of manto things eternal" (Boswell.e). . ButLeibniz's yielding to the incomprehensible and to divine omnipotence andprovidence denies manifest contingency in governing the quality of humanexperience. "Voltaire's Grin." New York Review of Books 3 November 1995: 49-55.Pocock, J. It is a commonplace that Candide represents a direct satire of theviews of the philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), whose systemic and inflexiblearticulations of optimism, hence absolute faith in divine providence, inthe face of repeated and intolerable horrors of human experience, ispersonified in the figure of Candide's tutor Pangloss. 1988. Voltaire'santiclericalism, a sustained and continually reappearing critique of theinstitutional church, is present not just in Candide, and his impulsetoward social reform is always present in his texts. Dr. Johnson, who hated Hume for thelatter's reformist/revolutionary tendencies, despised Voltaire andespecially the fact that Voltaire had been welcomed in exile in England.Boswell compares Candide with Johnson's Rasselas. Asked whether Rousseau, thenabiding in London, were "as bad a man as Voltaire," Johnson replied, "Sir,it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them" (Boswell132). He was a literary colleague of Rousseau andDiderot on Diderot's ambitious Encyclopedie project. James Lynch, from the two-volume 19 4 Oxford edition. Nothing about Voltaire's cultural concerns, i.e., from his concerns asa careerist commentator, should detract from the thematic concerns of theliterary content of Candide. There areno heroes in Candide; its title character lacks that stature, though he isa clever and lucky enough survivor to arrive at a degree of thoughtfulness. Candide. This led to on-again, off-again periods of exile--in the Low Countries, Prussia, and Switzerland--and service to the Frenchcourt. Voltaire's position in Candide is that human reason may be reliable,or anyway no less reliable than human faith, where the problem of evilarises. 2nd ed. After some two years, Voltaire returned to France, building onhis acquaintance with English letters by publishing critiques of Frenchsocial and intellectual life, including critiques of such iconic Frenchmenas Descartes and Pascal. Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Viewed in the context of the(mainly) nationalist-secular Seven Years' War (French and Indian War inAmerica, 1756-63), Candide reaches meaning not as reformist tract but as asecular critique of faith and its institutions and--significantly--ofsecular institutions and traditions of faith that support them. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.Gay, Peter. But Voltaire (1694-1778) wascentral to a much larger, culture-spanning critical dynamic. New York: Mentor/New American Library, 1956.Holmes, Richard. He was first driven from France, to London, in 1826, aftera public quarrel with a French aristocrat landed him briefly in theBastille, destined for a life characterized "exile and opposition"(Pomeau). New York: Literary Classics, Inc., 1944. It isironic that Candide, born and reared in Westphalia, that site and symbol ofthe end of Europe's religious warfare, proceeds to sites all over Europe,the Levant, and South America, where murderous and rapacious religiousbigotry thrives.
If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again:
or
We can write a Custom Essay just for you.
Browse Essays by Subject