The Renaissance of Impasse
Leroux, Jean-Fran cois
In his 1963 debut essay for the militant Quebec journal, Parti pris, André Brochu invoked the figure of the sixteenth-century skeptic Michel de Montaigne in the name of what Ralph Waldo Emerson, responding to the same over a century earlier, had called, «an original relation to the universe». «Écrire», wrote Brochu, «c'est redéfinir la relation originelle de l'homme à l'univers, c'est, comme écrit magnifiquement Montaigne, 'faire l'homme'...» ...