Rousseau's autobiographies

Considering Rousseau’s corpus of writings, it is striking to find not one, but rather three central independent autobiographical projects. The first and most famous of these is The Confessions (completed 1770, published 1782), followed by The Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (completed 1776, published 1782), and finally the incomplete Reveries of the Solitary Walker (written between 1176 and 1778, published 1782). This multiplicity cannot be explained by reducing it to one continuous autobiographical endeavor interrupted and recovered on later occasions, for each autobiography has its own specific “genre,” or deploys its own specific ways of understanding the autobiographical task. Moreover, it is not as though one autobiography picks up where the other left off; rather each, in its own way, opens Rousseau’s life.