Robert C. Solomon
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195181579
- eISBN:
- 9780199786602
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195181573.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were the giants of 20th-century “existentialism”, although neither of them was comfortable with that title. Their famous differences aside, they shared a ...
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Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were the giants of 20th-century “existentialism”, although neither of them was comfortable with that title. Their famous differences aside, they shared a “phenomenological” sensibility and described personal experience in exquisite and excruciating detail and reflected on the meaning of this experience with both sensitivity and insight. That is the focus of this book: Camus and Sartre, their descriptions of personal experience, and their reflections on the meaning of this experience. They also reflected, worriedly, on the nature of reflection. The thematic problem of the book is the relationship between experience and reflection. The book explores this relationship through novels and plays, Camus’ The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit, and Sartre’s great philosophical tome, Being and Nothingness.Less
Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were the giants of 20th-century “existentialism”, although neither of them was comfortable with that title. Their famous differences aside, they shared a “phenomenological” sensibility and described personal experience in exquisite and excruciating detail and reflected on the meaning of this experience with both sensitivity and insight. That is the focus of this book: Camus and Sartre, their descriptions of personal experience, and their reflections on the meaning of this experience. They also reflected, worriedly, on the nature of reflection. The thematic problem of the book is the relationship between experience and reflection. The book explores this relationship through novels and plays, Camus’ The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit, and Sartre’s great philosophical tome, Being and Nothingness.
Jack Hayward
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199216314
- eISBN:
- 9780191712265
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199216314.003.0009
- Subject:
- Political Science, European Union
Intellectuals have imparted polemical contentiousness to French political controversy. Zola's role in the Dreyfus case had a literary legacy on both the Left and Right, with Surrealists and ...
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Intellectuals have imparted polemical contentiousness to French political controversy. Zola's role in the Dreyfus case had a literary legacy on both the Left and Right, with Surrealists and Communists or individuals like Sartre on the Left and Barrès and Maurras on the Right being prominent. Mounier's Catholic anti-liberalism met its reassertion by Aron. Decolonization prompted intellectual activism but Benda made the case against commitment.Less
Intellectuals have imparted polemical contentiousness to French political controversy. Zola's role in the Dreyfus case had a literary legacy on both the Left and Right, with Surrealists and Communists or individuals like Sartre on the Left and Barrès and Maurras on the Right being prominent. Mounier's Catholic anti-liberalism met its reassertion by Aron. Decolonization prompted intellectual activism but Benda made the case against commitment.
Peter Lamarque
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199577460
- eISBN:
- 9780191722998
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577460.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Metaphysics/Epistemology
This book explores certain fundamental metaphysical aspects of works of art, giving focus to a distinction between works and the materials that underlie or constitute them. This constitutive material ...
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This book explores certain fundamental metaphysical aspects of works of art, giving focus to a distinction between works and the materials that underlie or constitute them. This constitutive material might be physical or abstract. For each work there is an ‘object’ (i.e., the materials of its composition) associated with it and a central claim in the book is that the work is never simply identical with the ‘object’ that constitutes it. Issues about the creation of works, their distinct kinds of properties (including aesthetic properties), their amenability to interpretation, their style, the conditions under which they can go out of existence, and their relation to perceptually indistinguishable doubles (including forgeries and parodies) are raised and debated. A core theme is that works like paintings, music, literature, sculpture, architecture, films, photographs, multimedia installations, and many more besides, have fundamental features in common, as cultural artefacts, in spite of enormous surface differences. It is their nature as distinct kinds of things, grounded in distinct ontological categories, that is the subject of this enquiry. Although much of the discussion is abstract, based in analytical metaphysics, there are many specific applications, including a study of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La Nausée and recent conceptual art. Some surprising conclusions are derived about the identity and survival conditions of works, and about the difference, often, between what a work seems to be and what it really is.Less
This book explores certain fundamental metaphysical aspects of works of art, giving focus to a distinction between works and the materials that underlie or constitute them. This constitutive material might be physical or abstract. For each work there is an ‘object’ (i.e., the materials of its composition) associated with it and a central claim in the book is that the work is never simply identical with the ‘object’ that constitutes it. Issues about the creation of works, their distinct kinds of properties (including aesthetic properties), their amenability to interpretation, their style, the conditions under which they can go out of existence, and their relation to perceptually indistinguishable doubles (including forgeries and parodies) are raised and debated. A core theme is that works like paintings, music, literature, sculpture, architecture, films, photographs, multimedia installations, and many more besides, have fundamental features in common, as cultural artefacts, in spite of enormous surface differences. It is their nature as distinct kinds of things, grounded in distinct ontological categories, that is the subject of this enquiry. Although much of the discussion is abstract, based in analytical metaphysics, there are many specific applications, including a study of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La Nausée and recent conceptual art. Some surprising conclusions are derived about the identity and survival conditions of works, and about the difference, often, between what a work seems to be and what it really is.
Michael Sheringham
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198158431
- eISBN:
- 9780191673306
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198158431.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This book studies French autobiography. Whereas earlier critics have engaged primarily in theoretical discussion of the genre, or in analyses of individual works or authors, this book identifies ...
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This book studies French autobiography. Whereas earlier critics have engaged primarily in theoretical discussion of the genre, or in analyses of individual works or authors, this book identifies sixteen key autobiographical texts and situates them in the context of an evolving set of challenges and problems. Informed by a sophisticated awareness of recent theoretical debates, the book conceives autobiography as a distinctively open form of writing, perpetually engaged with different forms of ‘otherness’. Manifestations of the Other in the autobiographical process — from the reader, who incarnates other people, to ideology, against which individual truth must be pitted, to the potential otherness of memory itself — are traced through a scrutiny of the ‘devices and desires’ at work in a range of texts from Rousseau's Confessions, to Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard and Sartre's Les Mots. Other writers examined include Chateaubriand, Gide, Green, Leiris, Leduc, Gorz, Barthes, Perec, and Sarraute.Less
This book studies French autobiography. Whereas earlier critics have engaged primarily in theoretical discussion of the genre, or in analyses of individual works or authors, this book identifies sixteen key autobiographical texts and situates them in the context of an evolving set of challenges and problems. Informed by a sophisticated awareness of recent theoretical debates, the book conceives autobiography as a distinctively open form of writing, perpetually engaged with different forms of ‘otherness’. Manifestations of the Other in the autobiographical process — from the reader, who incarnates other people, to ideology, against which individual truth must be pitted, to the potential otherness of memory itself — are traced through a scrutiny of the ‘devices and desires’ at work in a range of texts from Rousseau's Confessions, to Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard and Sartre's Les Mots. Other writers examined include Chateaubriand, Gide, Green, Leiris, Leduc, Gorz, Barthes, Perec, and Sarraute.
Ann Jefferson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691160658
- eISBN:
- 9781400852598
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691160658.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as ...
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This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.Less
This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.
Patrizia Lombardo
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Barthes’s œuvre is significant not simply for the ‘linguistic turn’ of the second half of the twentieth century, but also for the interest in the emotions that has marked a number of disciplines ...
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Barthes’s œuvre is significant not simply for the ‘linguistic turn’ of the second half of the twentieth century, but also for the interest in the emotions that has marked a number of disciplines since the early 1980s. This chapter analyses Barthes’s changing relationship to affectivity in general and to art considered as an emotional experience. The early Barthes, enthralled by Brecht’s dramaturgy and Japanese Bunraku, denounced traditional Western theatre for its privileging of the expression of emotions and the audience’s participation in the feelings of fictional characters (Barthes’s comparison of two operatic death scenes, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Debussy’s Mélisande, is a key example). By the late 1970s, Barthes has rethought his negative evaluation of emotion. In Fragments d’un discours amoureux, he draws on Sartre’s phenomenological Esquisse pour une théorie des émotions; in the Proustian ‘“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”’, he stresses the reader’s participation in fictional ‘moments of truth’ and proclaims his own need to write a novel of pathos; in La Chambre claire, he valorises an emotional relation to photography. Barthes’s late vita nova cannot be fully understood without this new focus on affectivity, a positive acknowledgement of pathos, and the emergence of joy.Less
Barthes’s œuvre is significant not simply for the ‘linguistic turn’ of the second half of the twentieth century, but also for the interest in the emotions that has marked a number of disciplines since the early 1980s. This chapter analyses Barthes’s changing relationship to affectivity in general and to art considered as an emotional experience. The early Barthes, enthralled by Brecht’s dramaturgy and Japanese Bunraku, denounced traditional Western theatre for its privileging of the expression of emotions and the audience’s participation in the feelings of fictional characters (Barthes’s comparison of two operatic death scenes, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Debussy’s Mélisande, is a key example). By the late 1970s, Barthes has rethought his negative evaluation of emotion. In Fragments d’un discours amoureux, he draws on Sartre’s phenomenological Esquisse pour une théorie des émotions; in the Proustian ‘“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”’, he stresses the reader’s participation in fictional ‘moments of truth’ and proclaims his own need to write a novel of pathos; in La Chambre claire, he valorises an emotional relation to photography. Barthes’s late vita nova cannot be fully understood without this new focus on affectivity, a positive acknowledgement of pathos, and the emergence of joy.
Joseph Frank
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823239252
- eISBN:
- 9780823239290
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823239252.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Jean-Paul Sartre's treatise Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952) is one of the strangest books ever to be written by a reputable philosopher. It is about a far more outlandish figure than Immanuel ...
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Jean-Paul Sartre's treatise Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952) is one of the strangest books ever to be written by a reputable philosopher. It is about a far more outlandish figure than Immanuel Kant's Swedenborg: Jean Genet, ex-jailbird and self-confessed thief, pederast, prostitute, and stoolpigeon. Genet's sumptuously obscene celebrations of evil, in a prose whose preciosity recalls Marcel Proust and Jean Giraudoux, have made him, since the end of World War II, the rage of Parisian literary circles. And Sartre's intensely, sometimes comically serious discussion of Genet is a dazzling display of dialectic, ending with what Sartre calls “a request that Jean Genet be well treated.” The truth is that Sartre was preoccupied in those years with the problems of an Existentialist ethics; and in the figure of Genet, he found a pretext for developing certain ideas on good and evil which had not hitherto found expression in his theoretical writings. Genet's work is a gigantic glorification of vice and crime, a willful inversion of all normal ethical standards.Less
Jean-Paul Sartre's treatise Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952) is one of the strangest books ever to be written by a reputable philosopher. It is about a far more outlandish figure than Immanuel Kant's Swedenborg: Jean Genet, ex-jailbird and self-confessed thief, pederast, prostitute, and stoolpigeon. Genet's sumptuously obscene celebrations of evil, in a prose whose preciosity recalls Marcel Proust and Jean Giraudoux, have made him, since the end of World War II, the rage of Parisian literary circles. And Sartre's intensely, sometimes comically serious discussion of Genet is a dazzling display of dialectic, ending with what Sartre calls “a request that Jean Genet be well treated.” The truth is that Sartre was preoccupied in those years with the problems of an Existentialist ethics; and in the figure of Genet, he found a pretext for developing certain ideas on good and evil which had not hitherto found expression in his theoretical writings. Genet's work is a gigantic glorification of vice and crime, a willful inversion of all normal ethical standards.
France Peter
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263181
- eISBN:
- 9780191734595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263181.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Jean Sartre's fictional hero Roquentin believes that one cannot seriously take the task of writing one's life. For him, biography is an impossibility, a work of ‘pure imagination’ subjected to the ...
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Jean Sartre's fictional hero Roquentin believes that one cannot seriously take the task of writing one's life. For him, biography is an impossibility, a work of ‘pure imagination’ subjected to the biases of the writer and devoid of resemblance to the subject. In the early days, biographies served as testimony to the greatness a person. They served as models from which people could emulate the exemplary individual. Then, the essential thing was to tell a story based on external facts and on psychological plausibility. However, in the age of Rousseau's Confessions, it was argued that biographies were accounts of inner truths, and that self-revelation was only achieved by the person himself: ‘No man can write a man's life but himself’. Even in the days when new methods of understanding the life of a man were increasingly becoming available, biographies were often seen as suspect enterprises. They were often seen as approaches that obscure the proper comprehension of the literary process and as illusions of profound knowledge of the inner truth, when in fact biographers continue to approach biographies with misgivings. In spite of all the criticisms against biographies, they have remained of great interest. They reach out to a broad public as a literature in its own right and have played a vital role in the history of European culture. Biographies have served as an inspiration, as a celebration of the great personages of the nation, as an insight to the gender roles of the society, and so on.Less
Jean Sartre's fictional hero Roquentin believes that one cannot seriously take the task of writing one's life. For him, biography is an impossibility, a work of ‘pure imagination’ subjected to the biases of the writer and devoid of resemblance to the subject. In the early days, biographies served as testimony to the greatness a person. They served as models from which people could emulate the exemplary individual. Then, the essential thing was to tell a story based on external facts and on psychological plausibility. However, in the age of Rousseau's Confessions, it was argued that biographies were accounts of inner truths, and that self-revelation was only achieved by the person himself: ‘No man can write a man's life but himself’. Even in the days when new methods of understanding the life of a man were increasingly becoming available, biographies were often seen as suspect enterprises. They were often seen as approaches that obscure the proper comprehension of the literary process and as illusions of profound knowledge of the inner truth, when in fact biographers continue to approach biographies with misgivings. In spite of all the criticisms against biographies, they have remained of great interest. They reach out to a broad public as a literature in its own right and have played a vital role in the history of European culture. Biographies have served as an inspiration, as a celebration of the great personages of the nation, as an insight to the gender roles of the society, and so on.
Ann Jefferson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691160658
- eISBN:
- 9781400852598
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691160658.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter describes the gradual discrediting of the notion of genius. In France in the 1950s, contemporaneously with the Minou Drouet affair, it became the object of a powerful cultural critique ...
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This chapter describes the gradual discrediting of the notion of genius. In France in the 1950s, contemporaneously with the Minou Drouet affair, it became the object of a powerful cultural critique under the aegis of literary theory, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes—more or less simultaneously—portrayed it as an anachronistic legacy from the previous century, and denounced it as a one of the myths that lay at the heart of bourgeois ideology. Two of Barthes's texts in Mythologies (1957) specifically target genius—one devoted to Einstein's brain, and the other to Minou Drouet. Much the same goes for Sartre, whose autobiography, Les Mots, begun in 1953 (and finally published in 1964), targets genius and the child prodigy as central components of his farewell to literature.Less
This chapter describes the gradual discrediting of the notion of genius. In France in the 1950s, contemporaneously with the Minou Drouet affair, it became the object of a powerful cultural critique under the aegis of literary theory, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes—more or less simultaneously—portrayed it as an anachronistic legacy from the previous century, and denounced it as a one of the myths that lay at the heart of bourgeois ideology. Two of Barthes's texts in Mythologies (1957) specifically target genius—one devoted to Einstein's brain, and the other to Minou Drouet. Much the same goes for Sartre, whose autobiography, Les Mots, begun in 1953 (and finally published in 1964), targets genius and the child prodigy as central components of his farewell to literature.
Christina Howells
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263181
- eISBN:
- 9780191734595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263181.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses Jean Sartre's approach to writing biographies. As a biographer, Sartre embraces the paradox of an attempted, yet always impossible, totalization of the fragmentary, and ...
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This chapter discusses Jean Sartre's approach to writing biographies. As a biographer, Sartre embraces the paradox of an attempted, yet always impossible, totalization of the fragmentary, and acknowledges the extent to which he is implicated in the story he tells. His biographical purpose is innovatory compared to the norms of French biography in the twentieth century. Sartre's approach is epistemological, critical, and political rather than literary. His method involves historical and psychological interpretation. Although Sartre's biographies are not consistent in format and approach, they nevertheless are all examples of existentialist psychoanalysis and of the progressive–regressive method. In all cases, he is concerned to conceive human life as a totality rather than as a collection of disparate data, and to interpret attitudes, events, and projects as part of the chosen destiny rather than as accidental phenomenon. In this sense, all the biographies form part of Sartre's epistemological enquiry into the relations between man and nature, and his ethical exploration of nature and of freedom.Less
This chapter discusses Jean Sartre's approach to writing biographies. As a biographer, Sartre embraces the paradox of an attempted, yet always impossible, totalization of the fragmentary, and acknowledges the extent to which he is implicated in the story he tells. His biographical purpose is innovatory compared to the norms of French biography in the twentieth century. Sartre's approach is epistemological, critical, and political rather than literary. His method involves historical and psychological interpretation. Although Sartre's biographies are not consistent in format and approach, they nevertheless are all examples of existentialist psychoanalysis and of the progressive–regressive method. In all cases, he is concerned to conceive human life as a totality rather than as a collection of disparate data, and to interpret attitudes, events, and projects as part of the chosen destiny rather than as accidental phenomenon. In this sense, all the biographies form part of Sartre's epistemological enquiry into the relations between man and nature, and his ethical exploration of nature and of freedom.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life‐writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary ...
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This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life‐writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary portraiture, imaginary self‐portraiture, and aesthetic autobiography figure in experiments in life‐writing by two authors coming after modernism: Jean‐Paul Sartre in Les Mots, and Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory. The second section sketches ways in which postmodernism has drawn upon and extended the tradition of experimentations with life‐writing. Here the emphasis is on metafictional strategies, especially those of auto/biografiction and imaginary authorship. Auto/biografiction can be understood as a strand of what Linda Hutcheon defines as ‘historiographic metafiction’, focusing on the representations of individual life stories rather than on representations of historical crises or trauma. Modernist works explicitly thematizing their own processes of representation (such as Orlando or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) are reconsidered as pioneers of the postmodern development that might be termed ‘auto/biographic metafiction’. Key examples discussed are A. S. Byatt's Possession (as biographic metafiction); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (as autobiographic metafiction) and Nabokov's Pale Fire (as auto/biographic metafiction). Where historiographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of the historical novel, auto/biographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of auto/biography.Less
This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life‐writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary portraiture, imaginary self‐portraiture, and aesthetic autobiography figure in experiments in life‐writing by two authors coming after modernism: Jean‐Paul Sartre in Les Mots, and Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory. The second section sketches ways in which postmodernism has drawn upon and extended the tradition of experimentations with life‐writing. Here the emphasis is on metafictional strategies, especially those of auto/biografiction and imaginary authorship. Auto/biografiction can be understood as a strand of what Linda Hutcheon defines as ‘historiographic metafiction’, focusing on the representations of individual life stories rather than on representations of historical crises or trauma. Modernist works explicitly thematizing their own processes of representation (such as Orlando or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) are reconsidered as pioneers of the postmodern development that might be termed ‘auto/biographic metafiction’. Key examples discussed are A. S. Byatt's Possession (as biographic metafiction); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (as autobiographic metafiction) and Nabokov's Pale Fire (as auto/biographic metafiction). Where historiographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of the historical novel, auto/biographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of auto/biography.
Miriam Leonard
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199277254
- eISBN:
- 9780191707414
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199277254.003.0005
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
How far can reading the Greeks politically get us? This concluding chapter questions whether an innovative approach to the political — a new theory of democracy — has emerged from the French post-war ...
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How far can reading the Greeks politically get us? This concluding chapter questions whether an innovative approach to the political — a new theory of democracy — has emerged from the French post-war encounter with 5th century Athens. Did post-war France rediscover Greece in the shadow of German tyranny to write the script of a truly emancipatory politics for the future? Can one see beyond the humanist appropriation of classical culture or is the return to antiquity inevitably a revisiting of the worst exclusionary narratives of the enlightenment? The chapter contrasts the reception of antiquity in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre with the later investment in the classical past explored in this book.Less
How far can reading the Greeks politically get us? This concluding chapter questions whether an innovative approach to the political — a new theory of democracy — has emerged from the French post-war encounter with 5th century Athens. Did post-war France rediscover Greece in the shadow of German tyranny to write the script of a truly emancipatory politics for the future? Can one see beyond the humanist appropriation of classical culture or is the return to antiquity inevitably a revisiting of the worst exclusionary narratives of the enlightenment? The chapter contrasts the reception of antiquity in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre with the later investment in the classical past explored in this book.
Lawrence R. Schehr
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823231355
- eISBN:
- 9780823241095
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823231355.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
To move from the retrospective and nostalgic view of the Restoration that is Balzac's to the world leading to the Second World War that is Sartre's is to cover a bit over a century of tumultuous ...
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To move from the retrospective and nostalgic view of the Restoration that is Balzac's to the world leading to the Second World War that is Sartre's is to cover a bit over a century of tumultuous change, industrial and economic revolution, and social evolution in mores, class structure, and demographics to an extent that the West had never before seen. While verisimilitude remains the anchor of all of these works, analyses of each of them show disruptions strengthen and deepen the narrative. Though all of these authors transform evolutions, still there are no authors the same.Less
To move from the retrospective and nostalgic view of the Restoration that is Balzac's to the world leading to the Second World War that is Sartre's is to cover a bit over a century of tumultuous change, industrial and economic revolution, and social evolution in mores, class structure, and demographics to an extent that the West had never before seen. While verisimilitude remains the anchor of all of these works, analyses of each of them show disruptions strengthen and deepen the narrative. Though all of these authors transform evolutions, still there are no authors the same.
Jerome Neu
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199862986
- eISBN:
- 9780199949762
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199862986.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
This chapter considers Sartre's critique of Freud and his alternative account of self-deception in terms of bad faith in order to see what can be learned from him and also in order to suggest that ...
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This chapter considers Sartre's critique of Freud and his alternative account of self-deception in terms of bad faith in order to see what can be learned from him and also in order to suggest that there is still much to be learned from Freud. Where Sartre's critique is defective, as it often is, an attempt is made to bring out the underlying problem that still poses a challenge to psychoanalytic theorizing.Less
This chapter considers Sartre's critique of Freud and his alternative account of self-deception in terms of bad faith in order to see what can be learned from him and also in order to suggest that there is still much to be learned from Freud. Where Sartre's critique is defective, as it often is, an attempt is made to bring out the underlying problem that still poses a challenge to psychoanalytic theorizing.
David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199272457
- eISBN:
- 9780191709951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199272457.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
This volume involves both disciplinary and historical issues, and aims to integrate results and methods of the two disciplines in the interest of philosophy as a whole. There has been a long-standing ...
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This volume involves both disciplinary and historical issues, and aims to integrate results and methods of the two disciplines in the interest of philosophy as a whole. There has been a long-standing assumption that — for historical, methodological, or doctrinal reasons — analytic philosophy of mind has little in common with the tradition of phenomenology that began with Brentano, and which was developed by Husserl and continued through such figures as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau–Ponty. This volume overturns that assumption by demonstrating how work in phenomenology may lead to progress on problems central to both classical phenomenology and contemporary philosophy of mind. Specifically, the essays gathered here (all written for the volume) bring ideas from classical phenomenology into the recent debates in philosophy of mind, and vice versa, in discussions of consciousness, intentionality, perception, action, self-knowledge, temporal awareness, holism about mental state contents, and the prospects for ‘explaining’ consciousness.Less
This volume involves both disciplinary and historical issues, and aims to integrate results and methods of the two disciplines in the interest of philosophy as a whole. There has been a long-standing assumption that — for historical, methodological, or doctrinal reasons — analytic philosophy of mind has little in common with the tradition of phenomenology that began with Brentano, and which was developed by Husserl and continued through such figures as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau–Ponty. This volume overturns that assumption by demonstrating how work in phenomenology may lead to progress on problems central to both classical phenomenology and contemporary philosophy of mind. Specifically, the essays gathered here (all written for the volume) bring ideas from classical phenomenology into the recent debates in philosophy of mind, and vice versa, in discussions of consciousness, intentionality, perception, action, self-knowledge, temporal awareness, holism about mental state contents, and the prospects for ‘explaining’ consciousness.
Iris Marion Young
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195392388
- eISBN:
- 9780199866625
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195392388.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter focuses on a specific kind of moral wrong—structural injustice—which is distinct from wrongs traceable to specific individual actions or policies. The chapter is organized as follows. ...
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This chapter focuses on a specific kind of moral wrong—structural injustice—which is distinct from wrongs traceable to specific individual actions or policies. The chapter is organized as follows. Section I explains these distinctions between types of wrong and expands on the example of the lack of affordable housing to illustrate the concept of structural injustice. Section II conceptualizes social-structural processes by drawing on the ideas of several social theorists, including Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean–Paul Sartre. Section III returns to reflection on injustice by recalling John Rawls's claim that the subject of justice is the basic structure of society. It examines critiques of this claim that argue that Rawls too starkly separates institutional justice from individual action. It is argued that in order properly to respond to these critiques, a conception of justice needs to revise an understanding of what it means to say that the subject of justice is structure.Less
This chapter focuses on a specific kind of moral wrong—structural injustice—which is distinct from wrongs traceable to specific individual actions or policies. The chapter is organized as follows. Section I explains these distinctions between types of wrong and expands on the example of the lack of affordable housing to illustrate the concept of structural injustice. Section II conceptualizes social-structural processes by drawing on the ideas of several social theorists, including Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean–Paul Sartre. Section III returns to reflection on injustice by recalling John Rawls's claim that the subject of justice is the basic structure of society. It examines critiques of this claim that argue that Rawls too starkly separates institutional justice from individual action. It is argued that in order properly to respond to these critiques, a conception of justice needs to revise an understanding of what it means to say that the subject of justice is structure.
Tom Martin
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195320398
- eISBN:
- 9780199869534
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195320398.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, General
The aim of this essay is to account for the anti-Semitism harboured and expressed by Danny Balint, the main character in Henry Bean’s film, The Believer. I begin by considering two kinds of ...
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The aim of this essay is to account for the anti-Semitism harboured and expressed by Danny Balint, the main character in Henry Bean’s film, The Believer. I begin by considering two kinds of explanation that Danny himself offers: one focusing on rational argument, the other on non-rational, emotional grounds. I argue that neither of Danny’s expressed accounts, however, emerges as adequate to understanding his hatred of the Jews. Instead, I offer a more fundamental and inclusive account of Danny’s anti-Semitism, one that focuses not just on the accounts he gives, but rather on constructing an account from a number of diverse, even contradictory, claims that he makes. I argue that the thread running through Danny’s anti-Semitic attitudes is the link that, for him, exists between the Jews, Judaism, and various forms of meaninglessness.Less
The aim of this essay is to account for the anti-Semitism harboured and expressed by Danny Balint, the main character in Henry Bean’s film, The Believer. I begin by considering two kinds of explanation that Danny himself offers: one focusing on rational argument, the other on non-rational, emotional grounds. I argue that neither of Danny’s expressed accounts, however, emerges as adequate to understanding his hatred of the Jews. Instead, I offer a more fundamental and inclusive account of Danny’s anti-Semitism, one that focuses not just on the accounts he gives, but rather on constructing an account from a number of diverse, even contradictory, claims that he makes. I argue that the thread running through Danny’s anti-Semitic attitudes is the link that, for him, exists between the Jews, Judaism, and various forms of meaninglessness.
Peter Lamarque
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199577460
- eISBN:
- 9780191722998
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577460.003.0010
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Metaphysics/Epistemology
This chapter identifies a view about the ontology of art in the final sections of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea and suggests a more positive evaluation of the novel's ending than is commonly ...
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This chapter identifies a view about the ontology of art in the final sections of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea and suggests a more positive evaluation of the novel's ending than is commonly proposed. A contrast between the nature of objects, as a source of nausea, and the nature of works of art (with the focus on the jazz song ‘Some of These Days’) is drawn in terms of three features: the viscous, the absurd, and the contingent. Reasons for the absence, in Sartre's view, of these features in works of art are elaborated, partly by reference to Sartre's work The Psychology of Imagination, as is the idea that works are objects of the imagination. Sartre's puzzling claim that works of art do not (strictly) exist is explained in terms of the distinctive ontology of art that emerges in the novel.Less
This chapter identifies a view about the ontology of art in the final sections of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea and suggests a more positive evaluation of the novel's ending than is commonly proposed. A contrast between the nature of objects, as a source of nausea, and the nature of works of art (with the focus on the jazz song ‘Some of These Days’) is drawn in terms of three features: the viscous, the absurd, and the contingent. Reasons for the absence, in Sartre's view, of these features in works of art are elaborated, partly by reference to Sartre's work The Psychology of Imagination, as is the idea that works are objects of the imagination. Sartre's puzzling claim that works of art do not (strictly) exist is explained in terms of the distinctive ontology of art that emerges in the novel.
Ann Jefferson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199270842
- eISBN:
- 9780191710292
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199270842.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Sartre shares with Leiris a view of literature that conceives of it as an act, but, in contrast to Leiris, his aim is rather to desacralize the literary. An examination of his theoretical writings, ...
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Sartre shares with Leiris a view of literature that conceives of it as an act, but, in contrast to Leiris, his aim is rather to desacralize the literary. An examination of his theoretical writings, especially Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, reveals that this conception rests on a biographical approach to the writer's role. The entanglement of literature with biography is evident not just in Sartre's own literary biographies of Baudelaire, Genet, and Mallarmé but also in his novel, La Nausé. These texts explore the concepts of literature and biography in ways that highlight Sartre's ambivalent evaluation of them. His autobiography, Les Mots, is as much a denunciation of the way that the ‘retrospective illusion’ created by biography can corrupt the existential project of a subject, as it is an exploitation of the potential offered by autobiography to construct literature as an act — even if it is an act of farewell to the literary.Less
Sartre shares with Leiris a view of literature that conceives of it as an act, but, in contrast to Leiris, his aim is rather to desacralize the literary. An examination of his theoretical writings, especially Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, reveals that this conception rests on a biographical approach to the writer's role. The entanglement of literature with biography is evident not just in Sartre's own literary biographies of Baudelaire, Genet, and Mallarmé but also in his novel, La Nausé. These texts explore the concepts of literature and biography in ways that highlight Sartre's ambivalent evaluation of them. His autobiography, Les Mots, is as much a denunciation of the way that the ‘retrospective illusion’ created by biography can corrupt the existential project of a subject, as it is an exploitation of the potential offered by autobiography to construct literature as an act — even if it is an act of farewell to the literary.
Patrick Hayes
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199587957
- eISBN:
- 9780191723292
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587957.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter contextualizes Coetzee's fiction by placing it in relation to late twentieth‐century debates on the nature of a good community, and on the relationship between culture and politics. It ...
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This chapter contextualizes Coetzee's fiction by placing it in relation to late twentieth‐century debates on the nature of a good community, and on the relationship between culture and politics. It argues that Coetzee presents political modernity as a divided moral legacy made up of two distinctively different interpretations of the ideal of equal recognition—the politics of equal dignity and the politics of difference. The chapter explores the different claims each form of politics tends to make upon literary expression with reference to a wide range of intellectuals—including Habermas, Charles Taylor, John Gray, Sartre, Fanon, and the South African Students' Organization (SASO). It relates Coetzee's approach to an alternative line of thinking about both culture and politics, which departs from the different forms of the politics of recognition by instead seeking to defend an anti‐foundational understanding of the good community.Less
This chapter contextualizes Coetzee's fiction by placing it in relation to late twentieth‐century debates on the nature of a good community, and on the relationship between culture and politics. It argues that Coetzee presents political modernity as a divided moral legacy made up of two distinctively different interpretations of the ideal of equal recognition—the politics of equal dignity and the politics of difference. The chapter explores the different claims each form of politics tends to make upon literary expression with reference to a wide range of intellectuals—including Habermas, Charles Taylor, John Gray, Sartre, Fanon, and the South African Students' Organization (SASO). It relates Coetzee's approach to an alternative line of thinking about both culture and politics, which departs from the different forms of the politics of recognition by instead seeking to defend an anti‐foundational understanding of the good community.
