Simone de Beauvoir interroge Jean-Paul Sartre

When this book's author discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired the author to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of the book, immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s — from the painful aftermath of World War II to the horror and shame of French colonial brutality in Algeria and through the dilemmas and exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements. The letters provide a glimpse into the power of reading and the power of readers to seduce their favorite authors. The relationship between Beauvoir and her audience proved especially long, intimate, and vexed. The book traces this relationship, from the publication of Beauvoir's acclaimed The Second Sex to the release of the last volume of her memoirs, offering an unfamiliar perspective on one of the most magnetic and polarizing philosophers of the twentieth century. Along the way, we meet many of the greatest writers of Beauvoir's generation — Hannah Arendt; Dominique Aury, author of The Story of O; François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize and nemesis of Albert Camus; Betty Friedan; and, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre — bringing the electrically charged salon experience to life. The book lays bare the private lives and political emotions of the letter writers and of Beauvoir herself. Her readers did not simply pen fan letters but, as the book shows, engaged in a dialogue that revealed intellectual and literary life to be a joint and collaborative production.

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Carole Potvin, Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir : deux solitudes et un duo

@nalyses. Revue des littératures franco-canadiennes et québécoise ◽

10.18192/analyses.v5i2.580 ◽

1969 ◽

Author(s):

Christian Milat

Keyword(s):

Simone De Beauvoir ◽

Jean Paul

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“The Mandarins”: Simone de Beauvoir’s Artistic Method

Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences ◽

10.30727/0235-1188-2018-9-96-109 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 96-109

Author(s):

Yu. V. Korelskaya

Keyword(s):

Albert Camus ◽

Literary Form ◽

The Novel ◽

Simone De Beauvoir ◽

Inner Life ◽

Postwar Literature ◽

Outer Line ◽

Jean Paul ◽

Literary Methods ◽

Intimate Life

Simone de Beauvoir is a representative of one of the leading philosophical schools in the middle of the 20th century. The article presents Beauvoir’s artistic method, applied in her novel The Mandarins, and examines the theoretical and biographical sources of the novel. The author demonstrates the place that the novel has in the Beauvoir’s literary and philosophical heritage and reveals the genre features of the work, introducing some special terms such as engaged, modern or philosophical novel and testimonial autobiographical project. The article also analyzes the novel’s literary form and the binary structure of the narrative. The study of the main characters, who are Henri Perron, Anne Dubreuilh and her husband Robert, allows to give a couple of narrative lines. First of them is the inner line that opens the reflective, contemplative and intimate life of one of the main characters – Anne. The second one is the outer line that means that the reader receives the information about characters from the Henry’s actions. Basing on this structure, we draw a conclusion about the modifications in the genre of existential novel in the postwar years. The new themes can be found in the literature. Authors introduce to readers the certain social reality through the inner life of some characters – intellectuals, novelists or philosophers. The thesis about the inner transformation of the genre is proved on Beauvoir’ and Jean-Paul Sartre’s works and on the prewar works of Sartre and Albert Camus. Beauvoir’s new literary methods and plots, which are the logical development of her work, made her novel one of the pioneers in the postwar literature.

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FANTASY 33 and religious or quasi-religious contexts, whereby colonising and invading forces have assumed non-white and/or non-Christian cultures to be barbaric, 'heathen', or, in some instances, not human. Ethnocentrist attitudes thus transform relative difference between cultures into value judgments mobilised by an ideology of hierarchical identification and comparison in which questions of race also figure exten-sively. As a corrective to ethnocentric tendencies, cultural relativism has stressed that cultures can not be evaluated for their merits or faults in comparison with other cultures; rather, a structural approach to ethnic cultural analysis has emerged which seeks to identify the various constituent elements and their interrelations within a culture which gives a particular culture its identity. However, such an approach is still not free from the problematic of ethnocentrism in-asmuch as the act of analysis and the epistemological frame-works that generate analysis can still be marked invisibly by cultural assumptions. Ethnography—Systematic and organised recording and classifi-cation of human cultures. Existentialism—A philosophical movement that involves the study of individual existence in an infinite, unfathomable universe. Existentialism devotes particular attention to the individual's notion of free will and interpersonal responsi-bility without any concrete knowledge of what constitutes right and wrong. A variety of twentieth-century thinkers and writers have explored the possibilities of existentialism, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Simone de Beauvoir, among others. False consciousness—Illusory or mistaken beliefs, the term is used in marxist theories to designate the beliefs of groups with whom one disagrees or who are in need of liberation and enlightenment; otherwise, the belief on the part of the middle classes which insists that class-based interests are not posi-tioned ideologically but are universal. Fantasy—In everyday language, fantasy refers simply to the workings of the imagination, but in different theoretical

Key Concepts in Literary Theory ◽

10.4324/9781315063799-10 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 49-51

Keyword(s):

Relative Difference ◽

Cultural Analysis ◽

Cultural Relativism ◽

False Consciousness ◽

Simone De Beauvoir ◽

Value Judgments ◽

Cultural Assumptions ◽

Jean Paul ◽

Individual Existence ◽

Constituent Elements

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Introduction

Muriel Spark, Existentialism and The Art of Death ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447201.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-15

Author(s):

Cairns Craig

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Second World War ◽

The Novel ◽

Simone De Beauvoir ◽

World War ◽

Christian Philosophy ◽

Muriel Spark ◽

Jean Paul ◽

Intellectual Context ◽

Second World

Muriel Spark has regularly been described as a Catholic novelist, given that her conversion to Catholicism was followed closely by the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, about the struggles of a Catholic convert. However, the intellectual context in which she came to maturity in the years after the Second World War was pervaded by the issues raised by existentialism, issues which surface directly in her novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Existentialism is now associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an atheistic philosophy, but it began as a Christian philosophy inspired by nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism which shaped Spark’s own ‘leap to faith’ and his ironic style which shaped her own approach to the novel form.

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