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"What is Literature?" and Other Essays Paperback – October 15, 1988

by Jean-Paul Sartre (Author), Steven Ungar (Introduction)

5 customer reviews

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"What is Literature?" remains the most significant critical landmark of French literature since World War II. Neither abstract nor abstruse, it is a brilliant, provocative performance by a writer more inspired than cautious. "What is Literature?" challenges anyone who writes as if literature could be extricated from history or society. But Sartre does more than indict. He offers a definitive statement about the phenomenology of reading, and he goes on to provide a dashing example of how to write a history of literature that takes ideology and institutions into account. This new edition of "What is Literature?" also collects three other crucial essays of Sartre's for the first time in a volume of his. The essays presenting Sartre's monthly, Les Temps modernes, and on the peculiarly French manner of nationalizing literature do much to create a context for Sartre's treatise. "Black Orpheus" has been for many years a key text for the study of black and third-world literatures.

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About the Author

Jean-Paul Sartre, the great figure of French literary and philosophical culture at mid-century, was the author of numerous works.

Product details

Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press; Third Printing edition (October 15, 1988)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674950844
ISBN-13: 978-0674950849
Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 5 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #936,264 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #448 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Regional & Cultural > European > French
- #751 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Aesthetics
- #8641 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Criticism & Theory

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Sartre shows that literature is active and exciting.

March 28, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Okay, I am a huge Jean-Paul Sartre fan, at least the existentialist, pre-Marxist Sartre. "What is Literature" is a guidepost, a refreshing collection of essays about writing - what why, how and limits thereof. Sartre believed in writing, but not overwriting. He felt that literature was a shared responsibility. The writer began by writing, but with the shared goal in mind, leaving silence for he reader to pick up the task of finishing the work as a reader.
Sartre writes, "Thus, the autor writes in order to address himself to the freedom of readers, and he requires it in order to make his work exist." The
The approach to writing Sartre takes is refreshing and invigorating. In the current entitlement society of today, where people want literature and ideas spoon fed to them - Sartre offers the option of true freedom. How can one resist the thought of equally responsible writers and readers sharing a literary creation. I for one have to believe it works.

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An Anticipation of the 1980s?

March 13, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

By that I mean we get a "scientific" analysis of literature here that while far different from Barthes and his semiological ilk is just as questionable and almost as boring.

To conclude that John Dos Passos was a great 20th century novelist is to be badly deluded. Ironically, Dos Passos, after writing USA, became in later life a "salaud" in Sartre's terms.

Read Sartre's novels and short stories, ignore his lit crit as too tainted by philosophical and sociological misconceptions.

Comment

Better than i expected

February 3, 2010

Format: Paperback

Like most other people, I first read Sartre early in my time at college- Nausea, Being & Nothingness, Words. And I was, of course, smitten by this man who understood so well my experience of isolation, freedom and how irritating it is when tools don't work properly and when other young men and women looked at me. And then, like (I hope) most other people (including, it must be said, Sartre), I got over it, realized that the world existed neither to irritate me nor to coddle me, and that there were more important things than the state of my Existence.

So I didn't exactly have high expectations of this, and was very pleasantly surprised. Sartre's argument is based on a pretty dodgy philosophy, but quite valid feelings: anger at injustice, love of literature. Like most philosophies of literature, he makes absurd and stupid generalizations (the poet 'considers words as things, not signs' and so isn't like a 'writer'), but at least his largest generalization isn't an insult to human beings: the act of writing, he argues, is an act of freedom addressed to other free humans who happen at present to be in terrible situations of unfreedom. The relation between writer and reader can be an ideal image of a world in which people aren't forced to work in jobs they hate, or do anything else they hate for that matter. I'll take that over 'the act of writing is the putting into question of literature' any day. "The work of art, from whichever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men." And, I assume, women.

So Sartre argues that the writer is addressing both a real public - the people who do actually read her - and a virtual public, the people who could conceivably read her. In different historical periods these two audiences will more or less match up: when the society is one of minimal freedom for most people (Sartre's example is the 17th century), the virtual audience is more or less absent; when the society has the potential for greater freedom, the virtual audience expands (e.g., modernity.) But in any case, the writer must address her 'virtual' public through her real one. Abstract palaver has no place in Sartre's theory.

He follows this up with a great history of 20th century literature in France, which is basically a critique of surrealism and the communist party (it's important to note the latter, since everyone - including myself up till now - seems to think Sartre was a Stalinist), and the last chapter is a rousing call for writers to care about what they do.

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ICE work strap ping

accepting our higher swindle selves

January 26, 2012

Format: Paperback

I rarely read Sartre because I have more interest in political theories than in philosophy, and Sartre has the kind of journal which takes sides on a different basis than merely accepting the current higher swindles. I quote:

Consequently, concerning the political
and social events to come, our journal
will take a position in each case.
It will not do so politically -
that is, in the service of a particular
party - but it will attempt to sort out
the conception of man that inspires
each one of the conflicting theses,
and will give its opinion in conformity
with the conception it maintains. (p. 255).

The style of philosophy is likely to condemn works of rock and roll as:

what Mallarmé called "bibelors
d'inanité sonore" (trinkets of
sonorous inanity), this in itself
is a sign - that there is a crisis
of Letters and, no doubt, of
Society, or even that the dominant
classes have channeled him without
his realizing it toward an activity
that seems pure luxury, for fear
that he might take off and swell
the ranks of the revolutionaries. (p. 251).

Spend about five minutes listening to the song What's Up by 4 Non Blondes and see if you hear someone in an institution praying for a revolution every single day. Mostly the song is feeling a little peculiar, and it is quite common in a society that depends on a higher swindle to keep getting by that philosophy is the extraliminated activity of only a very few people, none of whom will be important for the five-second attention span of people who are wrapped up in rock and roll.

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