Download or read book A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir written by Laura Hengehold and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-07-27 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Choice award for Outstanding Academic Title! The work of Simone de Beauvoir has endured and flowered in the last two decades, thanks primarily to the lasting influence of The Second Sex on the rise of academic discussions of gender, sexuality, and old age. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to her life and writings, an international assembly of prominent scholars, essayists, and leading interpreters reflect upon the range of Beauvoir’s contribution to philosophy as one of the great authors, thinkers, and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. The Companion examines Beauvoir’s rich intellectual life from a variety of angles—including literary, historical, and anthropological perspectives—and situates her in relation to her forbears and contemporaries in the philosophical canon. Essays in each of four thematic sections reveal the breadth and acuity of her insight, from the significance of The Second Sex and her work on the metaphysics of gender to her plentiful contributions in ethics and political philosophy. Later chapters trace the relationship between Beauvoir’s philosophical and literary work and open up her scholarship to global issues, questions of race, and the legacy of colonialism and sexism. The volume concludes by considering her impact on contemporary feminist thought writ large, and features pioneering work from a new generation of Beauvoir scholars. Ambitious and unprecedented in scope, A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir is an accessible and interdisciplinary resource for students, teachers, and researchers across the humanities and social sciences.

Download or read book Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought written by Daniel Brennan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought, edited by Daniel Brennan and Marguerite La Caze, enrichens and deepens scholarship on Arendt’s relation to philosophical history and traditions. Some contributors analyze thinkers not often linked to Arendt, such as William Shakespeare, Hans Jonas, and Simone de Beauvoir. Other contributors treat themes that are pressing and crucial to understanding Arendt’s work, such as love in its many forms, ethnicity and race, disability, human rights, politics, and statelessness. The collection is anchored by chapters on Arendt’s interpretation of Kant and her relation to early German Romanticism and phenomenology, while other chapters explore new perspectives, such as Arendt and film, her philosophical connections with other women thinkers, and her influence on Eastern European thought and activism. The collection expands the frames of reference for research on Arendt—both in terms of using a broader range of texts like her Denktagebuch and in examining her ideas about judgment, feminism, and worldliness in this wider context.

Download or read book Sartre written by Thomas R. Flynn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-29 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Regarded as the father of existentialist philosophy, he was also a political critic, moralist, playwright, novelist, and author of biographies and short stories. Thomas R. Flynn provides the first book-length account of Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, mapping the intellectual development of his ideas throughout his life, and building a narrative that is not only philosophical but also attentive to the political and literary dimensions of his work. Exploring Sartre's existentialism, politics, ethics, and ontology, this book illuminates the defining ideas of Sartre's oeuvre: the literary and the philosophical, the imaginary and the conceptual, his descriptive phenomenology and his phenomenological concept of intentionality, and his conjunction of ethics and politics with an 'egoless' consciousness. It will appeal to all who are interested in Sartre's philosophy and its relation to his life.

Download or read book Autobiographical Tightropes written by Leah D. Hewitt and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In order to write" said Simone de Beauvoir, "the first essential condition is that reality can no longer be taken for granted." She and four other French women writers of the second half of the twentieth century—Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé—illustrate that producing autobiography is like performing a tightrope act on the slippery line between fact and fiction. Autobiographical Tightropes emphasizes the tension in the works of these major writers as they move in and out of "experience" and "literature," violating the neat boundaries between genres and confusing the distinctions between remembering and creating. Focusing on selected works, Leah D. Hewitt for the first time anywhere explores the connections among the authors. In doing so she shows how contemporary women's autobiography in France links with feminist issues, literary tradition and trends, and postmodern theories of writing. In light of these theories Hewitt offers a new reading of de Beauvoir's memoirs and reveals how her attempt to represent the past faithfully is undone by irony, by literary and "feminine" detours. Other analysts of Nathalie Sarraute's writing have dwelt mainly on formal considerations of the New Novel, but Hewitt exposes a repressed, forbidden feminine aspect in her literary innovations. Unlike Sarraute, Duras cannot be connected with just one literary movement, political stance, style, or kind of feminism because her writing, largely autobiographical, is marked by chameleon like transformations. The chapters on Wittig and Condé show how, within the bounds of feminism, lesbians and women of color challenge the individualistic premises of autobiography. Hewitt demonstrates that, despite vast differences among these five writers, all of them reveal in their autobiographical works the self's need of a fictive other.

Download or read book Simone de Beauvoir The Basics written by Megan Burke and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-08 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simone de Beauvoir: The Basics provides an accessible introduction to the life, work and ground-breaking ideas of author, philosopher, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir. The book offers readers “the basics” of Beauvoir, affording new and continuing readers a guide to her works and ideas. The book examines main developments in her life, the social and political events and efforts, as well as intellectual figures who influenced her thinking. Readers will be introduced to her existentialist ethics of freedom and her preoccupation with situations of oppression, covering her more widely read philosophical texts like The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity, as well as her lesser-known texts like A Very Easy Death and Les Belles Images. Simone de Beauvoir: The Basics offers an energetic introduction to Beauvoir that encourages readers to study her further and that will inspire them to think with Beauvoir in their own lives, and is of value to those studying Beauvoir’s work for the first time and those looking for a supplement to their general knowledge of Beauvoir.

Download or read book Literature and Society written by NA Glicksberg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. Prolegomena The purpose of this book is to examine anew and from a number of different perspectives the highly complex and controversial relation between literature and society. This is not meant to be a study in sociology or political science; the analysis of literature - its structure, content, function, and effect - is our primary concern. What we shall try to find out is how the imaginative work is rooted in and grows out of the parent social body, to what extent it is influenced in subject matter as well as form and technique by the domi nant climate of ideas in a given historical period, and to what degree and in what manner literature "influences" the society to which it is addressed. The stream of literary influence is of course difficult to trace to its putative source, for here we are not dealing, as in science, with isolated physical phenomena which can be fitted precisely within some cause-and-effect pat tern. The relationship between literature and society is far more subtle and complex than social scientists or cultural critics commonly assume.

Download or read book Literature and Society written by I. Glicksberg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. Prolegomena The purpose of this book is to examine anew and from a number of different perspectives the highly complex and controversial relation between literature and society. This is not meant to be a study in sociology or political science; the analysis of literature - its structure, content, function, and effect - is our primary concern. What we shall try to find out is how the imaginative work is rooted in and grows out of the parent social body, to what extent it is influenced in subject matter as well as form and technique by the domi nant climate of ideas in a given historical period, and to what degree and in what manner literature "influences" the society to which it is addressed. The stream of literary influence is of course difficult to trace to its putative source, for here we are not dealing, as in science, with isolated physical phenomena which can be fitted precisely within some cause-and-effect pat tern. The relationship between literature and society is far more subtle and complex than social scientists or cultural critics commonly assume.

Download or read book Volume 9 Kierkegaard and Existentialism written by Jon Stewart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There can be no doubt that most of the thinkers who are usually associated with the existentialist tradition, whatever their actual doctrines, were in one way or another influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard. This influence is so great that it can be fairly stated that the existentialist movement was largely responsible for the major advance in Kierkegaard's international reception that took place in the twentieth century. In Kierkegaard's writings one can find a rich array of concepts such as anxiety, despair, freedom, sin, the crowd, and sickness that all came to be standard motifs in existentialist literature. Sartre played an important role in canonizing Kierkegaard as one of the forerunners of existentialism. However, recent scholarship has been attentive to his ideological use of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Sartre seemed to be exploiting Kierkegaard for his own purposes and suspicions of misrepresentation and distortions have led recent commentators to go back and reexamine the complex relation between Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinkers. The articles in the present volume feature figures from the French, German, Spanish and Russian traditions of existentialism. They examine the rich and varied use of Kierkegaard by these later thinkers, and, most importantly, they critically analyze his purported role in this famous intellectual movement.

Download or read book The A to Z of Existentialism written by Stephen Michelman and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Existentialism is the philosophy of human existence, which flourished first in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and then in France in the decade following the end of World War II. The operative meaning of existentialism here is thus broader than it was circa 1945 when the term first gained currency in France as a label for the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. However, it is considerably less broad than the view proposed by commentators in the 1950s and 1960s who, in an attempt to overcome Sartre's hegemony, discovered the seeds of existentialism far and wide: in Shakespeare, Saint Augustine, and the Old Testament prophets. In this dictionary, existentialism is understood as a decidedly 20th-century phenomenon, though with roots in the 19th century. Effort has been made to understand the philosophy of existentialism, as all philosophies should be understood, as part of an ongoing intellectual tradition: an evolving history of problems, concepts, and arguments. The A to Z of Existentialism explains the central claims of existentialist philosophy and the contexts in which it developed into one of the most influential intellectual trends of the 20th century. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and more than 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries offering clear, accessible accounts of the life and thought of major existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as thinkers influential to its development such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Max Scheler. This book affords readers an integrated, critical, and historically-sensitive understanding of this important philosophical movement.

Download or read book Simone de Beauvoir A Humanist Thinker written by and published by Hotei Publishing. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of humanist readings of Simone de Beauvoir’s work is a novel contribution to contemporary research on Beauvoir, and a defense of the importance of the humanities. It demonstrates the significance and value of humanistic research through the work of Beauvoir, and argues that the reception and influence of her works demonstrate the transformative potential of humanistic research. Organized around three topics, each chapter ascertains Beauvoir’s relation to the humanities and the humanist tradition. The first group focuses on Beauvoir’s interdisciplinary methodology and critical thinking, the second on her ethics of freedom and the construction of values. The last section explores how Beauvoir uses literature as a laboratory for developing her ideas on human interaction. The chapters can be studied as independent essays, or read together as a whole. Simone de Beauvoir—A Humanist Thinker reveals new and previously unexplored dimensions of Beauvoir’s work by exposing her as a significant and inspiring humanist thinker. This volume attests that Beauvoir’s works continue to offer conceptual tools and insights enabling readers to critically analyze their own situation. In today’s world, where religious fanaticism and totalitarian ideologies are gaining ground, humanist values and humanistic research are more important than ever.

Download or read book Nelson Algren written by Richard F. Bales and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-11-07 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses critical gaps in existing biographies of Nelson Algren, providing new perspectives on his writing style, literary contributions, professional colleagues, and personal life--especially his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Although Beauvoir maintained a simultaneous relationship with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the correspondence exchanged between Beauvoir, Algren, and Sartre, as this book discusses, sheds new light on her "transatlantic love affair" with Algren. Moreover, this work challenges the assertion that Algren's writing aligns seamlessly with the "New Journalism" style popularized by Tom Wolfe. It investigates how Algren's literary legacy might have diverged had he embraced more of the principles associated with New Journalism.

Download or read book Reading Sartre s Second Ethics written by Elizabeth A. Bowman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-03-27 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reading Sartre’s Second Ethics, Elizabeth A. Bowman and Robert V. Stone provide a comprehensive, reconstructive, and critical interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s mature dialectical ethics. The key Sartrean texts are two posthumously published lectures, one delivered at the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1964, the other scheduled to be delivered at Cornell University in 1965 but cancelled by Sartre in protest of U.S. foreign policy. Though different in content, method, and intended audience, Sartre gave both lectures the shared title “Morality and History.” As Bowman and Stone argue, these texts comprise a single, systematic ethic in two parts. The Cornell lecture focuses primarily on a regressive and phenomenological analysis of normativity and its ambiguous place in lived moral experience; the Rome lecture focuses primarily on a progressive and dialectical synthesis of the ends or goals of historical conduct. Taken together, the two texts demonstrate that “integral humanity” is always possible because the means to it can always be freely invented.

Download or read book The Wind From the East written by Richard Wolin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Maoism captured the imagination of French intellectuals during the 1960s Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who’s who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China’s Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life. Wolin’s riveting narrative reveals that Maoism’s allure among France’s best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.

Download or read book Existentialism and the Desirability of Immortality written by Adam Buben and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks to existential thinkers for reasons to hope immortal life could be worth living. It injects new arguments and insights into the debate about the desirability of immortality, and tackles related issues such as boredom, personal identity, technological progress, and the meaning of life. Immortality, in some form or another, is a common topic throughout the history of philosophy, but many thinkers who consider its possibility (or necessity) give little attention to the question of whether it would be worthwhile. Recent work on the topic has been dominated by transhumanists in pursuit of radical life extension, and philosophers from the analytic tradition who argue about the dangers of immortality. This book makes the case that continental thinkers—including Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Miguel de Unamuno, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir—have much to offer the debate on immortality. For most of these figures, it seems possible that an unending life would not preclude the preservation of personal identity or the sorts of dangers and deadlines required to maintain something like ordinary human values and fend off boredom. The author draws connections between these so-called "existentialists" and demonstrates how they contribute to an overarching argument about the desirability of immortality. Existentialism and the Desirability of Immortality will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on the philosophy of death and the history of existentialism.

Download or read book Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics written by Anthony C. Alessandrini and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on a reading of Frantz Fanon’s work and life, asking how the work of a revolutionary writer such as Fanon might be best appropriated for contemporary political and cultural issues. Separate chapters introduce Fanon’s life and examine the question of Fanon as our contemporary; review the field of “Fanon studies” that has grown up around his work; bring Fanon into conversation with the critical contemporary figures Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Jamaica Kincaid, and Paul Gilroy; and turn to Fanon’s work to think through the contemporary popular uprisings that have come to be known as the “Arab Spring.” The book concludes by arguing that a reevaluation of Fanon’s life and work can provide us with a particular set of lessons about solidarity—lessons that are crucial for the contemporary political struggles that face us today and that will continue to confront us in the future. Finding Something Different: Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics is inspired by Fanon’s unsparing struggle against the depredations of racism and colonialism, and his lifelong commitment to finding something different.

Download or read book The Socrates Express written by Eric Weiner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author retraces the journeys of forefront intellectuals from Epicurus and Gandhi to Thoreau and Beauvoir to illuminate how their practical and spiritual lessons can be applied in today's unsettled world. Eric Weiner combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi, Massachusetts, Coney Island, Frankfurt, and points in between, to recapture philosophy's original purpose: teaching us how to lead wiser, more meaningful lives. From Socrates and ancient Athens to Simone de Beauvoir and twentieth century Paris, Weiner's chosen places and thinkers provide important signposts as we navigate today's chaotic times.

Download or read book Conrad s Existentialism written by O. Bohlmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 1991-06-25 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Otto Bohlmann's fascinating study offers detailed and exhaustive evidence that the major philosophical aspects of Conrad's novels exhibit a powerful existential strain, foreshadowing many central concerns of twentieth-century modernism. Through both wide and close reading, Dr Bohlmann illuminates more thoroughly than any previous scholar the remarkable extent to which Conrad's fiction is replete with ideas, attitudes and even phrases reminiscent of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus.