1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910480937803321

Autore

LaCapra Dominick

Titolo

A Preface to Sartre / / Dominick LaCapra

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, N.Y. : , : Cornell University Press, , [2016]

©1987

ISBN

1-5017-0521-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (251 pages)

Disciplina

848/.91209

Soggetti

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Errata slip inserted.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface -- Abbreviations for Sartre's Works -- Introduction -- 1 . Early Theoretical Studies: Art Is a n Unreality -- 2. Literature, Language, and Politics: Ellipses of What? -- 3. Nausea : "Une Autre Espéce de Livre" -- 4. From Being and Nothingness to the Critique: Breaking Bones in One's Head -- 5. Autobiography and Biography: Self and Other -- 6. In Lieu of a Conclusion -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Perhaps the leading Western intellectual of his time, Jean-Paul Sartre has written highly influential works in a diverse number of subject areas: philosophy, literature, biography, autobiography, and the theory of history. The concise and lucidly-written A Preface to Sartre discusses the French philosopher's contributions in all of these fields. Making imaginative use of the insights of some of the most important contemporary French thinkers (notably Jacques Derrida), Dominick LaCapra seeks to bring about an active confrontation between Sartre and his critics in terms that transcend the opposition between existentialism and structuralism. Referring wherever appropriate to important events in Sartre's life, he illuminates such difficult works as Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and places Sartre in relation to the traditions that he has explicitly rejected. LaCapra also offers close and sensitive interpretations of Nausea, of the autobiography, The Words, and of Sartre's biographical studies of



Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert. "I envision intellectual history," writes laCapra, "as a critical, informed, and stimulating conversation with the past through the medium of the texts of major thinkers. Who else in our recent past is a more fascinating interlocutor than Sartre?"