"What is literature?" and other essays / Jean-Paul Sartre.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905-1980.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Standardized Title:

Essays. Selections. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Literature--Philosophy.

Literature.

Authorship.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

361 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1988.

Summary:

""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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0674950836

0674950844

OCLC:

17353626