'What is literature?'' and other essays

✍ Scribed by Jean-Paul Sartre

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1988
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 368
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

"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.

✦ Table of Contents

Introduction by Steven Ungar......Page 8
What Is Literature?......Page 28
What Is Writing?......Page 32
Why Write?......Page 55
For Whom Does One Write?......Page 77
Situation of the Writer in 1947......Page 148
Writing for One's Age......Page 246
Introducing Les Temps modernes......Page 254
The Nationalization of Literature......Page 276
Black Orpheus......Page 296
Notes......Page 340
A Note on the Texts......Page 356
Index......Page 358