Sartre's Existential Biographies - Hardcover

Scriven, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333319877 ISBN 13: 9780333319871

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983

Synopsis

Between 1946 and 1981 approximately four thousand pages of Sartre’s biographical discourse were published; that’s almost two million words. The average reader, however, rarely associates Sartre’s name with biography. Sartre spent thirty years of his life engaged in one way or another in writing the biographies of several poets, novelist and dramatists, and one painter. Yet he vigorously proclaimed all the while that the primary task of the contemporary writer was to produce literature that mobilised the reading public towards participation in the significant socio-political issues of our time. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 in recognition of the literary talents displayed in his autobiography “Les Mots”, Sartre refused this prestigious accolade on the grounds that he did not wish to become the spokesman of a western bourgeois cultural institution. Yet “Les Mots”, the most widely read of Sartre’s biographies, has been unanimously acclaimed by the bourgeois reading public precisely and paradoxically because it sanctifies in some way the very bourgeois cultural practices that Sartre relentlessly attacks. Towards the end of his life Sartre declared that of all the books that he had written those which came closest to his literary ideal were his biographies of Genet and Flaubert. Yet very few people have read either of them. Their serpentine length, their methodological complexity and their sheer cost deter a mass readership. Despite Sartre’s evident concern to produce democratic literature for the majority, his biographies of Genet and Flaubert are inevitably destined to be studied by a specialised academic elite, not the man in the street. Manifestly, Sartre’s existential biographies are a network of contradictions which epitomise the contradictory nature of literature in the society in which we live. This book is an attempt to explain some of these contradictions.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0333319877
• ISBN 13: 9780333319871
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 164