Autobiography and the Existential Self: Studies in Modern French Writing

by TerryKeefe (Editor), EdmundSmyth (Editor), EdmundJ.Smyth (Editor), TerryKeefe (Editor)

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  Paperback
  1995

  $17.83

  In recent years, critical attention has become increasingly focused on autobiography. The impact of this enquiry is not exclusively confined to comparative literature studies and literary theory and criticism, but has also been extended to philosophy, sociology, feminist studies, psychoanalysis, social history, and cultural studies. This volume examines specifically the autobiographical writings of the various French existentialist' (and related) authors, and includes discussions of already well-known existentialist autobiographical productions (such as Les Mots and de Beauvoir's memoirs), but also examines a number of recent posthumous publications, such as Sartre's Camets de la drole de guerre and Simone de Beauvoir's Journal de guerre , and the correspondence between Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir ( Lettres au Castor ). Much of this new material has so far received very little critical attention. The relationship between the self and writing also emerges in the autobiographical work of a number of other writers, many of whom were either close to the existentialist (in philosophical, aesthetic, or political terms) or have continued as part of this tradition . Thus, other chapters include analyses of such writers as Albert Camus, Paul Nizan, Jean Genet, Violette Leduc, and Herve Guibert, whose autobiographical account of his experience of AIDS can be examined in existential terms. In addition to 10 chapters by established specialists, the volume contains an introduction and a conclusion in which the various common themes are addressed.