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Part of the book: Sartre's Theory of Literature

Christina Howells

MHRA Texts and Dissertations 14

Modern Humanities Research Association

ModernFrenchPhilosophyopen

Abstract.  Sartre's ideas on the nature of language and on man's relations to it are distributed widely throught his philosophical, critical and even his autobiographical writings. In these writings we can discern a spectrum of interests: at one end of this spectrum, as a critic of poetry for example, or in his account of certain aspects of Flaubert's style, Sartre is concerned with linguistic patterns and images; at the other end, as a philosopher and moralist, he is interested in language as human behaviour, and this interest sets him sharply off against those thinkers who see language as an abstract logical structure of formal relations. In this chapter we will attempt to give an account of Sartre's ideas on language, at the same time situating these with respect to other linguistic theories, and indicating their importance for his notion of the role of literature and the nature of literary commitment.

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