Sartre's Theory of Literature 

Christina Howells

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MHRA Texts and Dissertations 14

Modern Humanities Research Association

1 January 1979

ISBN: 978-1-839546-51-8 (Hosted on this website)

Open Access with doi: 10.59860/td.b58a46a

ModernFrenchPhilosophyopen


As an imaginative writer Sartre is fascinated by the role of imagination in the creative process. Moreover his critical, psychological and philosophical writings witness to a constant meditation on the function and status of the imaginary.

This book, originally published in paperback in 1979 under the ISBN 978-0-900547-57-7, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.

Contents:

i-vii, 1-251

Sartre's Theory of Literature
Christina Howells
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The complete text of this book.

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i-vii

Sartre's Theory of Literature: front matter
Christina Howells
doi:10.59860/td.c6971a1

Contents, Foreword and list of Abbreviations.

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1-2

Introduction
Christina Howells
doi:10.59860/td.c6b239e

As an imaginative writer Sartre is fascinated by the role of imagination in the creative process. Moreover his critical, psychological and philosophical writings witness to a constant meditation on the function and status of the imaginary. In his exploration of the relationship between mind and world, the role attributed to the imagination is at least as great as that of perception: imagination is, in Sartre's view, constitutive of the 'world' as we know it. It appears moreover as the correlative of the freedom of human consciousness; and it is this which permits Sartre to bring his interest in art within his overriding preoccupation with human liberty and social commitment.

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3-23

Chapter 1: The Two Poles: Pure Art and Committed Art
Christina Howells
doi:10.59860/td.c7c17e5

The basis of Sartre's aesthetic theories is laid in his phenomenological study of the imagination, published in 1940. An understanding of this work and its implications is essential for a proper appreciation of Sartre's ideas on art. It is, moreover, in this work of psychology that many of the paradoxes of his later aesthetics originate.

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24-47

Chapter 2: Situations: Themes and Critical Criteria
Christina Howells
doi:10.59860/td.c8d0c2c

Having examined the broad basis of Sartre's aesthetic theories, we must now turn to a more detailed examination of the specific critical criteria and themes implicit in his criticism itself. These themes in fact provide constant reference points throughout Sartre's critical writings; but since his attention will be focussed progressively more sharply on individual authors rather than diffused in numerous circumstantial articles, it is naturally in the earlier essays of Situations that such themes will reveal themselves most clearly as touchstones for a wide variety of critical judgements. I hope therefore in this chapter to demonstrate the origins of these critical themes in Sartre's writings, and also to show briefly their continuity in his later articles where they are often simply referred to rather than re-explored in any detail.

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48-56

Chapter 3: Sartre and Baudelaire
Christina Howells
doi:10.59860/td.c05698f

Sartre's intention in his preface to the Ecrits intimes was to give a picture of Baudelaire as a totality, a unique and unified whole, consistent even within apparent inconsistency, because motivated by an original choice rather than determined by chance events over which he had no control. Sartre wished therefore to make use of the biographical data, not in the disparate and haphazard way of previous critics, but rather in order to draw from it clues to Baudelaire's basic option, and verification of that option once it was discovered. In this sense his analysis already follows the broad lines of the méthode progressive-régressive which was later to be outlined in Question de méthode.

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57-91

Chapter 4: Saint Genet: comédien et martyr
Christina Howells
doi:10.59860/td.c165dd6

Saint Genet: comédien et martyr lies about half-way between L'Imaginaire and L'Ètre et le Néant on the one hand, and the Critique de la raison dialectique on the other, with respect to both chronology and content. Many of Sartre's earlier pre- occupations are still very much in evidence: in particular his distinction between the real and the imaginary from L'Imaginaire, and the categories of good and bad faith and the problems surrounding personal liberty from L'Etre et le Néant. But the work is also a sociological study of the formative influences on one particular illegitimate child, and an attempt to discover to what extent these condition or limit potential choices of career and personality.

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92-169

Chapter 5: L'Idiot de la famille
Christina Howells
doi:10.59860/td.c27521d

L'Idiot de la famille is arguably the most maligned, the most admired, and the least read of all Sartre's works. It is a work of dual purpose: a study of methodology as much as a study of Flaubert. Sartre's method is once again the progressive-regressive, synthetico-analytic approach already discussed in the previous chapter, but applied here with a rigour and thoroughness unmatched even by Saint Genet. Not only does Sartre interrogate the final years of Flaubert's life to illumine his childhood choices and attitudes, but the regressive analysis takes him back to Flaubert as a suckling, and he even regrets having no knowledge of the foetus's life in the uterus.

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170-219

Sartre's Ideas on Language
Christina Howells
doi:10.59860/td.c38427c

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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220-51

Sartre's Theory of Literature: end matter
Christina Howells
doi:10.59860/td.c4936c3

Bibliography, endnotes to the book, and index.

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Bibliography entry:

Howells, Christina, Sartre's Theory of Literature, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 14 (MHRA, 1979)

First footnote reference: 35 Christina Howells, Sartre's Theory of Literature, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 14 (MHRA, 1979), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Howells, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Howells, Christina. 1979. Sartre's Theory of Literature, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 14 (MHRA)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Howells 1979: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Howells 1979: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)


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