Critical essays: Situations 1

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Critical Essays (Situations I) contains essays on literature and philosophy from a highly formative period of French philosopher and leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s life, the years between 1938 and 1946. This period is particularly interesting because it is before Sartre published the magnum opus that would solidify his name as a philosopher, Being and Nothingness. Instead, during this time Sartre was emerging as one of France’s most promising young novelists and playwrights—he had already published Nausea, The Age of Reason, The Flies, and No Exit. Not content, however, he was meanwhile consciously attempting to revive the form of the essay via detailed examinations of writers who were to become central to European cultural life in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Collected here are Sartre’s experiments in reimagining the idea and structure of the essay. Among the distinguished writers he analyzes are Francis Ponge, Georges Bataille, Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice Blanchot, and, of course, Albert Camus, whose novel The Stranger Sartre endeavours to explain in these pages. Critical Essays (Situations I) also contains a famous attack on the Catholic novelist François Mauriac, studies of the great American literary iconoclasts Faulkner and Dos Passos, and brief but insightful essays on aspects of the philosophical writings of Husserl and Descartes.

This new translation by Chris Turner reinvigorates the original skill and voice of Sartre’s work and will be essential reading for fans of Sartre and the many writers and works he explores.

          “For my generation he has always been one of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of our time.”—Edward Said

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

532 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture.

Reviews

[Jeroen Vandenbossche · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oubliez “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?” ce plaidoyer maudit de l’après-guerre pour une ‘littérature engagée’ (Situations II)

Lisez plutôt ces essais critiques de “jeunesse” dans lesquels Sartre se penche sur les romans de Blanchot, Mauriac, Kafka, Camus, Dos Passos et Faulkner.

Ils sont lucides et didactiques, parfois drôles et parfois exaspérants.

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

took me forever to read because every fifth line would make me put the book down and marvel at the world around me

some of my favourite lines!

...this very simple truth that is so poorly understood by our finest minds: if we love a woman, it is because she is lovable.

in vain would we seek, (like) a child kissing her own shoulder, the caresses and fondlings of a private intimacy, since, at long last, everything is outside. it is outside, in the world, among others. it is not in some lonely refuge that we shall discover ourselves, but on the road, in the town, in the crowd, as a thing among things and a human being among human beings.

a novel is written by a human being for human beings. in the eyes of god, who sees through appearances and does not linger on them, there is no novel and there is no art.

for man isn't rolled up inside himself, but is outside, always outside, between earth and sky.

[Lise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essays on literature. Situations 1 from 1947 includes "On 'The Sound and the Fury': Time in the Work of Faulkner"