Hello everyone!

Next week I will be presenting Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938), one his earliest and most loved works of literature. Now that we’ve become well acquainted with the French existentialist tradition, it will be exciting to finally take a closer look at some of the influential ideas that are distinctly Sartrean. This particular novel was important for introducing the philosophical attitude that Sartre will later come to substantiate in his major text Being and Nothingness. 

Due to the richness of the ideas put forth in the novel, I would like our discussion to focus on the tenets of his personal ideology, paying close attention to his solution to the central problem of existentialism, namely, how we ought to confront reality given its “contingency”.

I am posting one excerpt from Nausea that I believe covers a decent breadth of these ideas, and should also give you a good sense of what the experience of reading the novel is like. I am also posting an excerpt from Being and Nothingness which primarily goes over the notion of individual responsibility and “Bad Faith” which has come up a lot so far in our discussions. Finally, there is a link to the very short last chapter of Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”. A friend and intellectual rival of Sartre, Camus  presents an alternative approach to the existentialist dilemma thought by many to be more compelling than Sartre’s.

Nausea Excerpt.compressed
Being&NothingnessExcerpt.compressed
http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm

For those interested, I am also linking a short book by Sartre titled “What Is Literature?” which is worth browsing through and might be especially helpful for final papers:

https://archive.org/details/whatisliterature030271mbp

Also, here is the powerpoint I used during my presentation:

NAUSEA

As we move forward time, no longer studying the historical backdrop for Existential thinking/art/literature, we will see themes and ideas more densely and fully explored. She Came to Stay (L’Invitee)  was published in 1943, placing it a few years before Sartre and Beauvoir explicitly came out and used the brand of Existentialism to publicize their work. This is the same year Sartre published Being and Nothingness, a work which  grew out of their shared intellectual pursuits, though Sartre explicitly wrote it.

In She Came to Stay Beauvoir masterfully uses her powers for narrative to approach difficult Hegelian and Heideggarian thinking, offering a keen insight as to the nature of being, and our relationship to others in the world. Beauvoir puts herself and the people around her directly in the novel. Francoise is herself, Pierre is Jean-Paul Sartre, and Xaviere is the real life person of Olga Kosakiewicz. Olga is a younger woman who, in an unconventional way, had joined Beauvoir and Sartre’s relationship in the 1930s. By the end of the novel Francoise, unable to reconcile this relationship, destroys her ‘other’ and brings finality to the story. Given that Beauvoir has publicly said that violence is a possessing of the other, something you can never do, what can we say about Francoise’s actions? Think about this and the other topics brought up in the critical texts for next class.

(Please read them in the listed order)

Simone de Beauvoir and the Ethics of Characters _PHIL 489 presentation (Slides)

Chronology of Beauvoir’s life

How to Read Beauvoir

She Came To Stay (Part 1)
She Came To Stay (Part 2)
She Came To Stay (Part 3)

Excess and Transgression in Beauvoir’s Fiction (Part 1)
Excess and Transgression in Beauvoir’s Fiction (Part2)

(Optional reading)
Ethics of Ambiguity (Read the first chapter)

If you have time, this article is absolutely fantastic, would suggest looking at it for paper topics!:

Scheu, Ashley King. “The Viability of the Philosophical Novel: The Case of Simone De Beauvoir’sShe Came to Stay.” Hypatia, vol. 27, no. 4, 2011, pp. 791–809., doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01199.x.