What is Literature? challenges anyone who writes as if literature could be extricated from history or society. But Sartre does more than indict. He offers a definitive statement about the phenomenology of reading, and he goes on to provide a dashing example of how to write a history of literature that takes ideology and institutions into account.

In this major study Rhiannon Goldthorpe takes up the challenge of Sartre's diversity in an original and provocative way. Her detailed and comprehensive exploration of the relationship between the theoretical and literary works pays due attention to their characteristic complexity. The discussion of La Nausée, Les Mouches, Huis clos, Les Mains sales and Les Séquestrés e'Altona, for example, does not present these literary texts as mere 'illustrations' of Sartre's theories of consciousness, imagination and emotion, but as subtle philosophical and linguistic investigations in their own right. In addition, by reference to recently published fragments from Sartre's earlier work, Goldthorpe calls into question existing views of Sartre's intellectual development and provides a new history of the crucial Sartrean concept of 'commitment'.

First published in French magazines in the 1960s, the essays and interviews collected in this volume tackle two of Sartre's most enduring concerns as a philosopher: politics and literature. With regard to the former, they develop the notion of the intellectual not only as an aloof theoretician, but also as a constructive agent of change. His writings on literature explore the limitations of language as an exact vehicle for meaning, the author's lack of ownership of his own words and the avenues that certain types of theatre such as Artaud's open for non-verbal communication. A useful, concise introduction to Sartre's thinking, Politics and Literature investigates concepts and highlights conflicts, interrogations and debates that remain topical and relevant to this day.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 Jean-Paul Sartre is often seen as the quintessential public intellectual, but this was not always the case. Until the mid-1940s he was not so well-known, even in France. Then suddenly, in a very short period of time, Sartre became an intellectual celebrity. How can we explain this remarkable transformation? The Existentialist Moment retraces Sartre's career and provides a compelling new explanation of his meteoric rise to fame. Baert takes the reader back to the confusing and traumatic period of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath and shows how the unique political and intellectual landscape in France at this time helped to propel Sartre and existentialist philosophy to the fore. The book also explores why, from the early 1960s onwards, in France and elsewhere, the interest in Sartre and existentialism eventually waned. The Existentialist Moment ends with a bold new theory for the study of intellectuals and a provocative challenge to the widespread belief that the public intellectual is a species now on the brink of extinction.

From the bestselling author of Assholes: A Theory, a book that—in the tradition of Shopclass as Soulcraft, Barbarian Days and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—uses the experience and the ethos of surfing to explore key concepts in philosophy. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once declared "the ideal limit of aquatic sports . . . is waterskiing." The avid surfer and lavishly credentialed academic philosopher Aaron James vigorously disagrees, and in Surfing with Sartre he intends to expound the thinking surfer's view of the matter, in the process elucidating such philosophical categories as freedom, being, phenomenology, morality, epistemology, and even the emerging values of what he terms "leisure capitalism." In developing his unique surfer-philosophical worldview, he draws from his own experience of surfing and from surf culture and lingo, and includes many relevant details from the lives of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, with whose thought he engages. In the process, he'll speak to readers in search of personal and social meaning in our current anxious moment, by way of doing real, authentic philosophy.

Perhaps the leading Western intellectual of his time, Jean-Paul Sartre has written highly influential works in an awesomely diverse number of subject areas: philosophy, literature, biography, autobiography, and the theory of history. This concise and lucidly written book discusses Sartre's contributions in all of these fields. Making imaginative use of the insights of some of the most important contemporary French thinkers (notably Jacques Derrida), Dominick LaCapra seeks to bring about an active confrontation between Sartre and his critics in terms that transcend the opposition, so often discussed, between existentialism and structuralism. Referring wherever appropriate to important events in Sartre's life, he illuminates such difficult works as Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and places Sartre in relation to the traditions that he has explicitly rejected. Professor LaCapra also offers close and sensitive interpretations of Nausea, of the autobiography, The Words, and of Sartre's biographical studies of Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert. "I envision intellectual history," writes LaCapra, "as a critical, informed, and stimulating conversation with the past through the medium of the texts of major thinkers. Who else in our recent past is a more fascinating interlocutor than Sartre?" A Preface to Sartre will be welcomed by philosophers, literary critics, and historians of modern Western culture. It is also an ideal book for the informed reader who seeks an understanding of Sartre's works and the issues they raise.

This unique selection presents the essential elements of Sartre's lifework -- organized systematically and made available in one volume for the first time in any language.