- Shopping Bag ( 0 items )
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review.Nothing disproves the ill-informed criticisms that philosophy is an obscure field better than a philosopher's writings on allegedly non-philosophical topics. This collection of essays from the existentialist philosopher counters such claims and attests to philosophy's continued relevance without explicitly setting that goal. Now-commonplace subjects, like New York City and jazz, in Sartre's hands become telling indications of the differences between American and European metropolitan lifestyles, their solitary versus communal tendencies. A few essays delve into significant literary works, like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Camus's The Stranger, from which Sartre, with his self-proclaimed appreciation for literary ambiguity, gleans assessments on the human relation to time and the absurdity of the human experience in the world, respectively. Art, poetry, politics, war, oppression and racism, Americanization, the atomizing of soldiers, the serialization of votes, the future of France, and, of course, existentialism also receive Sartre's keen analysis. As with most collections, there's little reason to read the essays linearly, although they are arranged chronologically. Regardless of the topic, Sartre relates everything back to the human condition and our obligation to fully create the self: it's the only chance we'll get.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Overview
Jean-Paul Sartre was a man of staggering gifts, whose accomplishments as philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, and activist still command attention and inspire debate. Sartre’s restless intelligence may have found its most characteristic outlet in the open-ended form of the essay. For Sartre the essay was an essentially dramatic form, the record of an encounter, the framing of a choice. Whether writing about literature, art, politics, or his own life, he seizes our attention and drives us to grapple with...