Kirjahaku

Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking work has transformed the way we think about gender and identity. Without her 1949 text The Second Sex, gender theory as we know it today would be unthinkable. A leading figure in French existentialism, Beauvoir's concepts of 'becoming woman' and of woman as 'Other' are among the most influential ideas in feminist enquiry and debate.This book guides the reader through the main areas of Simone de Beauvoir's thought, including:*existentialism and ethics*gender studies and feminism*literature and autobiography*sexuality, the body and ageingDrawing upon Beauvoir's literary and theoretical texts, this is the ideal introduction to her thought for students on a range of courses including literature, cultural studies, gender, philosophy and modern languages.

Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking work has transformed the way we think about gender and identity. Without her 1949 text The Second Sex, gender theory as we know it today would be unthinkable. A leading figure in French existentialism, Beauvoir's concepts of 'becoming woman' and of woman as 'Other' are among the most influential ideas in feminist enquiry and debate.This book guides the reader through the main areas of Simone de Beauvoir's thought, including:*existentialism and ethics*gender studies and feminism*literature and autobiography*sexuality, the body and ageingDrawing upon Beauvoir's literary and theoretical texts, this is the ideal introduction to her thought for students on a range of courses including literature, cultural studies, gender, philosophy and modern languages.

This is the first full-length study to explore Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical and biographical writings in the context of ideas on selfhood formulated in Le deuxième sexe and her other philosophical essays of the 1940s. Drawing on recent work in autobiographical studies and working within a broadly Foucauldian framework, Ursula Tidd offers a detailed analysis of Beauvoir’s auto/biographical strategy as a woman writer seeking to write herself into the male-constructed autobiographical canon. Tidd first analyses Beauvoir’s notions of selfhood in her philosophical essays, and then discusses her four autobiographical and two biographical volumes, along with some of her unpublished diaries, in an attempt to explore notions of selectivity, and the politics of truth-production and reception. The study concludes that Beauvoir’s vast auto/biographical project, situated in specific personal and historical contexts, can be read as shaped by a testimonial obligation rooted in a productive consciousness of the Other.

This book examines four key areas of Jorge Semprun's writing: his relationship to language, exile and identity; the range of narrative strategies deployed in representing his experience of Buchenwald; the ethical aspects of his reworking of autobiography; and his political thinking on Europe.

‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) in her controversial bestseller The Second Sex (1949), widely acclaimed as the founding book of modern feminism. Beauvoir lived through some of the most dramatic and harrowing events of the twentieth century, a time of huge change for women across the world. Ursula Tidd illuminates these and many other facets of Beauvoir's complex personality: her relentless autobiographical drive, living life as a continually unfolding narrative; her personal and intellectual relationships, essentially lived as a series of dialogues with a variety of interlocutors, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Nelson Algren; her active involvement in political struggles; and how Beauvoir the woman became Beauvoir the myth. This concise and up-to-date appraisal of the life and works of the quintessential feminist intellectual draws on the most recent scholarship on Beauvoir's work, and on newly published and extant volumes of her diaries and correspondence, to allow the reader unrivalled access to the voice of this pivotal modern figure.