Simone De Beauvoir Gender And Testimony

Following its publication in 1949, The Second Sex quickly became one of the fundamental works of feminist thought. In it, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) offered up a statement that has informed nearly all feminist and gender scholarship that has followed, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” And it is the woman Beauvoir became who continues to fascinate, fostering a legend of coffee-drinking Parisian intellectuals debating existentialism in smoky cafes along the Left Bank. Beauvoir lived through some of the most dramatic and significant events of the twentieth century, and a time of enormous change for women across the world. Her personal and intellectual companions were one and the same—and as a result, her intimate relationships with Jean-Paul Sartre and Nelson Algren provide a captivating context to the development of her ideas. In this concise and up-to-date critical appraisal of both the life and words of Beauvoir, Ursula Tidd illuminates the many facets of the feminist icon’s complex personality, including her relentless autobiographical drive, which led her to envision her life as a continuously unfolding narrative, her active involvement in twentieth-century political struggles, and how Beauvoir the woman has over the decades become Beauvoir the myth. 2008 marked the centenary of Beauvoir’s birth, yet her ideas continue to reverberate throughout contemporary scholarship. This critical biography will benefit any reader seeking insight into one of the most prominent and intriguing intellectuals of the twentieth century.

This is the first full-length study to explore Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical and biographical writings in the context of her ideas on selfhood as formulated in The Second Sex and other philosophical essays of the 1940s. Ursula Tidd presents a detailed analysis of Beauvoir's engagement with issues of gender, sexuality and race, as part of her auto/biographical strategy in seeking to write herself into the male-constructed autobiographical canon. Tidd offers new readings of Beauvoir's unpublished diaries and recently published letters along with more well-known philosophical and autobiographical texts.

This collection of essays brings an approach to Beauvoir studies and makes an important contribution to Beauvoir's writing practice in her novels and short stories, and analysis the extent to which the meaning of her texts cannot be separated from the way they are written.

For the second edition of her landmark study of Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi provides a major new introduction discussing current developments in Beauvoir studies as well as the recent publication of papers and letters by Beauvoir, including her letters to her lovers Jacques-Laurent Bost and Nelson Agren, and her student diaries from 1926-7.

Alison Holland’s innovative book fills a gap in Beauvoir studies by focusing on the writer’s frequently neglected novels and short stories, L’Invitée, Les Mandarins, Les Belles Images, and La Femme rompue. In illuminating the density and rich complexity of Beauvoir’s style, Holland challenges the often accepted view that Beauvoir’s writing is flat, detached, and controlled, revealing, rather, that her prose is frequently disrupted and inflected by forceful emotion. Holland shows that excess and transgression are intrinsic qualities of the texts, and argues that Beauvoir’s textual strategies duplicate madness in her fiction. Holland’s reading of Beauvoir’s fiction demonstrates the extent to which Beauvoir’s fiction undermines an ideologically patriarchal position on language. Her study is important not only for its re-evaluation of Beauvoir as a fiction writer but for its contribution to the wider debate on madness and literature.

While earlier research considered Simone de Beauvoir in the perspectives of Existentialism or Feminism, this work is the first to emphasize her reflective and descriptive approach and the full range of issues she addresses. There are valuable chapters and sections that are historical and/or comparative, but most of the contents of this work critically examine Beauvoir's views on old age (whereon she is the first phenomenologist to work), biology, gender, ethics, ethnicity (where she is among the first), and politics (again among the first). Besides their systematic as well as historical significance, these chapters show her philosophy as on a par with those of Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre in quality, richness and distinctiveness of problematics, and the penetration of her insight into collective as well as individual human life within the socio-historical world.

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