Encounters with Death, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Marks

Encounters with Death, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Marks

Using a thematic approach, Elaine Marks traces, through a series of quotations from Simone de Beauvoir's writings, an obsession central to the modern sensibility - the awareness of mortality. The quotations, in English, which appear in chronological order at the beginning of each chapter, are drawn not only from the published works - memoirs, essays, and fiction - but also from two early unpublished manuscripts, "L'Enfance de Françoise Miquel" and "La Primauté du spirituel." The French version of these quotations is given in the notes.

Each chapter of Simone de Beauvoir deals with a specific kind of death, such as the "death of God," death during the occupation of France, the death of Beauvoir's mother and of other members of her family, as well as near-encounters of her own and Sartre's.

From the quotations and the accompanying analysis, Simone de Beauvoir, whom Henri Peyre once called "the high priestess of existentialist authors" and a "formidable" vindicator of women's rights, emerges as a prime example of the current obsession with mortality. Hers is shown to be an obsession so pronounced and so painful that it is consistently transformed into something else, into apologies for collective action and condemnation of the bourgeoisie. Ironically, mortality is thus never dealt with in its own right: her perturbation is projected in other forms.

Elaine Mark's literary and psychological criticism provides an unusual insight into the wellsprings of a writer whose impact on drama, fiction, and critical and polemical writing has been of a measure with Merleau-Ponty's and Sartre's.

Elaine Marks has degrees from Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania; she received her doctorate from New York University, where she taught nine years, with time off as a Fulbright Scholar in Paris. She held a Junior Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities in Madison, Wisconsin, and taught five years at the University of Wisconsin. She is now Professor of French at the University of Massachusetts. Her publications include Colette (1960), French Poetry from Baudelaire to the Present (1962), three textbooks, and various articles and reviews.

Details

• Hardcover with dust jacket (acceptable)    
  
• Condition: Good, no notes/stamps
  
• ISBN: 0813507073
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press