What is Literature? Revisited
Sartre on the Language of Literature
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8409335 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Wai-Shun Hung (Seattle University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-15 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-1773 • E-ISSN: 2332-0486 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00071773.2014.969967 |
| OpenAlex | W2104186902 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
This article argues that Sartre's distinction in What Is Literature? between prose and poetry should be understood in the light of his earlier distinction in The Imaginary between two kinds of meaning. Sartre argues against the “Cartesian picture” of consciousness in The Imaginary, specifically concerning our experience of images. Not only is a mental image not an “inner object” mediating between consciousness and the world, even a picture drawn on paper should not be understood as an object standing between the viewer and what this picture represents. Our experience, Sartre argues, is that of seeing things in a picture rather than seeing through it, such that the meaning of pictures and images in general is embodied in them and cannot be separated from them. He then goes on to contrast this kind of embodied meaning (which he calls “sense”) with a kind of meaning that can be completely grasped independently of its expression (which he calls “signification”) and identify the two with painting and language respectively. It is for this reason, this article argues, that Sartre later sees poetry as a deviation from language's proper function. This rigid distinction is maintained by Sartre until the end of his career, and the change that some commentators found in him are its outcome rather than a revolt against it. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty has demonstrated more convincingly that sense and signification are both essential aspects of linguistic meaning, and their relation is much more dynamic and complimentary than Sartre would have allowed
Aesthetics · Consciousness · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Expression (computer science) · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Object (grammar) · Poetry · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database) · The Imaginary · French Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |