Episode 212: Sartre on Literature (Part Two)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2019
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Continuing on What is Literature? (1948).
Sartre gives a phenomenology of reading and writing that makes reading into a creative act of completing the writer's work, and calls this cooperation ethical: the work is an appeal to the reader's freedom, and also the reader's responsibility to then know what the work reveals. Are you shirking, all you skimmers?
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End song: "Things I Shouldn't Have Told You" by Sam Phillips, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #90.
Transcript
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| 0:49.2 | Hey, you're listening to the partially examin life episode 212, part 2 on Sartera. |
| 0:54.6 | What is literature? |
| 0:56.0 | We've been discussing what is writing the first essay in that and have just gotten through |
| 1:00.8 | the poetry part. |
| 1:02.8 | So we need to move to his discussion of what prose is. |
| 1:07.4 | Contrast to that. |
| 1:08.9 | The second chapter is going to be why write. |
| 1:12.1 | So between talking about prose here and talking about prose there, we want to say why it's |
| 1:16.6 | okay for his prose to be so political. |
| 1:19.1 | The answer is it can't help but be political because it's prose. |
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