Simone de Beauvoir : the making of an intellectual woman

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Title:

Author:

Moi, Toril.

ISBN:

9780199238729

9780199238712

Personal Author:

Moi, Toril.

Edition:

2nd ed.

Publication Information:

New York ; Oxford : Oxford University Press, c2008.

Physical Description:

xii, 349 p. ; 24 cm.

General Note:

Previous ed.: Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

Contents:

1. Second only to Sartre -- 2. The making of an intellectual woman -- 3. Politics and the intellectual woman: clichés and commonplaces in the reception of Simone de Beauvoir -- 4. L'Invitée: and existentialist melodrama -- 5. Freedom and flirtation: the personal and the philosophical in Sartre and Beauvoir -- 6. Ambiguous women: alienation and the body in The second sex -- 7. Beauvoir's utopia: the politics of The second sex -- 8. The scandal of loneliness and separation: the writing of depression.

Abstract:

"How did Simone de Beauvoir become Simone de Beauvoir, the leading feminist thinker and emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century? Toril Moi blends biography with literary criticism, feminist theory, and historical and social analysis, to provide a provocative and original account of Beauvoir's education and formation as an intellectual." "In a second edition of her landmark study of Simone de Beauvoir, published 100 years after Beauvoir's birth, Toril Moi provides a major new introduction discussing the recent publication of papers and letters by Beauvoir, including her letters to her lovers Jacques-Laurent Bost and Nelson Algren, and her student diaries from 1926/7."--BOOK JACKET.

Personal Subject:

Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908-1986.

Subject Term:

Women authors, French -- 20th century -- Biography.

Women intellectuals -- France -- Biography.

Women and literature -- France -- History -- 20th century.

Geographic Term:

France -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168023697598	848.91409 M712S 2008	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

In Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman Toril Moi shows how Simone de Beauvoir became Simone de Beauvoir, the leading feminist thinker and emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century. Blending biography with literary criticism, feminist theory, and historical and social analysis, this book provides a completely original analysis of Beauvoir's education and formation as an intellectual.In The Second Sex, Beauvoir shows that we constantly make something of what the world tries to make of us. By reconstructing the social and political world in which Beauvoir became the author of The Second Sex, and by showing how Beauvoir reacted to the pressures of that world, Moi applies Beauvoir's ideas to Beauvoir's own life. Ranging from an investigation of French educational institutions to reflections on the relationship between freedom and flirtation, this book uncovers the conflicts and difficulties of an intellectual woman in the middle of the twentieth century. Through her analysis of Beauvoir's life and work Moi shows how difficult it was - and still is - for women to be taken seriously as intellectuals. Two major chapters on The Second Sex provide a theoretical and a political analysis of that epochal text. The last chapter turns to Beauvoir's love life, her depressions and her fear of ageing. In a major new introduction, Moi discusses Beauvoir's letters to her lovers Jacques-Laurent Bost and Nelson Algren, as well as her recently published student diaries from 1926/27.