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What Can Literature Do? Simone de Beauvoir as a Literary Theorist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Toril Moi
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Extract

The past twenty years have seen a beauvoir revival in feminist theory. Feminist philosophers, political scientists, and historians of ideas have all made powerful contributions to our understanding of her philosophy, above all The Second Sex. Literary studies have lagged somewhat behind. Given that Beauvoir always defined herself as a writer rather than as a philosopher (Moi, Simone de Beauvoir 52–57), this is an unexpected state of affairs. Ursula Tidd's explanation is that Beauvoir's existentialism is theoretically incompatible with the poststructuralist trends that have dominated feminist criticism:

Viewed as unsympathetic to “écriture féminine” and to feminist differentialist critiques of language, Beauvoir's broadly realist and “committed” approach to literature has been deemed less technically challenging than experimental women's writing exploring the feminine, read through the lens of feminist psychoanalytic theory.

(“État Présent” 205)

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 189 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by The Modern Language Association of America

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