Simone de Beauvoir Gender Testimony: 61 (Cambridge Studies in French, Series Number 61)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: New Ed, 8/21/2008
EAN 9780521034500, ISBN10: 0521034507
Paperback, 268 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
This is a full-length study exploring Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical and biographical writings in the context of ideas on selfhood formulated in Le deuxième sexe and her other philosophical essays of the 1940s. Drawing on more recent work in autobiographical studies and working within a broadly Foucauldian framework, Ursula Tidd offers a detailed analysis of Beauvoir's auto/biographical strategy as a woman writer seeking to write herself into the male-constructed autobiographical canon. Tidd first analyses Beauvoir's notions of selfhood in her philosophical essays, and then discusses her four autobiographical and two biographical volumes, along with some of her unpublished diaries, in an attempt to explore notions of selectivity, and the politics of truth-production and reception. The study concludes that Beauvoir's vast auto/biographical project, situated in specific personal and historical contexts, can be read as shaped by a testimonial obligation rooted in a productive consciousness of the Other.
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
Part I. Becoming the Self
1. Pyrrhus et Cinéas and Pour une morale de l'ambiguité
2. Le Deuxième Sexe
Part II. Writing the Life
3. Narratives of self-representation
4. Negotiating autobiography
5. Writing the self - Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée
6. Bearing witness with the Other, bearing witness for the Other
7. Writing the Other
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography.