What Is Literature? (Literature and Existentialism)

About this episode

On this episode, Ryan and Todd complete their Sartre inflected trifecta of episodes by engaging his 1947 essay series What Is Literature? The hosts begin by talking about how much Sartre's method has meant to them respectively before moving on to engage the text's most famous claim: literature appeals to the reader's freedom. Sartre's diagnosis and prescription is that literary works--as opposed to poetry, music, and visual arts--must uniquely enact a praxis of "committed writing." For Sartre, committed writing is constant and conscious political awareness. Each text, according to Sartre, situates the author to their political temporal moment. The hosts discuss how this text presages his later movement toward thinking the "group-in-fusion" of the more Marxist and much less existential Critique of Dialectical Reason some thirteen years later. Ultimately, the hosts find that while many of Sartre's claims are untenable (or even abandoned by Sartre himself), the tension points his argument presents are fecund for developing the podcast's on claims about the transcendence of literary works and the importance of separating urgency from immediacy. Quick note: to avoid any confusion, this