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Negation and Shadow: Sartre and Levinas on literary object

¡@What is literature?(Qu'est-ce que la littérature?) is a thesis on literature written by Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, in 1947. By proposing the concept of literary engagement, Sartre attempted to prove that it was natural for literature to engage in the society. Needless to say, such an idea triggered a series of controversy among which the key issue was what the relation between literature and reality was. Regarding this, the current article, starting from the intentionality of the phenomenology, will discuss Sartre¡¦s negativity and Emmanuel Levinas¡¦ shadow concepts in order. It attempts to describe the relation between literature and reality and to unfold such two concepts in parallel at the utmost. However, its purpose is not only to visualize a certain possible mode between literature and reality but to indicate that the difference between literary engagement controversy and others is that it seems to mark the overall symptoms prompted by defining literature with theories. Accordingly, perhaps it is closer to the problematics of literary engagement to find out, apart from repeatedly fixing literature, such a top in movement, to facilitate description, whether it is possible to shed light on the basic fact that literature always conceals itself to draw out reality based on the results that the confrontation between the above-mentioned two theories and literature always leads to, such as communication inability and their being driven away. We thus realize that it is not impossible for the models of Sartre¡¦s and Levinas¡¦ literary objects to converse with such a problematic.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0829110-022410
Date29 August 2010
CreatorsHsieh, Chao-tang
ContributorsKai-lin Yang, Chung-chi Yu, Shin-yun Wang, Cheng-yun Tsai
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageCholon
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0829110-022410
Rightsunrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive

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