Max Scheler
Gesellschaft

Repository | Series | Buch | Kapitel

205313

Pressing engagement

Jean-Paul Sartre and the aesthetic problem of the political

Geoffrey A. Baker

pp. 163-190

Abstrakt

While Sartre's What Is Literature? is often seen as the crystallization of a political aesthetic driven by clarity and disclosure, this chapter finds in it and other writings a deep-seated uncertainty about how to politicize literature. In essays like "Black Orpheus," Sartre even explicitly champions the revolutionary potential of precisely the sort of Surrealism that he had earlier disparaged as disengaged art. "Black Orpheus' suggests what Sartre later acknowledges openly: realistic disclosure became too confining and limited a strategy to adequately communicate the political tremors of his time. In the Roads to Freedom trilogy, Sartre mixes strategies of clarity and disclosure with those of experimentation and confusion, a strange and intermittent deference to uncertain form over clearly communicated content.

Publication details

Published in:

Baker Geoffrey A. (2016) The aesthetics of clarity and confusion: literature and engagement since Nietzsche and the naturalists. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Seiten: 163-190

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-42171-1_6

Referenz:

Baker Geoffrey A. (2016) Pressing engagement: Jean-Paul Sartre and the aesthetic problem of the political, In: The aesthetics of clarity and confusion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 163–190.