Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Lived Experience: Literature and Metaphysics

Simone de Beauvoir developed her philosophy of lived experience as she actually wrote fiction. Hence she should be placed among the major philosophical novelists of the 20th century, such as Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer. Her theory of the metaphysical novel acknowledges multicultural traditions of story-telling and song which are not locked into the theoretical abstractions of the Greek philosophical tradition. In this book, Eleanore Holveck presents Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of literature and metaphysics, including its relationship to the philosophers Husserl, Heidegger, Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, with reference to the literary tradition of Goethe, Maurice Barres, Rimbaud, Andre Breton and Paul Nizan. The text provides a detailed philosophical analysis of de Beauvoir’s early short stories and several major novels, including The Mandarins and L'invitee , from the point of view of other women who appear on the fringes of her fiction: shop girls, seamstresses and prostitutes. Holveck applies de Beauvoir’s philosophy to her own lived experience as a working-class teenager who grew up in jazz clubs similar to those de Beauvoir herself visited in New York and Chicago.