Poetics of Subjectivity

In the last thirty years, primarily feminist scholars have drawn attention to and re-evaluated the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). Her philosophical practice has been described as non-systematic, and her literary writing has been viewed as part of her non-systematic mode of philosophising. This dissertation radically deepens the question concerning Beauvoir’s philosophical motivations for turning to literature as a mode to express subjectivity. It explicates the central concepts of Beauvoir’s philosophy of existence, which are subjectivity, ambiguity, paradox and temporality, and their background in the modern traditions of existential philosophy and phenomenology. It also clarifies Beauvoir’s main reason to turn to literature in order to express subjectivity as both singular and universal: as a specific mode of communication, literature is able to make the universalit