Simone de Beauvoir

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). Beauvoir is not a systematic or academic writer and she does not present any theory of art or any doctrine of aesthetic experience. She is, however, a philosophical thinker, and her works include original reflections on the task of the artist and the novelist. These she develops not only in her existential-phenomenological essays, but also in her great novels, L’invitée (1943) and Les mandarins (1954). Even her multivolume autobiography (1958–1972) includes philosophical discussions of the nature of fiction and literature. Thus Beauvoir trains our thinking on art and literature both by her scholarly texts and by her fictional works.