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“Les Mots” by Jean-Paul Sartre as an Autobiographical Fiction
The article analyses the genre specificity of “Les Mots” by Jean-Paul Sartre in the context of autobiographical and confessional literary traditions in relation with the Sartrian concept of the “singular universal”. The genre of this work is still a controversial question among foreign researchers. It can be interpreted as an autobiography and as an autofi ction.
Starting from the ideas of the foreign researchers, we consider the confessional and the autobiographical traditions with examples of “Confessions” by St. Augustine and by J.-J. Rousseau, use the principles of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis
in the interpretation of his text. In terms of the theory of the “singular universal”, connecting the commonness and the specificity in a particular biography, Sartre analyzed and reconstructed the phenomenon of G. Flaubert, it also affected
the concept and poetic features of the writer’s own autobiography. We come to conclusion that specifi c implementation of subjectivity in the considered writing makes it paradoxically closer to the confessional form than Rousseauistic
autobiography: the personal experience in the Sartre’s text appears not as exceptionally individual one, it becomes impersonal, an experience of the generation, considered in a panhuman perspective, which imparts a parable tone to the text and makes it an autobiographical fiction.
Starting from the ideas of the foreign researchers, we consider the confessional and the autobiographical traditions with examples of “Confessions” by St. Augustine and by J.-J. Rousseau, use the principles of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis
in the interpretation of his text. In terms of the theory of the “singular universal”, connecting the commonness and the specificity in a particular biography, Sartre analyzed and reconstructed the phenomenon of G. Flaubert, it also affected
the concept and poetic features of the writer’s own autobiography. We come to conclusion that specifi c implementation of subjectivity in the considered writing makes it paradoxically closer to the confessional form than Rousseauistic
autobiography: the personal experience in the Sartre’s text appears not as exceptionally individual one, it becomes impersonal, an experience of the generation, considered in a panhuman perspective, which imparts a parable tone to the text and makes it an autobiographical fiction.
Sartre, autobiography, confessional fiction, autobiographical fiction, genre, subjectivity