Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman - Hardcover

Moi, Toril

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199238715 ISBN 13: 9780199238712

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2008

Synopsis

In Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, Toril Moi shows how Simone de Beauvoir became the leading feminist thinker and emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century. Blending biography with literary criticism, feminist theory, and historical and social analysis, this book provides a completely original analysis of Beauvoir's education and formation as an intellectual.

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir shows that we constantly make something of what the world tries to make of us. By reconstructing the social and political world in which Beauvoir became the author of The Second Sex, and by showing how Beauvoir reacted to the pressures of that world, Moi applies Beauvoir's ideas to Beauvoir's own life.

Ranging from an investigation of French educational institutions to reflections on the relationship between freedom and flirtation, this book uncovers the conflicts and difficulties of an intellectual woman in the middle of the twentieth century. Through her analysis of Beauvoir's life and work Moi shows how difficult it was - and still is - for women to be taken seriously as intellectuals. Two major chapters on The Second Sex provide a theoretical and a political analysis of that epochal text. The last chapter turns to Beauvoir's love life, her depressions and her fear of ageing.

In a major new introduction, Moi discusses Beauvoir's letters to her lovers Jacques-Laurent Bost and Nelson Algren, as well as her recently published student diaries from 1926/27.

About this title

Book Description

Moving from the impact of educational institutions on Beauvoir to a representation of love, desire, and sexuality, Moi analyzes the conflicts and contradictions that shape intellectual women's lives, offering a new interpretation of Beauvoir's relationship to Sartre and to other women, and forging a new alliance between socio-historical and psychoanalytical perspectives.

About the Author

Toril Moi was born and raised in Norway, and worked in England in the 1980s, before moving to Duke University in 1989, where she is now the James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. She is the author of numerous influential books on feminist theory. Her study of Ibsen, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism was published to wide critical acclaim in 2006.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0199238715
• ISBN 13: 9780199238712
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 362