SARTRE, BOURDIEU, AND GUSTAVE FLAUBERT: FROM INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND SOCIAL DETERMINISM IN THE FIELD OF LITERARY CREATION

Authors

  • Emma Barrett Fiedler University of Aix-Marseille, IDEMEC (Institut d’ethnologie européenne, méditerranéenne et comparative), France

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.46827/ejls.v3i1.280

Keywords:

Bourdieu/Sartre, Gustave Flaubert, literature, structuralism/phenomenology, psychoanalysis, existentialism

Abstract

Drawing from the analysis of Sartre’s monumental biography of the French writer Gustave Flaubert and Bourdieu’s critical response to it, this article explores anew the dialectics of agency and coercion through the lenses of sartrian philosophy and bourdieusian sociology. From his birth to his childhood and his death in 1880, the biographical elements of the life of Madame Bovary’s author and the contents of his literary works were depicted by Sartre and Bourdieu in a dialogue questioning the writer’s individual goals, strategies, limits and fate. Put in a historical perspective, this socio-philosophical confrontation between the theoretical aims and methods of existentialist psychoanalysis and structuralist socio-analysis reopens the oldest of debates between actor-centered philosophy of action and socio-centered logic of practice, between the transcendence of ego and the transcendence of social, or freedom and determinism.

 

Author Biography

  • Emma Barrett Fiedler, University of Aix-Marseille, IDEMEC (Institut d’ethnologie européenne, méditerranéenne et comparative), France
    Emma Barrett Fiedler is a doctoral researcher in social and cultural anthropology at Aix-Marseille University (IDEMEC, Institut d’Ethnologie Européenne, Méditerranéenne et Comparative). Her actual doctoral research observes the consequences of current legal immigration administration on migrants’ exilic subjective experience in France and Germany, from integration courses towards naturalization. Her research interests reach from anthropology to sociology and philosophy, psychanalysis and literature studies.

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Published

2021-08-27

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2021)

Section

Articles

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