Sartre’s Dessin, Literature and the Ambiguities of the Representing Word

Springer Science and Business Media LLC - Tập 19 Số 5 - Trang 891-904 - 2020
Süner, Ahmet1
1Department of English Language and Literature, Yaşar University, Izmir, Turkey

Tóm tắt

Seemingly a minor part of L’Imaginaire, Sartre’s literary examples therein are of great significance especially in the way they highlight the implicit yet crucial role of linguistic signs and words in his psychology of the image. While commenting on the act of reading a novel, he views literary words practically as images, endowing them with both an affective and representative status and illustrating the word-image through the figure of a drawing or dessin. The novel’s word-images or dessins solve an important problem in his phenomenology: in order to represent, they do not need an original perception as other, more typical images do. While the dessin suggests the opportune possibility of representation without presentation, it also introduces ambiguity in meaning, running counter to Sartre’s demand that linguistic signification be clear and transparent. Sartre attempts to contain such ambiguity by ascribing the image-like, representative use of words to poetry in What’s Literature? but I argue that the dessin indeed allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic sign and representation that covers both poetry and prose.

Tài liệu tham khảo

citation_journal_title=Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology; citation_title=Sartre’s theory of the imagination; citation_author=WH Bossart; citation_volume=11; citation_issue=1; citation_publication_date=1980; citation_pages=37-53; citation_doi=10.1080/00071773.1980.11007490; citation_id=CR1 citation_journal_title=American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly; citation_title=Sartre and Ricoeur on imagination; citation_author=T Busch; citation_volume=70; citation_issue=4; citation_publication_date=1997; citation_pages=508-518; citation_id=CR2 citation_inbook_title=Sartre on imagination. ; citation_publication_date=1981; citation_pages=139-167; citation_id=CR3; citation_author=ES Casey; citation_publisher=Open Court Danto, Arthur C. (1975). Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: The Viking Press. citation_title=Traité de Psychologie; citation_publication_date=1934; citation_id=CR5; citation_author=G Dwelshauvers; citation_publisher=Paris Payot citation_title=A preface to Sartre; citation_publication_date=1978; citation_id=CR6; citation_author=D LaCapra; citation_publisher=Cornell University Press citation_inbook_title=Sartre and Ryle on the imagination. ; citation_publication_date=1981; citation_pages=167-179; citation_id=CR7; citation_author=P Ricoeur; citation_publisher=Open Court Sartre, J. P. (1940/1971). L’Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénomenologique de l’Imagination. Saint-Amand (Cher): Gallimard. Sartre, J. P. (1949). What is Literature? Tr. B. Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library. Sartre, J. P. (2004). The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Tr. J. Webber. London: Routledge. citation_journal_title=Sartre Studies International; citation_title=Pictorial representation or subjective scenario? Sartre on Imagination; citation_author=B Stawarska; citation_volume=7; citation_issue=2; citation_publication_date=2001; citation_pages=87-111; citation_doi=10.3167/135715501780886492; citation_id=CR11