A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir

A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir
Author: Laura Hengehold
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2017-10-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1118796020

Winner of the 2018 Choice award for Outstanding Academic Title! The work of Simone de Beauvoir has endured and flowered in the last two decades, thanks primarily to the lasting influence of The Second Sex on the rise of academic discussions of gender, sexuality, and old age. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to her life and writings, an international assembly of prominent scholars, essayists, and leading interpreters reflect upon the range of Beauvoir’s contribution to philosophy as one of the great authors, thinkers, and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. The Companion examines Beauvoir’s rich intellectual life from a variety of angles—including literary, historical, and anthropological perspectives—and situates her in relation to her forbears and contemporaries in the philosophical canon. Essays in each of four thematic sections reveal the breadth and acuity of her insight, from the significance of The Second Sex and her work on the metaphysics of gender to her plentiful contributions in ethics and political philosophy. Later chapters trace the relationship between Beauvoir’s philosophical and literary work and open up her scholarship to global issues, questions of race, and the legacy of colonialism and sexism. The volume concludes by considering her impact on contemporary feminist thought writ large, and features pioneering work from a new generation of Beauvoir scholars. Ambitious and unprecedented in scope, A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir is an accessible and interdisciplinary resource for students, teachers, and researchers across the humanities and social sciences.

Le Deuxième Sexe

Le Deuxième Sexe
Author: Simone de Beauvoir
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 791
Release: 1989
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0679724516

The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.

Beauvoir and The Second Sex

Beauvoir and The Second Sex
Author: Margaret A. Simons
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2001-02-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0742571270

In a compelling chronicle of her search to understand Beauvoir's philosophy in The Second Sex, Margaret A. Simons offers a unique perspective on Beauvoir's wide-ranging contribution to twentieth-century thought. She details the discovery of the origins of Beauvoir's existential philosophy in her hand-written diary from 1927; uncovers evidence of the sexist exclusion of Beauvoir from the philosophical canon; reveals evidence that the African-American writer Richard Wright provided Beauvoir with the theoretical model of oppression that she used in The Second Sex; shows the influence of The Second Sex in transforming Sartre's philosophy and in laying the theoretical foundations of radical feminism; and addresses feminist issues of racism, motherhood, and lesbian identity.

Translating Feminism in China

Translating Feminism in China
Author: Zhongli Yu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2015-06-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 131762002X

This book explores translation of feminism in China through examining several Chinese translations of two typical feminist works: The Second Sex (TSS, Beauvoir 1949/1952) and The Vagina Monologues (TVM, Ensler 1998). TSS exposes the cultural construction of woman while TVM reveals the pervasiveness of sexual oppression toward women. The female body and female sexuality (including lesbian sexuality) constitute a challenge to the Chinese translators due to cultural differences and sexuality still being a sensitive topic in China. This book investigates from gender and feminist perspectives, how TSS and TVM have been translated and received in China, with special attention to how the translators meet the challenges. Since translation is the gateway to the reception of feminism, an examination of the translations should reveal the response to feminism of the translator as the first reader and gatekeeper, and how feminism is translated both ideologically and technically in China. The translators’ decisions are discussed within the social, historical, and political contexts. Translating Feminism in China discusses, among other issues: Feminist Translation: Practice, Theory, and Studies Translating the Female Body and Sexuality Translating Lesbianism Censorship, Sexuality, and Translation This book will be relevant to postgraduate students and researchers of translation studies. It will also interest academics interested in feminism, gender studies and Chinese literature and culture. Zhongli Yu is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC).

Translating Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

Translating Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
Author: Julia C. Bullock
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2023-05-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000869229

This collection offers insights into the transnational and translingual implications of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), a text that has served as foundational for feminisms worldwide since its publication in 1949. Little scholarly attention has been devoted to how the original French-language source text made its way into languages other than English. This is a shocking omission, given that many (but by no means all) other translations were based on the 1953 English translation by Howard M. Parshley, which has been widely criticized by Beauvoir scholars for its omissions and careless attention to its philosophical implications. This volume seeks to fill this gap in scholarship with an innovative collection of essays that interrogate the ways that Beauvoir’s essay has shifted in meaning and significance as it has travelled across the globe. This volume brings together for the first time scholars from Translation Studies, Literary Studies and Philosophical Studies, and over half of it is dedicated to non-Western European engagements with Le Deuxième Sexe (including chapters on the Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hungarian and Polish translations). As such, this collection will be essential to any scholar of Beauvoir’s philosophy and its contributions to feminist discourses.

Becoming Beauvoir

Becoming Beauvoir
Author: Kate Kirkpatrick
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2019-08-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350047198

“One is not born a woman, but becomes one”, Simone de Beauvoir A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short. Her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has been billed as one of the most legendary love affairs of the twentieth century. But for Beauvoir it came at a cost: for decades she was dismissed as an unoriginal thinker who 'applied' Sartre's ideas. In recent years new material has come to light revealing the ingenuity of Beauvoir's own philosophy and the importance of other lovers in her life. This ground-breaking biography draws on never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how Simone de Beauvoir became herself.

"On Ne Naît Pas Femme : on Le Devient"

Author: Bonnie Mann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2017
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0190608811

This collection of essays takes up the most famous feminist sentence ever written, Simone de Beauvoir's "On ne naît pas femme: on le devient," finding in it a flashpoint of feminist thinking. Two controversies emerge from this sentence which the volume addresses from multiple scholarly perspectives: one over the practice of translation and one over the nature and status of sexual difference.

Translation and Gender

Translation and Gender
Author: Luise Von Flotow
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134959931

The last thirty years of intellectual and artistic creativity in the 20th century have been marked by gender issues. Translation practice, translation theory and translation criticism have also been powerfully affected by the focus on gender. As a result of feminist praxis and criticism and the simultaneous emphasis on culture in translation studies, translation has become an important site for the exploration of the cultural impact of gender and the gender-specific influence of cuture. With the dismantling of 'universal' meaning and the struggle for women's visibility in feminist work, and with the interest in translation as a visible factor in cultural exchange, the linking of gender and translation has created fertile ground for explorations of influence in writing, rewriting and reading. Translation and Gender places recent work in translation against the background of the women's movement and its critique of 'patriarchal' language. It explains translation practices derived from experimental feminist writing, the development of openly interventionist translation strategies, the initiative to retranslate fundamental texts such as the Bible, translating as a way of recuperating writings 'lost' in patriarchy, and translation history as a means of focusing on women translators of the past.

An Analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

An Analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex
Author: Rachele Dini
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351351613

Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book The Second Sex is a masterpiece of feminist criticism and philosophy. An incendiary take on the place of women in post-war French society, it helped define major trends in feminist thought for the rest of the 20th century, and its influence is still felt today. The book’s success owes much to Beauvoir’s brilliant writing style and passion, but both are rooted in the clarity of her critical thinking skills. She builds a strong argument against the silent assumptions that continually demoted (and still demote) women to “second place” in a society dominated by men. Beauvoir also demonstrates the central skills of reasoning at their best: presenting a persuasive case, organising her thoughts, and supporting her conclusions. Above all, though, The Second Sex is a masterclass in analysis. Treating the structures of contemporary society and culture as a series of arguments that tend continuously to demote women, Beauvoir is able to isolate and describe the implicit assumptions that underpin male domination. Her demolition of these assumptions provides the crucial ammunition for her argument that women are in no way the “second” sex, but are in every way the equal of men.

Political Writings

Political Writings
Author: Simone de Beauvoir
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2012-06-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0252097203

Political Writings offers an abundance of newly translated essays by Simone de Beauvoir that demonstrate a heretofore unknown side of her political philosophy. The writings in this volume range from Beauvoir's surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic eighteenth-century pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to a co-written 1974 documentary film, transcribed here for the first time, which draws on Beauvoir's analysis of how socioeconomic privilege shapes the biological reality of aging. The volume traces nearly three decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement, from exposés of conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard-hitting attacks on right-wing French intellectuals in the 1950s, to the 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article arguing for what is now called the "two-state solution" in Israel. Together these texts prefigure Beauvoir's later feminist activism and provide a new interpretive context for reading her multi-volume autobiography, while also shedding new light on French intellectual history during the turbulent era of decolonization.