Simone Weil: Thinking Poetically

Joan Dargan

Jun 1999 · State University of New York Press

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Simone Weil created a memorable œuvre remarkable for its lucid, striking, and seemingly transparent prose. Aphoristic and impersonal in tone, it is the instrument of a master stylist. The first to recognize Weil's achievement as a writer, this book situates her work within the French literary tradition, showing its affinities with Pascal and Baudelaire, and acknowledges its kinship to the works of poets and writers of her generation, notably the poets René Char and Marina Tsvetaeva. The parallel between Weil's concept of decreation and the impersonality of the speaker in her prose is shown ultimately to be related to her will to surpass the boundaries of the written page in her drive to self-immolation. Close reading of passages from her notebooks, several short texts, and a proposal for front-line nurses addressed to the Free French illustrates the forces and influences at work in her writing.

Autoren-Profil

Joan Dargan teaches French at St. Lawrence University. She has translated Miklos Veto's The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, published by SUNY Press and is also the author of Balzac and the Drama of Perspective.