Article published in Contemporary Literature, vol. 62, n°4, Winter 2021, p. 501-526.

In her travelogue America Day by Day (1947), Simone de Beau-voir recounts an argument over literature she had with Dwight MacDonald, Lionel Abel, William Phillips, and possibly Philip Rahv, key members of the New York Intellectuals. Since the mid-1930s, a handful of American novelists had been in vogue in France, prominent among them William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett, and Richard Wright. Rahv had already complained in 1940 that “[t]he intellectual is the only character missing in the American novel, which contains everything except ideas” (414), and this seems to have been the central complaint as Beauvoir tells it.... read online.

To read about this, see the Simone de Beauvoir Studies section on this website.
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Pour en savoir plus sur le sujet, voir la section consacrée à la revue Simone de Beauvoir Studies ​sur notre site internet.

If you would like to purchase the book, there is a launch discount (50%) for a short while: FPLAUNCH50. Visit the editor's website.

From the editor: "Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of ambiguity became a cornerstone of her philosophy and influenced a radical rethinking of freedom well into the twenty-first century. In Ambiguous Cinema, Fuery examines Beauvoir’s notion of ambiguity in relation to film experience, exploring both the legacies and limits of her existentialist ethics through a range of films by independent women filmmakers, including Joanna Hogg, Liliana Cavani, Debra Granik, Cheryl Dunye, Claire Denis, Lucrecia Martel, Lynne Ramsay and Céline Sciamma.
In doing so, Fuery deftly demonstrates the currency and relevancy of Beauvoir’s ideas to contemporary debates in film-philosophy and feminist thought by examining how these women filmmakers navigate turbulent themes such as moral choice, power, adolescence, love, trauma and motherhood. Reimagining Beauvoir’s idea of ambiguity within the context of film studies, Fuery asks that we confront and embrace difficult emotional situations so that we might realise an authentic, if indeterminate, freedom through our cinematic experiences."

We are pleased to share the new fascinating and necessary essay by two of our members, Kate Kirkpatrick and Sonia Kruks. 

"Old age is not exactly a time of life that most of us welcome, although globally speaking it is a privilege to reach it. In Western societies, the shocked realisation that we are growing old often fills us with alarm and even terror. As Simone de Beauvoir writes in her magisterial study of the topic, La vieillesse (1970) – translated in the UK as Old Age, and in the US as The Coming of Age (1972) – old age arouses a visceral aversion, often a ‘biological repugnance’. Many attempt to push it as far away as possible, denying that it will ever happen, even though we know it already dwells within us...." Read more on Aeon.