Episode 212: Sartre on Literature (Part Two)

From The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey

Continuing on What is Literature? (1948).

Sartre gives a phenomenology of reading and writing that makes reading into a creative act of completing the writer's work, and calls this cooperation ethical: the work is an appeal to the reader's freedom, and also the reader's responsibility to then know what the work reveals. Are you shirking, all you skimmers?

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End song: "Things I Shouldn't Have Told You" by Sam Phillips, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #90.