ABOUT THIS BOOK

An approachable abridgment of Sartre’s important analysis of Flaubert.

From 1981 to 1994, the University of Chicago Press published a five-volume translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, a sprawling masterwork by one of the greatest intellects of the twentieth century. This new volume delivers a compact abridgment of the original by renowned Sartre scholar, Joseph Catalano.

Sartre claimed that his existential approach to psychoanalysis required a new Freud, and in his study of Gustave Flaubert, Sartre becomes that Freud. The work summarizes Sartre’s overarching aim to reveal that human life is a meaningful adventure of freedom. In discussing Flaubert’s work, particularly his classic novel Madame Bovary, Sartre unleashes a fierce critique of modernity as nihilistic and demeaning of human dignity.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French philosopher and leading figure of the existentialist movement. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964. Joseph S. Catalano is professor emeritus of philosophy at Kean University. He is the author Reading Sartre and The Saint and the Atheist. Carol Cosman was a translator of French literature and letters, including works by Camus, Balzac, Beauvoir, and Durkheim.

REVIEWS

“The nihilism of the imaginary, as it is elaborately anatomized in The Family Idiot, is [not] a mere nineteenth-century curiosity or a local feature of some specifically French middle-class culture; nor is it a private obsession of Jean-Paul Sartre himself. Turning things into images, abolishing the real world, grasping the world as little more than a text or sign-system—this is notoriously the very logic of our own consumer society, the society of the image or the media event . . . [The Family Idiot] may well speak with terrifying immediacy [today].”

— Fredric Jameson, on the unabridged edition, New York Times

“A virtuoso performance. . . . For all that this book does to make one reconsider his life, The Family Idiot is less a case study of Flaubert than it is a final installment of Sartre’s mythology.”

— New York Review of Books, on the unabridged edition

“The Family Idiot, Sartre’s last magnum opus, a penetrating and challenging analysis of Gustave Flaubert, has remained less well known than his earlier works, in large measure because of the inordinate length of the original version. Catalano’s superb, masterful abridgment, together with his introduction and occasional explanatory notes, is destined to stimulate important new scholarly explorations by philosophers, psychologists, students of literature, and so many others.”

— William McBride, Purdue University

"A well-paced and quite comfortably readable work."

— Complete Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Quidquid volueris

Madame Bovary

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