Existentialism

Existentialism describes the mid-twentieth-century literary movement centered on Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, whose novels, plays, and essays dramatized individual existence, radical freedom, and the burden of choice in a universe without inherent meaning. Sartre's 1938 novel Nausea and his 1943 treatise Being and Nothingness gave the movement its philosophical vocabulary, while Camus, working alongside the group but resisting the existentialist label himself, explored related ground through the absurd in The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. Beauvoir extended existentialist ethics into a sustained analysis of women's lived situation in The Second Sex and dramatized the movement's own postwar circle in her novel The Mandarins. The movement drew on nineteenth century precursors, most notably Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose psychologically fraught characters wrestling with freedom, guilt, and faith anticipated existentialist concerns decades before the term existed. Centered in postwar Paris, existentialism shaped French letters through the 1940s and 1950s before its dominance faded as structuralism rose in the following decade.