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Books Like Les Mots by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Words — Sartre's Nobel-refusing autobiography and self-criticism of literature
Sartre's 1964 autobiography — the account of his childhood in his grandfather's library and the founding illusion that literature saves; written the year he refused the Nobel Prize, the self-criticism of the literary vocation in the most brilliant prose Sartre ever wrote.
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Buy on AmazonLa Nausée
by Jean-Paul Sartre
The fictional counterpart (1938) — La Nausée's ending, where Roquentin considers writing a novel to justify his existence, is precisely the illusion that Les Mots spends 200 pages analyzing and criticizing; reading the two together shows the development of Sartre's thought from the early existentialist fiction to the late self-criticism.
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Buy on AmazonQu'est-ce que la littérature?
by Jean-Paul Sartre
What is Literature? (1948) — the earlier confident account of engaged literature, the theory of commitment that Les Mots is partly dismantling; reading this before Les Mots shows the distance Sartre traveled in sixteen years from confident program to self-critical examination.
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Buy on AmazonSaint Genet, comédien et martyr
by Jean-Paul Sartre
The account of Genet (1952) — Sartre's existentialist analysis of the writer as the man condemned; reading Saint Genet alongside Les Mots shows the irony: the book about Genet that 'froze' Genet is itself a performance of the literary authority that Les Mots will later question.
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Buy on AmazonConfessions
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The founding text of French literary autobiography (1782) — Rousseau's self-justification through self-exposure is the formal ancestor of Les Mots; comparing the two gives the tradition of French confessional autobiography and the difference between Rousseau's self-defense and Sartre's self-criticism.
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Buy on AmazonL'Être et le Néant
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness (1943) — the major philosophical work; Les Mots is in part a practical demonstration of existentialist concepts (bad faith, the project, the gaze) applied to Sartre's own childhood; reading the philosophy gives the theoretical framework for the self-analysis.
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Buy on AmazonLa Chute
by Albert Camus
Camus's 1956 self-examination — both La Chute and Les Mots are late works in which major French intellectuals examine the vanity of their own positions; Clamence and Sartre are both exposing the self-deception at the center of their public lives, though in very different forms.
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Buy on AmazonLes Années
by Annie Ernaux
Ernaux's collective autobiography (2008) is the most important later work to read alongside Les Mots — both are about consciousness and time, both use the autobiography to examine the self's relationship to history; but where Sartre examines individual bad faith, Ernaux examines collective experience.
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Buy on AmazonHuis clos
by Jean-Paul Sartre
No Exit (1944) — the most accessible statement of Sartre's existentialist thesis ('Hell is other people'); reading the play alongside Les Mots gives the theatrical version of the existentialist self that the autobiography is examining and criticizing.
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