- 11 December 1945: Beauvoir gave a lecture titled ‘Roman et métaphysique’ at Club Maintenant in Paris. Beauvoir argued that novels can provide richer and more nuanced metaphysical visions of human reality than is possible using the skeletal abstractions of philosophical prose.
- Beauvoir’s lecture was at the same venue as Sartre’s famously chaotic event six weeks earlier, but seems to have been rather calmer. A written version was later published in Les Temps Modernes issue 7 (April 1946).Dec 11, 2025 17:42
- It is in The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy under the title ‘Literature and Metaphysics’.
