What Is Literature? What Is Literature? What Is Literature? (), also published as "Literature and Existentialism",) is an essay by French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Gallimard in 1948. Initially published in freestanding essays across French literary journals "Les Temps modernes", "Situations I" and "Situations II", essays "What is Writing?" and "Why Write?" were translated into English and published by the Paris-based literary journal Transition 1948. The English translation by Bernard Frechtman was published in 1950. Sartre attempts to devise an understanding of the effect literature has on those who are subjected to it. In the foreword Sartre addresses his critics
What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) The physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, writing in "Fashionable Nonsense" (1997), state that "What is Philosophy" became a best-seller in France in 1991. They argue that in attempting to show how philosophy and science are distinct, Deleuze and Guattari use scientific terms such as "chaos" in incorrect or misleading ways, and that while in some passages they seem to discuss serious problems in the philosophy of science and mathematics, these passages prove to be largely meaningless on close inspection. The philosopher Roger Scruton, writing in "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left" (2016), criticized "What is Philosophy?",