The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil - (Gender, Theory, and Religion) by Cynthia R Wallace (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book tells the story of Simone Weil's most dedicated--and at points surprising--literary conversation partners, exploring why writers with varied political and religious commitments have found her thought and life so resonant.

Book Synopsis

The French philosopher-mystic-activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) has drawn both passionate admiration and scornful dismissal since her early death and the posthumous publication of her writings. She has also provoked an extraordinary range of literary writing focused on not only her ideas but also her person: novels, nonfiction, and especially poetry. Given the challenges of Weil's ethic of self-emptying attention, what accounts for her appeal, especially among women writers?

This book tells the story of some of Weil's most dedicated--and at points surprising--literary conversation partners, exploring why writers with varied political and religious commitments have found her thought and life so resonant. Cynthia R. Wallace considers authors who have devoted decades of attention to Weil, such as Adrienne Rich, Annie Dillard, and Mary Gordon, and who have written poetic sequences or book-length verse biographies of Weil, including Maggie Helwig, Stephanie Strickland, Kate Daniels, Sarah Klassen, Anne Carson, and Lorri Neilsen Glenn. She illuminates how writing to, of, and in the tradition of Weil has helped these writers grapple with the linked harms and possibilities of religious belief, self-giving attention, and the kind of moral seriousness required by the ethical and political crises of late modernity. The first book to trace Weil's influence on Anglophone literature, The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil provides new ways to understand Weil's legacy and why her provocative wisdom continues to challenge and inspire writers and readers.

Review Quotes

Cynthia R. Wallace offers an unusually nuanced portrait of Simone Weil by examining her "literary afterlives" among a striking company of women writers. She argues that Weil affords these writers a place of moral integrity and authenticity to negotiate the jackknife--all too apparent to such women--of privilege and subjugation. This book is couched in prose that is at once learned and accessible: the perfect complement to its conceptual virtuosity.--Richard A. Rosengarten, University of Chicago Divinity School

Cynthia R. Wallace's study provides excellent critical analyses of Simone Weil's influence on women artists who both celebrated and resisted her fascination with a Christian God, self-sacrifice, and her call to practice attention. Through varying perspectives of feminism, religion, and political action, these select literary figures enrich our understanding of a complex woman philosopher who held her own in a male-dominated world.--E. Jane Doering, author of Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force

Why do literary writers engage deeply with Weil? Because her words have an authority that derives solely from the intensity of her desire to know truth of any sort, mathematical, mystical, philosophical, political. Stunned that such a level of honesty can make it to the page, even across translations, speaking what they only now realize they believe, while keeping them alert to pain, to contradiction, to love of the world, her readers begin to take themselves and every other person with complete seriousness. Cynthia Wallace carefully explores this magnetic pull arising in writer after writer as they keep inquiring of Simone, more, and again.--Stephanie Strickland, author of The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil

Simone Weil's appeal has from her initial publication in the late 1940s and early 1950s puzzled her readers. Carefully and thoroughly tracing Weil's extraordinary influence and ongoing presence in the public imagination, Cynthia Wallace tells us a great deal about hidden veins of religious engagement in literature and culture and the postsecular search for meaning. She writes with clarity and elegance.--Deborah Nelson, author of Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil

About the Author

Cynthia R. Wallace is associate professor of English at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, and author of Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering (Columbia, 2016).