The Originality and Complexity of Albert Camus’s Writings

E. Vanborre

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781137276537
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137309471
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Fifty years after Camus's untimely death, his work still has a tremendous impact on literature. From a twenty-first century vantage point, his work offer us coexisting ideas and principles by which we can read and understand the other and ourselves. Yet Camus seems to guide us without directing us strictly; his fictions do not offer clear-cut solutions or doctrines to follow. This complexity is what demands that the oeuvre be read, and reread. The wide-ranging articles in this volume shed light, concentrate on the original aspects of Camus' writings and explore how and why they are still relevant for us today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Originality and Complexity of Albert Camus’s Writings
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part 1: Literary Considerations
• Chapter 1: Camus, the Nouveau Roman, and the Postmodern
• Chapter 2: The Complexity and Modernity of The Plague
• Chapter 3: Albert Camus’s The Fall: The Vertiginous Fall into Language, Representation, and Reality
• Part 2: Philosophical and Political Reflections
• Chapter 4: Camus’s Unbeknownst Legacy: Or, “I’m Having an Existential Crisis!”: Don’t You Really Mean a Camusian Crisis?
• Chapter 5: Sisyphean (Out)rage and the Refusal to Mourn
• Chapter 6: Albert Camus’s Warring Twentieth Century: From His Ancestral Spain to His Mediterranean Utopias
• Part 3: Evolution and Influences
• Chapter 7: Prison, Plague, and Piety: Medieval Dystopia in Albert Camus’s The Plague
• Chapter 8: Summer by Albert Camus: The Essay in the Mirror of Fiction
• Chapter 9: Affliction, Revolt, and Love: A Conversation between Camus and Weil
• Chapter 10: Tormented Shade: Camus’s Dostoevsky
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index