Albert Camus | The Stranger | Meursault | The Outsider Find your way around Articles and Essays on Camus and his ideas Camus Society MAILING LIST Sign up here to receive important updates about the Camus Society and our new monthly newsletter. Journal of Camus Studies | JCS The Journal of Camus Studies Formerly the Journal of the Albert Camus Society, the JCS is published annually and is available in print or as an ebook. Albert Camus The Stranger | related pages The Stranger | Albert Camus In this essay it is assumed that the reader has not read Albert Camus' The Stranger but is aware that the plot involves a character called Meursault, the shooting of an Arab and a subsequent trial. For Camus, life has no rational meaning or order. It's worth noting here that L'Etranger is sometimes translated as The Outsider but this is inaccurate. In the second half of The Stranger, Camus depicts society's attempt to manufacture meaning behind Meursault's actions. An interesting motif in The Stranger is that of watching or observation.
TransVis | Othello Time Map Existentialist Themes and the Society In Albert Camus’s first novel, The Outsider, his thoughts as an existentialist is demonstrated. The underlying plot of the novel is about the protagonist, Mersault, who commits a murder and then receives a death sentence. As the novel approaches the climax, more ideas of existentialism are revealed, and more is learned about the character. This novel shows how Mersault acts as an outsider to the society, and is then “condemned because he doesn’t play the game” (Camus 118). Albert Camus first develops Mersault as an existentialist hero by using the notion of anxiety. Because Mersault rejects religion, he believes in himself and denies the existence of a higher power. Albert Camus creates Mersault as an existentialist by pointing out his belief in irrelevance. Mersault sees neither a future nor a past in his life; he is only concerned in the present moment. Mersault is an existentialist for he lacks a sense of right and wrong. Camus, Albert. Thody, Philip. Criticism (1959): 151.
Thirty Times ‘More Fair than Black’: Othello Re-Translation as Political Re-Statement Camus - The Stranger (aka Outsider) - discussion | Literary Centennials Meursault, the anti-hero of Camus masterpiece L’etranger continually puts the reader on the back foot: as he appears as an intensely self-interested man, but also an innocent abroad, he can be an extremely sensual man, but also a callous individual, he seems to be both a rebel and a man desperately trying to conform, above all he is an absurd man and we witness his growing self-awareness of the world around him that he struggles to come to terms with. The novel takes the form of a bildungsroman, as we witness his growth through adversity following the choices he makes in a life, which he comes to believe is absurd.. I read this back in the 1970’s and found I could identify with Meursault the sensual self-interested young man of part 1 of the novel, however I could not get to grips with his seeming acquiescence to his fate in part 2, putting it down to the establishments vindictiveness towards a young man, who appeared to rebel against society.
VVV - Project Translation Array Prototype 1 Shakespeare’s Othello (Act 1, Scene 3) with 37 German translations (1766–2010) Project Overview By Tom Cheesman, Kevin Flanagan and Stephan Thiel The most important works of world literature, philosophy, and religion have been re-translated over and over again in many languages. The differences between these re-translations can help us understand (1) cross-cultural dynamics, (2) the histories of translating cultures, and (3) the translated works themselves, and their capacity to provoke re-interpretation. We are building digital tools to help people explore, compare and analyse re-translations. As a ‘telescope array’ examines a celestial object from many slightly different angles, so a Translation Array explores a cultural work through its refractions in different languages, times and places. The scope is vast. Shakespeare makes a great case study. Our report on the work on this site, submitted to our main funder, the AHRC, in October 2012, is attached here.
The Stranger (novel) The Outsider or The Stranger (French: L’Étranger) is a novel by Albert Camus published in 1942. Its theme and outlook are often cited as exemplars of Camus's philosophy of the absurd and existentialism, though Camus personally rejected the latter label.[citation needed] The titular character is Meursault, an indifferent Algerian ("a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme du midi yet one who hardly partakes of the traditional Mediterranean culture")[2] who, after attending his mother's funeral, apathetically and seemingly irrationally kills an Arab man whom he recognises in French Algiers. The story is divided into two parts: Meursault's first-person narrative view before and after the murder, respectively. In January 1955, Camus said, "I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: 'In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.'
The Outsider by Albert Camus – review | Books | The Observer "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas." So, famously, opens Albert Camus's 1942 novel L'Etranger, but it's intriguing to see how differently those two sentences have been translated, despite the simplicity of Camus's construction. In Joseph Laredo's terse, widely read 1982 translation, he renders the opening as: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know." Smith, a Cambridge University don and translator of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, has emphasised the absurdist fault lines of Camus's novel through a less laconic, more expansive translation than Laredo's. Camus called Meursault "a man who… agrees to die for the truth" and characterised him as "the only Christ that we deserve". Vladimir Nabokov wrote that "neither learning nor diligence can replace imagination or style" in the art of translation, but Smith's version of L'Etranger is both erudite and agile.
UK | Magazine | The cult of the outsider Mean, moody and alone. What is the appeal of the outsider? The laureate of the cool teenager, Albert Camus, is having all his novels republished this week. It's the perfect checklist for an artist to appeal to a brooding young man. Died young, looked good in moody, atmospheric photographs, wrote about serious stuff in a way that was seriously cool. And most of all, he was an outsider, a rebel with his collars turned up, not part of the crowd. Albert Camus, French writer and one of the youngest people to have won a Nobel prize for literature, is making a comeback. Penguin are releasing all his novels again this week - and his most-famous work, The Outsider, was recently voted as the most significant "watershed" book for men. Rebel, rebel It's the book, preferably in dog-eared paperback, that generations of soulful young men have tucked inside their coat pocket, where it can be seen, even if never read. "What are you rebelling against?" Fatal attraction First lonely teen Moody and murderous
The Stranger: Context Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in French colonial Algeria. In 1914, his father was killed in World War I, at the Battle of the Marne. Albert, his mother, and his brother shared a two-bedroom apartment with the family’s maternal grandmother and a paralyzed uncle. Despite his family’s extreme poverty, Camus attended the University of Algiers, supporting his education by working a series of odd jobs. However, one of several severe attacks of tuberculosis forced him to drop out of school. The poverty and illness Camus experienced as a youth greatly influenced his writing. After dropping out of the university, Camus eventually entered the world of political journalism. While in wartime Paris, Camus developed his philosophy of the absurd. The Stranger, Camus’s first novel, is both a brilliantly crafted story and an illustration of Camus’s absurdist world view. Camus’s absurdist philosophy implies that moral orders have no rational or natural basis.