Abstracts

Meaghan Emery: ‘Reading the Subtext through secondary characters in Richard Wright’s Native Son and Albert Camus’ The Stranger’

Fictional representations that capture the diffuse nature of a totalitarian mentality and cultural worldview -- colonialist/segregationist, communist, fascist, etc., a list to which I add consumerist -- often compel different reader reactions, making these texts polemical in nature. This is the case for both Richard Wright’s Native Son and Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Scholars have adopted widely different views on authorial intention and the novels’ impacts. One aspect that has not been thoroughly examined is how Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears in Wright’s narrative, like the Arab in Camus’s, serve as narrative devices that reflect how ideas and norms of human dignity, freedom, and responsibility are deformed under such regimes. In this regard, Bigger Thomas’s and Meursault’s acts of killing can be viewed as symbolic of the impossibility of any other outcome. Further worthy of our inquiry is the fact that Marie, in The Stranger, escapes the fate of Mary and Bessie through her agency, which provides more perspective on the nature of Meursault’s rebellion. Like Meursault and also the café owner Céleste, Marie has the potential of what I call representativity, giving her cultural value, perhaps close to what Pierre Bourdieu defines as habitus. She embodies a culture different from that which condemns Meursault to pulling the trigger and is indeed depicted in the novel as a solar figure of another nature. In this paper, I will unpack this cultural dichotomy in The Stranger, in addition to showing how the murders of Mary, Bessie, and the Arab empty them of their potential for cultural value, to conclude on the novels’ different commentaries on the value of freedom.

Peter Francev: ‘Jean-Baptiste Clamence and the Fall of Empathy, Part III’

 Over the past few years, I presented several papers on the topic of ‘Jean-Baptiste Clamence and the Fall of Empathy’ in which I examined Clamence, the protagonist from The Fall, from the perspective of empathy as related through the stories that he revels to the unnamed bar patron in the seedy ‘sailor’s bar’ Mexico City and by using the empathetic philosophy of Edith Stein. For the sake of time, I was only able to cover the first two nights of the four-night encounter between the protagonist and his interlocutor-antagonist, and this paper is the second to cover the pivotal third night.  The purpose of this paper then is to continue with the analysis of Clamence through the third night whilst examining Clamence’s attitude towards the role of empathy in his life by beginning with what is arguably the most important and recognized part from the novel- the suicide of the woman on the Pont Royal.

Sumin Jang: ‘The Grotesque Crucified: The Scandal of Nihilism in The Plague’

In Albert Camus’s The Plague, the suffering and death of Judge Othon’s young son constitute one of the most unbearable scenes in the novel. How can the suffering of an innocent child be understood from the perspective of Christian salvation? And how does the figure of Christ evoked by this scene differ from the other Christ-like figures in the novel? Through an examination of Rieux’s response to the child’s suffering and Father Paneloux’s faith, The Plaguereveals a tension between attempts to explain or justify suffering and an experience that resists any such resolution.

This paper examines the figure of Christ as embodied by Othon’s young son, exploring how suffering and the question of Christian salvation intersect in The Plague. Focusing in particular on the scene that evokes Christ’s Passion and on the different attitudes of the characters confronted with the child’s suffering, it asks what this child-Christ figure signifies in Camus’s work. It also considers whether the figures of Christ in The Plague can be understood solely in terms of an ethics of revolt and solidarity, or whether they reveal a dimension of suffering that such a framework cannot fully encompass.

Dominik Kulcsár: ‘A Truncated Dialectic – The Influence of Hegel’s Method on Camus’

This presentation critically examines the influence of Hegel’s logic on Camus’ philosophy of revolt, and shows how his appropriation of Hegel extends beyond the master and slave analysis. My starting point is Maurice Weyembergh’s essay onCamus’ dialectic of revolt (“L’unité, la totalité et l’énigme ontologique,” 1998), where the contradiction between negation and affirmation persists, since neither vanishes into the other. This persistent rift does not permit determinate negation or Aufhebung,and Camus seemingly does away with Hegel’s category of becoming. However, this is not the case, since becoming re-emerges in the key passages of L’Homme révoltéon history, where the antinomy of revolt is the cause of the progressive expansion of human self-awareness. Camus’ notes from his reading of Morceaux choisis de Hegel prove that this was not an accident: he intentionally engaged with the Doctrine of Being and its category of Measure. Disagreeing with Hegel about the possibility of the subject’s absolute self-awareness, and refusing totalizing attempts to grasp the rational structure of reality, Camus reimagines measure as the Greek recognition of immanent limits, discovered in the moments of human excess and hubris throughout the development of the historical dialectic. He reconceptualizes becoming as the accumulation of pedagogical lucidity, responsible for the qualitative change in metaphysical revolt during the Enlightenment. In my talk, I will show how Camus’ theory of revolt uses Hegel’s dialectical attention to internal contradictions and limits against his revolutionary disciples, by rescuing active, and present, agency in opposition to nihilistic attempts to unleash humanity’s destructive powers by accelerating historical excess in the name of a total future resolution.