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Critiques such as Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor have encouraged the renunciation of metaphorical thinking about illness. This article suggests a level of discernment toward implicit interpretations of illness instead of an all-or-nothing removal of metaphor from the rhetoric surrounding illness. Rather than doing away with metaphorical thinking about illness in a total and absolute sense, the article reflects on illness metaphors to explore what insight they may have to impart about lived experiences of illness. With the help of literary expressions in Camus's The Plague, the article depicts ways that through a discerning attitude toward metaphorical thinking on illness, an elemental affirmation of being within the necessary limits on the human condition is given space to breathe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author analyzes Woody Allen's film Vicky Cristina Barcelona through an existential lens, drawing parallels with the philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The characters Vicky, Cristina, Juan Antonio, and María Elena embody existential dilemmas, exploring themes of individual freedom, choice, and the search for meaning in an indifferent world. The analysis delves into Sartrean concepts of bad faith and radical freedom, contrasting Vicky's societal conformity with Cristina's Camusian pursuit of meaning through experiences. The characters' interactions reflect the unpredictable and absurd nature of human relationships, echoing Camus's exploration of the absurdity of emotions. The non-linear narrative structure aligns with existential themes, emphasizing life's unpredictability, and Barcelona serves as a metaphor for the complexities of existence. Woody Allen's narrative and artistic choices invite viewers to reflect on the intricate interplay of love, desire, and chance encounters in the context of existentialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose an account of Camus's ethics in which violent revolutions are never morally permissible but nonetheless acceptable or necessary. My main thesis in this paper is that Camus's ethics of revolution and my defence of it, particularly the non-moral account of the permissibility of violent revolutions it comprises, can shed light on the reasonableness of participating in and supporting violent revolutions to some Catholics and the broader Christian community. My account of Camus's ethics of revolution and argument for its tenability will be compelling to some Catholics because they affirm their intuition that violent revolutions are morally untenable and show why it is nevertheless reasonable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Albert Camus, plague was both a fact of life and a powerful metaphor for the human condition. Camus engaged most explicitly and extensively with the subject of plague in his 1947 novel, The Plague (La peste), which chronicles an outbreak of what is presumably cholera in the French-Algerian city of Oran. I often thought of this novel—and what it might teach us—during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, I discuss seven important insights from The Plague about epidemics, public health and morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with the absurdity of continued climate inaction, more people are becoming morally outraged about the projections of human suffering and loss due to global warming impacts. This article draws from the work of Albert Camus to examine human responses to absurdity through rebellion and how this can be applied to understand the notion of climate rebellion. Focusing on Camus' works The Rebel and The Plague, as well as his speech "The Human Crisis", I examine the conditions of climate injustice that present the grounds for climate rebellion, what becoming a climate rebel might mean, the importance of solidarity in climate rebellion, and lastly how Camus' value of limitation might inform ethical responses to minimize climate-related harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious protest, such as the protest that Job expresses, reveals the manners in which believers experience the absurd while hanging on to God. The purpose of this article is to explore the "grammar" of this paradoxical faith stance by bringing Kierkegaard and Camus to bear upon it, and thereby to show the "family resemblance" between Job, Camus's "absurd man," and the Kierkegaardian believer. I begin with a discussion of experiences of the absurd that give rise to religious protest. I then turn to Kierkegaard to explore the manners in which "faith's thought" renders the "experience of the absurd" a religious one, while pushing the believer further into the absurd. I end with a discussion of Job as an absurd rebel in Camus's sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Albert Camus and Ernest Becker were both concerned with the effects of existential paradox (the paradox of the absurd) on human behavior and how the ability to accept this paradox may alleviate much individual, societal, and even planetary suffering. Their respective works focus on different aspects of existential paradox and I propose a comparison of their main themes leads to a deeper and more robust understanding of existential paradox and its effects. Thus, this article is an exploration of how a comparison of Camus and Becker's work may enrich our understanding of existential paradox, its effects on human behavior, and provide a way to live with it. I conclude from this comparison that the creation of absurd works of art may be integral for promoting the ability to live in existential paradox without appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of the proposed research is determined by the reviving the interest of modern literary studies of the figure of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, determining the place of his creativity in the context of European modernism, the ambiguity of assessments of this phenomenon in the context of Ukrainian fine literature. The article examines Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s novels in the discourse of French Existentialism. Attention is focused on outlining the similarities and differences between J.-P. Sartre, A. Camus and V. Vynnychenko’s worldviews and aesthetic views. The origins of the existentialist method in the work of the Ukrainian émigré writer and its inclusion in the discourse of French atheistic of Existentialism are also analysed, and some conclusions of the “Mougins” cycle of Vynnychenko’s works are investigated using summarized prospects for its study in a broad and its European context is also outlined. The authors examine the forms and methods of aesthetic refraction of the basic concepts of existentialism (absurdity, rebellion, freedom, choice, and relationships at the level “I – the Other”). The purpose of the work and the tasks involve analyzing the philosophical and artistic texts of Vynychenko in the discourse of French existentialism, as well as revealing the main philosophical ideas and functions of the novels of the Ukrainian writer, consistent with the creative guidelines of J.-P. Sartre and A. Camus. The set of goals determines the need for the use of hermeneutic (analysis of artistic texts), historical-literary, comparative-typological (posing and solving a number of literary problems in the context of equal national literature, and biographical (using diary entries) research methods. The problem is determining the place of ideology in the context of French existentialism and the “Mougins’” cycle of Vynnychenko’s works, was raised in literary studies as early as the 70s of the last century, in particular by diaspora researchers S. Naumovych and L. Zaleska-Onyshkevych, who tried to show the priority of Vynnychenko’s writing compared to Sartre and Camus. The problem of existentialism as a philosophical direction was considered in the late 1940s among the members of the Artistic Ukrainian Movement, attempting to formulate the concept of “Ukrainian existentialism”. The Ukrainian researcher Ya. Kotets includes diaspora representatives 70 years later in the article “The Formula of Ukrainian Existentialism” (2021). There are several Ukrainian and Soviet writers who produce some existential ideas and elements of existential interpretation of human life, but they should not be called conscious writers-existentialists. Among modern Ukrainian works need to name “Existentialist philosophy. Traditions and perspectives” by S. Raida (2009), as well as the comparative study “Ukrainian version of artistic existentialism: B.I. Antonych, V. Svidzinsky, T. Osmachka in the European context” (2020) by H. Tokman, where is introduced the concept of “artistic existentialism”. The critical optics of the research make it possible to combine the historical and philosophical specificity of the interwar twenty years and the post-war period, on which are built the works of Vynnychenko, Sartre and Camus. It is an attempt to show the originality of the philosophical and aesthetic views of the emigrant Vynnychenko in the paradigm of French existentialism, to demonstrate the similarity of the Ukrainian type of philosophizing (from Skovoroda, Franko, Lesya Ukrainka to Vynnychenko), to analyze his characteristic orientation towards a person who faces the eternal problems of life, death, and evil. Such non-scientific philosophizing gave birth to special genre forms: essay, aphorism, portrait, dialogue, drama, and novel, which can be found in V.Vynnychenko’s literary work. Vynnychenko belongs to those thinkers who went beyond the boundaries of traditional philosophy in order to comprehend the broader meaning of the entire spiritual culture, developing the ideas of A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche, A. Bergson, the theosophical theory of R. Steiner, in their writings. Vynnychenko set himself the goal of revealing prospects for further development to man, to give meaning to its existence, to point it to certain positive values, that is, to overcome the extremes of German and French existentialism and develop a positive philosophical platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just war theory appears ever more alienated from the practice it ostensibly regulates, warfare. An increasingly abstract and esoteric discourse, it can seem very remote from the mud-and-blood actualities of warfare. This is reflective of a broader disconnect between the study of, on the one hand, the ethics of war, and, on the other, the lived experience of war. Seeking to address this problem, this article asks: How can we recentre just war thinking as a 'lived' theory ? It proposes that we can reconnect just war theory to the lived experience of warfare by restoring its historical dialogue with existentialism. It develops this position by reading just war theory through the prism of Albert Camus's writings on political violence. It concludes that Camus's political thoughts provides a set of signposts for the development of a mode of just war theorising that places that the lived experience of warfare at the heart of our ethical thinking about war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Albert Camus has been at the centre of a long and bitter controversy for his positions on the Algerian war. Accused of being a colonialist, marked by Eurocentrism and/or a de facto supporter of imperialism, he in fact joined the struggle for decolonization from his earliest steps in politics, untethering it, however, from any nationalist perspective. This essay delineates the formation of Camusian position on the Algerian crisis, its turning points and the path followed in this regard from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, seeking to reveal his perspective of a decolonial federalism that would simultaneously transform Europe and Africa in order to establish a political community in which there would be neither dominant nor dominated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a reflection on Albert Camus's revival during the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. The popularity of Camus's novel, The Plague, is considered alongside his other writing as something that speaks to many throughout their lives. Such appraisal is interspersed with personal reflections on family life during pandemic lockdowns and the ways that Camus's thought resounds in our everyday selves. Written in two parts at different times – mainly in 2020 and with a 2023 afterthought – the essay critically acknowledges how Camus instructs us to live together with meaning and dignity in an age of catastrophe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article studies the city spaces in Albert Camus' "The Plague" and Jose Saramago's "Blindness." In light of COVID-19, the article reads these two literary texts in terms of their spatial settings that represent fictional microcosms of the real world engulfed in the COVID-19 pandemic. It also demonstrates how pandemics expose and exacerbate the flaws that are inherent in the social, ideological, and infrastructural dimensions of city spaces. The pandemics reshape Camus' and Saramago's cities, intensify human antagonism, and expose the fragility of the urban structure. We rely on George Simmel's viewpoints of the city as a space of constant conflicts and antagonism, so one can understand the struggles that take place on the spaces of Camus' Oran and Saramago's blind city. The article also employs Julian Wolfreys' concept of the urban uncanny to interpret the mystery and fear that accompany the emergence of diseases in cities. Finally, our experience with the COVID-19 pandemic provides new insights into Albert Camus' "The Plague" and Jose Saramago's "Blindness" as they become a fictional reflection of our own experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article locates a psychological mobilization of natural settings in the post-war Westerns Duel in the Sun, Lonely Are the Brave, and Man in the Wilderness, which I refer to as 'Sisyphean' landscape allegory. This narrative of inner conflict is not only expressed through an inhospitable terrain per se, but also through the protagonist's physical attempts to navigate and/or overcome it as a primary obstacle. I argue that the existential sense of futility these films invoke through their Sisyphean sequences serves to corroborate audience angst rather than to assuage it. At the same time, the larger therapeutic agenda of these films for American audiences varied according to their cultural milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current article - focused on two plays about the killing of a son by his family - has a double objective: firstly, it questions the probable source of a folkloric story of the prodigal son, and secondly, it places side by side theater plays based on a legendary theme. After presenting the playwrights, Karol Hubert Rostworowski and Albert Camus, as well as the terminological propositions of Eric Durnez, the article analyses the convergences and divergences that we find in using the subjects from chronicles quasi mythical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Claims (or the implicit assumption) of the inherent worth of life are pervasive and remain virtually unchallenged. I have already argued that these outright moral dictates are thinly veiled vestiges of theological ethics which, following the removal of their theological foundations, remain little more than nebulous claims supported only by fear of the consequences of a challenge. In my previous work, I rejected an a priori claim of an objective life's worth, which is the worth that we should assign to others' lives, and elucidated a principled framework that gives rise to the said worth immediately, as a consequence of the experiences of its sentient environment. Herein, I address the complementary question of the value of one's own life, which is the subjective value of life and, thus, Camus's (in)famous view that "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide". As before, I rejected the inherency of a life's worth, showing it to be contradictio in adjecto, and instead show how this worth too can in large part be seen to emerge from sentient experiences of the subject. Many of these are innately linked to experiences of other sentient beings as objects, thus erecting a framework that is both principled and thoroughly humane with Schopenhauer's 'loving kindness' running through it. Practically, my framework illuminates an understanding of suicide as a real-world phenomenon, helping those who remain living to understand a deceased one's decision, and paving the way to answering questions, such as when there should be an attempt to prevent suicide, and what means of suicide prevention are ethically permissible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article traces the formation of Hayden White's chapter on Hegel in Metahistory by comparing it with his earlier essay titled "Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism." It also analyzes White's review of George Armstrong Kelly's Idealism, Politics and History and White's well‐known essay titled "The Burden of History." This article argues that White's main concerns in his review essay and in Metahistory were (1) to respond to the existentialist challenge, posed especially by Camus, that history does not matter and (2) to use Hegel to articulate an answer regarding how historical consciousness and action can be combined. White created his version of Hegel early in "Hegel: Historicism as Tragic Realism" by absorbing (probably) Josiah Royce's interpretation of the Absolute and (more certainly) Erich Auerbach's idea of tragic realism. However, White's idea of tragedy, which focuses on the consequences of action, is not the same as Auerbach's idea, which concerns treating the psychological depth of characters seriously. In his review of Idealism, Politics and History and in Metahistory, White further injected the Kantian philosophy of history—as interpreted by Lucien Goldmann and Lewis White Beck—into Hegel's idea of tragedy and comedy. In doing so, White affirmed the philosophical activist's ability not only to recognize the tragic circumstance of the past and the present but also to hold on to the hope for a better, comic future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Entrenched inequality within South African society has led to a notable focus within literary criticism on the subject of legitimacy. The perennial question of who has access to narrative representation and how this authority is wielded has informed literary production itself—with some writers, invariably emerging from the elite, attempting to circumvent or undermine the assumed claims of legitimacy which attend the novel. This article discusses how a particular modernist form, narratorial disidentification, coheres around this preoccupation with inequality and legitimacy, overturning idealist accounts of moral agency in history through an emphasis on the determination of the material environment. Narratorial disidentification subverts the normative structure of the novel, assuming that the legitimate subject of society is not narratable within the novel form. Drawing on the work of Warwick Research Collective (WReC), in particular their expanded sense of modernism, this article argues that experiences of social bifurcation in semi‐peripheral locations are translated into this form of narrative coldness which seeks to undermine readerly identification and emphasize externality. It indicates how Camus's The Stranger can be productively re‐read by considering the employment of this form by a number of South African novelists—from Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World under apartheid, to postapartheid with Zoë Wicomb's Playing in The Light and Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit. This allows not only for formal continuities across apartheid‐postapartheid to be historicized, but offers a comparative lens for approaching novelistic form within global contexts of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, initial teacher education has experienced shifts towards competence and school-based programmatic reforms. As a result, literature on the role of teacher educators operating within the academy suggests a sense of doom as market-based and political distrust of the academy grows. For now, initial teacher education in Ireland is largely housed within the academy. However, several governing policies have recently been published which subtly seek to marginalise the role and practices of teacher educators. Drawing on Camus' understanding of the absurd as emerging from the interaction between the longing of human beings for clarity and the universe's indifferent and silent reply, this paper sets out to investigate possible methods that teacher educators may select in responding to an awareness of the absurd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On July 5, 2021, Algeria celebrated the fifty-ninth anniversary of her independence. The eight-year war, which broke out on November 1, 1954, cost the country much blood and resulted in 1.5 million deaths. This article looks at this page of history. My objective is to show why the Algerians took up arms, and to reexamine the conflict between the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the Algeria-born philosopher Albert Camus in light of the War of Independence. I argue that the friendship between the two philosophers can be seen as one casualty of this war, a friendship that had no chance of surviving given their different approaches to justice. Whereas for Sartre, justice was in no manner exclusive of freedom; for Camus, it was all that the Arabs needed, any demand for freedom being solely the work of a few militants "without any political culture." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2020 began with the world being controlled by a thenunknown force. This unknown force would later be called a coronavirus or Covid-19. Not a single country would be free from infection by this virus. We are petrified with astonishment when confronted with this disease. Initially, after admitting the reality, we started struggling with and revolting against this virus. Time has led us to the consideration of our existence. This pandemic inclines us to revisit the major themes in existential philosophy discussed by Sartre in the Nausea and the philosophy of the absurd by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague, and The Stranger. The study addresses the concepts of anxiety, suffering, freedom, self-deception, absurdity, and choices. When confronted with the reality of the disease, we are shocked by an odd sensation like what Roquentin felt in his experience of nausea. This bizarre feeling brought an initial rejection, a self-deception followed by suffering, and a reflection of one's freedom. The concept of freedom leads us to certain decisions we make and the choices we are offered. The absurdity brought about by the pandemic is a reality that we must accept as it is. How would Sisyphus feel if he were living in the present? The struggle by Sisyphus can be our struggle now against a coronavirus. We feel condemned to roll a rock to the top of a mountain, a punishment that seems like 'futile and hopeless labor.' However, we are stronger than our rock. The paper presents a parallelism between oursuffering during the pandemic and the sufferings of Sisyphus and Roquentin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Birzeit University (BZU)—established in 1924 by the Nasir family—was born out of struggle and developed as a microcosm of the Palestinian national movement against the Zionist settler colonial state of Israel. This article explores specific moments of solidarity with BZU and beyond. I map out a genealogy of three modes of solidarity with Palestine analyzed in light of the political thought and praxis of Amilcar Cabral, Albert Camus, and Hannah Arendt. BZU has been an important and contested site for individual, collective, and universal solidarity initiatives, as gestures of solidarity have been made since 1974 and have continued since then, including the establishment of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel in 2004. In this article, I trace the shifting apathy, empathy, and sympathy expressed with the Palestinian struggle and BZU with a particular emphasis on initiatives by Jewish and Israeli intellectuals. Although this article is neither a chronology nor a moral taxonomy, it aims to produce an indigenous, de-orientalized, and de-colonized account of the meanings of solidarity with Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Building the way - Revista do Curso de Letras da UEG/Itapuranga is the property of Universidade Estadual de Goias and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Epidemic refers to a wide occurrence of an infectious disease in a community within a particular time; while a pandemic is a more extensive spread of an infectious disease on a worldwide scale. A person or society that believes that disease comes from God or an evil power is of the same position whether it is a pandemic or an epidemic. This study is concerned with how Africans have conceived and interpreted pandemics or epidemics. The thoughts of Albert Camus, a French-Algerian philosopher on an epidemic that he wrote about in his novel, The Plague; and the understanding of epidemics or pandemics in African traditional epistemologies will be interrogated. That it is traditional does not mean it is no longer held. Some persons' understandings are still influenced by traditional epistemologies. Camus through the views of Dr Rieux expresses non-belief in God, for if he were to exist, he would be the one who should take care of the sick during the epidemic. The human response to evil should be that of revolt in taking action to solve human suffering instead of waiting for God. There are various perceptions on epidemics or plagues in African epistemology. In some cultures, it is believed that God is good and anything evil or suffering such as sicknesses comes from evil spirits. In others, epidemics emanate from human sinfulness or punishment for human faults. Pandemics can happen to one as a result of one's destiny. The paper through analytic and hermeneutic methods finds that while the viewpoint of Camus is thoroughly atheistic and secular; that of African epistemologies are theistic. The paper concludes that whether theistic or atheistic, there is solid reason for human beings to rebel against pandemics and work hard to eliminate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pursues three goals: First, to develop a lateral reading of Camus' Stranger. A lateral reading is characterized by the displacement of the central conflict. In the case of The Stranger, I argue that the central conflict in the novel lies in the relation between the author and the protagonist, not, as direct readings would have it, in the relation between the protagonist and his predicament. Second, to spell out more precisely why it should be read as an anti-existentialist novel. Here I argue that a lateral reading shows that the foundational existentialist opposition between telling and living is ironically dismantled by the very lateral structure of the novel. Third, to develop the notion of a lateral reading with a view to its potential advantages. Here, I point out that literalism involves positionalism and dynamicism. Positionalism refers to the reduction of fictional entities to their role in relation to each other. Dynamicism refers to the resulting view that those roles are further reducible to forces. I conclude that the lateral reading, with its commitments to positionalism and dynamicism is a model generalizable to the analysis of other fictional works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are striking differences between Camus's early and late philosophical essays, but Camus often claimed that his works were part of one consistent project. This paper argues that, although Camus had a significant change in his views on the consequences of the absurd, throughout his life he also had a common concern with the relation of the absurd to morality. Showing this requires us to clarify what Camus meant by the "absurd," and identify at least three different uses of the term by Camus: lacking a purpose; lacking an explanation; and a tension between purpose and purposelessness. Clarifying the meaning of "absurd" allows one to show that Camus's late argument against suicide, often dismissed as inadequate, is valid. This also illustrates the consistency of his concerns over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an enquiry into some commonalities between fiction and atheism. It suggests that 'disbelief' may be a state of mind shared by both and asks how a meaningful semantics might be derived from the mental stance of disbelief. Albert Camus' The Plague, published in 1947 post the trauma of two successive world wars, is a key 'existentialist' text that focuses on this dilemma. Not only is this work of fiction especially relevant to our current times of natural, political, economic and psychological distress gone 'viral', it is also one in which a blunt question is posed to the atheist hero of the novel, Doctor Rieux, in Oran, a small French Algerian town fighting a terrible pandemic: 'Do you believe in God, doctor?'. Rieux's answer is telling: 'No, but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out.' It is this human 'struggle' to discern the contours of the invisible 'in the dark' that could animate the thought worlds of fiction as well as of atheism. The paper seeks to draw out some of these putative similarities through the lens of 'ordinary language philosophy' and J.L, Austin and John Searle's classification of basic speech-acts. It also considers the evolutionary, affective and cross-cultural appeal of the parallel narratives of science and religion. Oran's most remarkable aspect, Camus insists, is its 'ordinariness'; yet, it is here that the 'extraordinariness' of the plague strikes. Quotidian local circumstances thus paradoxically set in motion the sorts of 'universal' inquiries into 'what it means to be human' that, my paper argues, alike motivate the fiction of atheism and the atheism of fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it possible to lead a good life, if life itself is not good; that is, if the systems and structures of our social existence involve conditions of oppression, violence, and destitution? This article examines the question from the perspectives of Albert Camus and Søren Kierkegaard's writings. Both thinkers uncompromisingly force us to acknowledge the inherent suffering or absurdity of the human condition, and to ask the question of the possibility of value and meaningfulness. Whereas Kierkegaard focuses on inner or spiritual transformation, rejecting the worldly, however, Camus invites us to examine the outward, social dimensions of oppression and to revolt against injustice. Exploring the relations between Camus and Kierkegaard, and their pertinence for our contemporary context, we argue that despite their differences, the works of these thinkers can help to develop an existential ethics of concern or compassion based on the recognition of the fact that there is no good life where others are in chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief communication seeks to clarify a phenomenon the author calls the "as-if state," an experience which patients have described in various ways since the beginning of the pandemic. While this state does not seem to fit into already-delineated phenomena such as defensive grandiosity or dissociative states, the author unexpectedly found a poignant and enlightening description of the as-if state in Camus' The Plague. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Introduction: The main objective of this study is to understand how the novel can be read against psychological reality. As a case study, this paper addresses the stranger by Camus. Embedded in Kundera's reading on the linkage between psychology on novel and psychology, the main question here is that how this novel can be read as what acts against psychology. Historically, how to address "characters or personages" has been obvious as a recent issue in novel studies. The main issue in psychology as a science is also "personage". Unlike enjoying the same unit of analysis, the main objective of this study is to highlight the possible boundaries between novel approaches to the personages versus psychological approaches to the same issue. The stranger by Albert Camus, an existentialist philosopher is viewed as a good and precise example to disclose such boundaries made. Not only in its form but also in its content, this novel avoids any psychological analysis. This paper hence attempts to show this as its main issue. The current study is theoretically embedded in Kundera's concepts. In kundera's reading, at an early age novelists intentionally avoid being linked with psychology. The nineteenth-century was the only era when the novel was dominated by psychology. In Kundera's reading, this era was read as a kind of misleading in its path. Kundera reckoned that exis tentialism could bring philosophy much closer to novels and coin a new paradigm in the novel world. Indeed, this paradigmatic shift was a kind of transition from "so-called psychological reality". This study is to explain how Camus as an exis tentialist thinker could make a distance from what is called a "Psychologizing novel". The main question in this study is to disclose how The s tranger by Camus made the longest distance from psychological reality. To answer such a question, it is needed to compare and contrast the concept of "reality" in a novel with psychological readings on it. In addition, unveiling Camus'stake on the possibility of "realism" and an answer to the question that art in general and novel in specific can be read based on a realistic framework is of significance in this study. As a result, the main issue here is that how a novel's take on reality can give rise to making reforms in "narrative forms" and going beyond classic plot as conceptualized in Camus's existentialis tic stance. In encountering such unaddressed issues in novel studies, we can find possible answers on how existentialism could pave some innovative ways in the novel world. Findings Some of the main findings of the study are the same as follows: Meursault, the main character or protagonist of the novel is faced with some psychological questions in court. These questions are to find out the psychological aspects of the personalities and disclose the most private issues in relationships. Meursault's resistance against the court is a kind of resistance against the interwoven linkage between the judiciary system and the psychology world. This contrast is another interpretation for a contrast between the novel and the case worlds. The world of the case is the world of clarity. It is a world that makes a linkage among the events in a causal relationship. It is to discover meaning in any event. Rather, Meursault, one belonging to the ontology of the novel, is the protagonist of the world of null. This under questions the main trend of the case i.e. making linkages among the unrelated affairs. It believes what leads the world has randomly occurred, nonsense, and meaningless issues. There exist no intersection among them. In fact, they make no monolithic and solid end and destiny. One of the main results of such an approach is to under question the "classic plot". Aristotle argues that a plot should not be shaped in a set of unjustifiable events. The Stranger cannot be classified in a classic plot-oriented taxonomy. In a sense that there exists a new concept of "reality" in this novel. Notably, not only is not able to understand the internal world but also fails to comprehend the internal worlds(identity of people). Unlike psychological reality which emphasizes a unified and fixed plot, in Camus' reading, we are faced with a set of "I" s rather than a monolithic identity or "I". "My or I destiny" has been shaped not in a monolithic and linear plot but in multiple and contradictory lines which are not supposed to meet each other in an intersected place and there is no end to it. No plot can narrate this destiny fully and comprehensively. Indeed, the discovered "I" in Mary's reading on Meursault is fully different from the "I" in the judge's eye. Which chain of events and possibilities is meaningless and meaningful in Meursault's life is still a challenging debate. Mary talks about some micro-narratives which are viewed as unrelated and insignificant in so-called macro and main narratives of the court. The main Mary's challenge with the court is on which narratives and criticize the classic plot. Conclusion. The current study showed that how the novel i.e. the stranger resists against psychological realities in its form and content. Unlike psychology which isto find out the main causes and motivations behind actions, the novel is to discover how life is a set of unrelated and unreasonable events. Embedded in such "non-ontological" knowledge, there exists a kind of freedom and agency as it sets the events free from what the past imposed on. This disclosure means understanding unpredictable aspects of life which are ignored as it was dominated by casual determinism. The present study showed how existentialism made new possibilities for Camus's narratives. Different forms of narrative are not possible regardless of philosophical and paradigmatic shifts. Indeed, forms of narrative are not "technique". Rather, they are "ontological". If reality is seen as something random and unreasonable, then the analysis of characters will be useless if it occurs based on psychological causes. As a result, what leads narratives is "unjustifiable action", this is exactly what the novel discovered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article turns to Jack London's and Albert Camus' novels about contagion to try to tease out some of the moral meanings of the pandemic we are currently living through. In many ways, these works are prescient, and can thus serve as commentary on the situation we find ourselves in. In others, their narratives differ from each other and from our experience; the differences signal what is at stake in some of our circumstances. Camus' ideal of solidarity focuses my discussion. I show how certain conditions associated with an outbreak provide occasions for solidarity, but also examine several obstacles to it. Many of those obstacles, I contend, have to do with the limitations on what we can know -- about ourselves, one another, and the world. In the end, I argue that complete solidarity may require us to reconceive our relationship to our communal past and the natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 has triggered a resurgence of interest in Albert Camus' book, The Plague. The novel is a complex narrative of an epidemic, stressing the human factor in addressing a social crisis as well as how individuals experience the personal drama of quarantine, isolation and death. These existentialist tropes have powerful resonance in the age of Covid-19. However, Covid's interlocking with structural violence worldwide requires a different engagement with The Plague beyond an aesthetics of suffering and hope. Both Camus' book and Covid-19 intersect with structural violence and suffering which are mediated differentially. Covid-19 intensifies other social catastrophes feeding on the ruins of structural inequality and the racism that condemns the marginalised to loss of agency, social apartheid and disposability. It also lays bare the necropolitics of neoliberalism – its power to dictate life and death undergirded by racialised, class, gendered and neocolonial logics. We witness emerging cartographies of power combined with virulent nationalism, authoritarianism and xenophobia. The Covid crisis is also likely to expand disaster capitalism, digital imperialism and algorithmic surveillance, further entrenching racial, class and gender hierarchies. If humanity is to avoid the pitfalls of these myriad fields of disaster intervention, what is needed is reflective analysis that has to aim at major societal change, at decolonisation that ends systemic abandon and racist structural violence. Camus' book fails to assist this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This philosophical survey of literature introduces a spectral reading of Albert Camus' multi-layered text The Fall. Readings on the spectral usually embark on the elements that haunt the subjectivity of the narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Within the affluence of potential meanings and allusions in the text, I focus on two places—Paris and Amsterdam—that have become "possessed," or more specifically, places that have become "spaces of the spectral." Amid the text's enigmatic character, a spectral reading highlights the particular uncanny turn that disturbs in the plot. I argue that the mentions of Paris and Amsterdam in the text function within the ambit of the spectral. Reviewing the models for spectral readings of place, I make use of Giorgio Agamben's lens of spectrality. For Agamben, there breed two types of spectrality in a place, namely, 'Final' and 'Larval.' Putting this perspective on the position of Clamence, this reading respectively exposes Paris as having final spectrality and Amsterdam as having larval spectrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to bring Marxism and psychoanalysis together at this conjuncture? Such a project has been a throughline, arguably, for Fredric Jameson's work for the past four decades. In this review-article, I read his chapter on Lacan and Hamlet for how it helps us to understand, not only how Jameson's ruminations on desire and neurosis highlight the social tendencies in Lacanian theory (for example, the notion that desire is the desire of the other), but also how that relationship throws new light on both the Marxist project and psychoanalysis proper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay responds to Frederic Jameson's Allegory and Ideology by arguing that this book is centrally concerned with the masses. By developing Jameson's own model of allegorical reading, the pressure of the masses on the text is explored. This is demonstrated through a reading of Albert Camus's The Plague , Jameson's central example of 'bad' allegory. While this novel is 'bad' for implying a one-to-one allegorical relationship between the plague infection and the Occupation of France during World War Two, or to the human condition, a reading of the text as biopolitical allegory reveals the complex presence of the masses. Finally, this response considers the 'immortality' of the masses as the utopian moment traced within Allegory and Ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper aims to explore right wing populist government responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is a narrative overview of right-wing populist policies and strategies, which is loosely structured around fascistic themes set out in Albert Camus' allegorical novel, The Plague. Findings: Although individual responses to the coronavirus pandemic among right-wing populists differ, they appear to coalesce around four central themes: initial denial and then mismanagement of the pandemic; the disease being framed as primarily an economic rather than a public health crisis; a contempt for scientific and professional expertise; and the "othering" of marginal groups for political ends. Populist responses to the pandemic have given rise to increased levels of xenophobia, the violation of human rights and the denigration of scientific expertise. Research limitations/implications: This is a narrative overview from a personal viewpoint. Originality/value: Drawing on themes in Camus' novel The Plague, this is a personal perspective on right wing populist government responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Populist responses to the pandemic have given rise to increased levels of intolerance and xenophobia and the violation of human rights and civil liberties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The universe is enormous, perhaps unimaginably so. In comparison, we are very small. Does this suggest that humanity has little if any cosmic significance? And if we don't matter, should that matter to us? Blaise Pascal, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Stephen Hawking, and others have offered insightful answers to those questions. For example, Pascal and Ramsey emphasize that whereas the stars (in all their enormity) cannot think, human beings can. Through an exploration of some features of awe and its positive effects on us, I offer a novel way of answering the second question: even if we don't matter, we, unlike the stars, naturally benefit from observing our own smallness. I explore implications for accounts of the absurdity of human life. Life might be absurd. But I give reasons to think that life isn't absurd in the ways some such as Nagel and Camus suggest. Finally, I connect non-symmetric awe with Buddhist insights to strengthen a recent and more positive account of how to find meaning in life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is Yoko Taro's NieR: Automata in general and its four main characters--androids 2B and 9S as well as machines Adam and Eve--in particular. Following their evolution in the game, I intend to show that they serve its author as a tool with which to propose that the sense of absurd, and the sense of life's meaninglessness around which their world is created, can be fought with selflessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars interested in just war theory have paid insufficient attention to how the soldiers tasked to carry out its demands think about it. Reflecting on this gap between theory and experience, this essay asks: What do soldiers think about the idea of just war and the demands it places upon them? Focusing on war memoirs, we argue that while most soldiers ostensibly endorse the principles of just war theory, they are not averse to highlighting, its absurdity. To understand this and what it means, one needs only to think about what makes soldiers laugh. Building on the work of Albert Camus, we suggest soldiers' laughter renders audible their lucid recognition of war's absurdity – an articulation of the gap between the idea of "just war" and their experience of waging it – and a candid appraisal of their role in it as sad and laughable and strange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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