Albert Camus Radio

Episode #3 of Albert Camus Radio. Camus' last finished novel and possibly his most intriguing. I this episode I will unpack this complex work and look at what drove Camus to write this book, the style he used, influences, and the themes he is working with. The Fall is a very rewarding book and I hope this episode can help guide you through this work. Enjoy!

In this episode I review Catelli's 2020 (English translation) of The Death of Camus. In this text he makes the case that Camus was killed by the KGB.

Enjoy.

Thank you to Vectis Consulting for sponsoring this podcast!

www.vectisconsulting.org

Professor James Woelfel received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of St. Andrews, became a member of the University of Kansas faculty in 1966, and served as Director of Humanities & Western Civilization from 1985 until July 2010.

His teaching and research have been primarily 19th and 20th century European philosophical and religious thought. Among the books he has authored are Bonhoeffer’s Theology, Borderland Christianity, Albert Camus on the Sacred and the Secular, Portraits in Victorian Religious Thought, The Existentialist Legacy and Other Essays on Philosophy and Religion, and is an editor of Patterns in Western Civilization fourth edition.

Professor Woelfel was a 1997 recipient of the Kansas Humanities Council’s Silver Anniversary Public Scholar Award, and in 1998 received a Kemper Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching. He retired from KU in May 2015.

In this interview, I ask Dr. Woelfel 20 questions about Albert Camus. Enjoy this engaging interview with Dr Woelfel, my dissertation advisor!

Episode #6 covers Camus' extraordinary text The Myth of Sisyphus. In this podcast I will cover the context of the text and focus specifically on the philosophical arguments and themes that Camus wishes to explore. This podcast accidentally ran a bit longer (25 minutes) than the others but I really go on a roll with some of points I wised to cover.

Enjoy!

Gina Breen: ‘French-Algerian Exile’

Albert Camus’s L’Exil et le Royaume was Camus’s last official literary publication before his death in 1960. It is a collection of six short stories, published in 1957, seven months before he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his acceptance speech, which was misreported, Camus specifically addressed justice and the Algerian situation, by discussing the role of the writer and the importance of truth, communicating his belief that the writer has a social duty as they bear witness to history.

In this paper, I will discuss three of the six short stories, namely “La Femme Adultère,” “Les Muets” and “L’Hôte” which are all set in Algeria. Written at the beginning of the armed struggle, the stories were published three years into the Algerian War. I argue that these stories demonstrate the moral dilemmas of the colonial situation, and they are vital to our understanding of Camus’s mythopoetics and the evolution of the pied-noir myth Camus first presents in L’étranger fifteen years earlier. Like Meursault, the characters in these stories suffer from estrangement. As the title suggests, Camus’s identity crisis still exists as he depicts the poverty, self-exile, exclusion, and solitude inherent in these dystopic Algerian spaces. None of the stories end with resolutions and the characters’ neutrality makes them victims of French colonialism. The stories and protagonists also mirror many of Camus’s personal confrontations because they hesitate about the future. They imply a certain degree of hopefulness, but their true feelings remain hidden