Albert Camus: Embracing life’s absurdity
The intellectual journey of Algeria’s great novelist and philosopher Albert Camus.
‘There is no sun without shadows, and it is essential to know the night,’ the words of Albert Camus, a writer whose exploration of the absurd nature of the human condition made him a literary and intellectual icon. Camus was born in Algeria but is celebrated in France as one of its great twentieth-century novelists and philosophers. His first publishing success, The Stranger, focused on the absurdity of existence but in his later works, including The Plague and The Rebel, he developed his thoughts on the human instinct to revolt.
But who was Albert Camus? How far were his ideas shaped by his Algerian upbringing and by the turbulent political times he lived through in the 1940s and '50s? Bridget Kendall explores these questions with three Camus experts: Nabil Boudraa, Algerian professor of French and Francophone Studies at Oregon State University, Eve Morisi, professor of French at Oxford University and Samantha Novello, research fellow in Political Philosophy at Verona University.
(Photo: Albert Camus Credit: Kurt Hutton/Getty Images)
Last on
More episodes
Previous
Next
Broadcasts
- Thu 19 Sep 2019 08:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service
- Thu 19 Sep 2019 23:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service
- Sat 21 Sep 2019 13:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service News Internet
- Sun 22 Sep 2019 14:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service except Americas and the Caribbean, East Asia & South Asia
- Mon 23 Sep 2019 02:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service UK DAB/Freeview
- Mon 23 Sep 2019 03:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service Online, Australasia, Americas and the Caribbean, South Asia & East Asia only
Featured in...
Classic literature: Reading between the lines—The Forum
From Moby Dick to the Moomins, exploring the books that captured the world's imagination
Do you think political or business leaders need to be charismatic? Or do you prefer highly competent but somewhat stern people?
Podcast
-
The Forum
The programme that explains the present by exploring the past