Reading Camus Today
- October 28, 2020
- 4:00 PM - 5:15 CST
- Zoom (registration required, please see link)
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Dept. of Modern Languages and Literatures
Julia Elsky, jelsky@luc.edu - Free
- Open to the public.
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Details
Albert Camus¿s novel The Plague will go down in literary history as the most talked about book of the Covid-19 crisis. Originally intended as an allegory of World War II, this story of an epidemic has been a staple of literature classes since 1947. Generations of students have learned that Camus was ¿really¿ writing about his experience of World War II. This March, that reading tradition was transformed. The epidemic brought the novel close to readers who began to read it as a book about their own lives¿a book to help them get through a global health crisis. Keeping in mind this new readership, we will offer a personal and literary meditation on living and working with The Plague during a global pandemic.
Alice Kaplan is Sterling Professor of French at Yale University and the director of the Whitney Humanities Center. Her most recent book is Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Laura Marris is an author and translator. Her latest project, a new translation of Camus¿s The Plague, is forthcoming from Knopf. She teaches creative writing at the University at Buffalo.
This is the first event in an MLL Speaker Series, organized by its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, *Plague and Power: Representations in Literature and Art* (2020-2021).
