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Complicit Silences: The Fiction of Albert Camus

  • 2021.03.26
  • Event
This talk explores the notion of complicity in Albert Camus’ three completed novels, The Outsider, The Plague and The Fall. It begins with definitions of complicity, and with the argument that fiction is particularly suited to examining complicities of connivance and culpable ignorance, that is, when stories fail to bear witness to wrongdoing and suffering. The talk suggests that three key events in Camus’ life shaped his attitudes towards collaboration and resistance, but that these also highlight an apparently irresolvable tension in his novels. Camus was politically engaged with the situation in French Algeria (where he grew up), edited Combat, a French Resistance magazine published during German occupation, and quarreled with Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1950s over their differing political views. Yet if sections of his fiction seem to celebrate principled and non-complicit positions, his fictional representations of Algeria are more puzzling because they seem to omit French colonial wrongdoing.   

Topic:              Complicit Silences: The Fiction of Albert Camus

Time& Date:  16:00-18:00, March 26th , 2021

Venue:            109 Zhi Xin Building

Speaker:         Prof. Ivan Stacy [Beijing Normal University]

Host:               Dr. Lucas Scripter [CUHK(SZ)]

Language:      English

Abstract:

This talk explores the notion of complicity in Albert Camus’ three completed novels, The Outsider, The Plague and The Fall. It begins with definitions of complicity, and with the argument that fiction is particularly suited to examining complicities of connivance and culpable ignorance, that is, when stories fail to bear witness to wrongdoing and suffering. The talk suggests that three key events in Camus’ life shaped his attitudes towards collaboration and resistance, but that these also highlight an apparently irresolvable tension in his novels. Camus was politically engaged with the situation in French Algeria (where he grew up), edited Combat, a French Resistance magazine published during German occupation, and quarreled with Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1950s over their differing political views. Yet if sections of his fiction seem to celebrate principled and non-complicit positions, his fictional representations of Algeria are more puzzling because they seem to omit French colonial wrongdoing.   

Speaker:

Ivan Stacy is associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University. He is the author of The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction, which was published by Lexington in 2021. He has also published articles on Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, China Miéville, and on the American television series The Wire, focusing on his main research interests, which are complicity and the carnivalesque. He has taught in China, Thailand, the UK, Bhutan, Libya, and South Korea.

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