camus lyrical and critical essays pdf

December 15, 1968 Lyrical And Critical Essays By JOHN WEIGHTMAN LYRICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS By Albert Camus. Edited and with notes by Philip Thody Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy he literary output of Albert Camus was exceptionally concentrated and well organized, so that each part of it throws light on the other parts. The novels “The Stranger” and “The Plague” were buttressed by corresponding theoretical works, “The Myth of Sisyphus” and “The Rebel.” The references to totalitarian evils and other social problems contained in these works were further developed in the many newspaper articles, a selection of which has been published here as “Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.” The plays and short stories also deal with the concept of the Absurd and the problem of choice, and the notebooks show how the ideas first germinated and were influenced by events. Here now, for the first time in a complete English translation, we have Camus's three little volumes of essays, plus a selection of his critical comments on literature and on his own place in it. As might be expected, the main interest of these writings is that they illuminate new facets of his usual subject matter. The volumes of essays--”The Wrong Side and the Right Side” (“L'envers et L'endroit,” 1937), “Nuptials” (“Noces,” 1938) and “Summer” (“Eté,” 1954)--are essentially attempts to define his sensibility as a European of mixed descent (French and Spanish), born and brought up on the north coast of Africa, which he looked upon as his homeland. Although he expresses his devotion to the French literary tradition, which is in any case obvious in his style, he never thought of metropolitan France as his native background. This is why the Algerian war was a particular tragedy for him. He was criticized for not taking sides more strongly, but while he was naturally anticolonialist, he could not wish for a solution that would turn him into a permanent exile. Had he survived to see the war end with the expulsion of the European population, he would no doubt have suffered bitterly. As a white African, he evolved a kind of solar paganism fraught with melancholy. “Nuptials” celebrates the union of the young man with the natural beauty of sun, landscape and sea. “The Wrong Side and the Right Side” signifies that life, even when lived to the full in the ideal circumstances of the Mediterranean, has its undercurrent of sadness. “There is no love of life without despair about life” is one of the aphorisms coined by Camus to express this view. He means that even in moments of intense lyrical appreciation--for instance, when bathing in the summer sea with his girl friend, like Meursault the hero of “The Strangers”--he is conscious of some inherent tragedy in the universe. In the essays this is not worked up explicitly into the concept of the Absurd, but it might easily have been. There is a constant suggestion that no common measure exists between man and the world around him; individuals grow old and lonely, and their pathetic little preoccupations are out of all proportion to the sea and the desert, those ever-present symbols of the mystery of infinite time and space. Sometimes Camus expresses this solar paganism in impressionistic or rhetorical prose. At other times, he handles it more intellectually and ironically. In either case, his treatment is very subjective. It may be enjoyed, but can hardly be fully accepted, by readers who have had to live their lives many hundreds of miles away from the Mediterranean. For instance, Camus includes in “The Wrong Side and the Right Side” a vivid travel sketch of Prague, in which Czechoslovakia, because it is a comparatively northern country, is seen as a dark nightmare from which the young Camus only escapes when he goes down into Italy and finds himself back in Mediterranean sunlight. This explains why the somber play, “The Misunderstanding,” is set in Bohemia, and why the last novel, “The Fall,” shows a character wallowing in guilt in the gray mists of Holland. Without underestimating the attraction of the Mediterranean and its importance in world history, one may feel that Camus is perhaps exaggerating the link between sunshine and civilization. An overcast sky does not inevitably lead to gloom, puritanism and guilt. Nor does sunshine necessarily bring about a high degree of culture. In some of the essays in “Summer” Camus himself gives a marvelous poetic and humorous picture of the provincial simplicities of Oran and Algiers. When he tries to produce a theory of Mediterranean culture, as he does in the first of the critical essays that form Part II of the book, the argument appears as shaky as in the section of “The Rebel” entitled “Thought at the Meridian.” He has a concept of moderation, humanism and tragic happiness that is probably more Greek than anything else and, while admitting that the Mediterranean is “turbulent” and “confused,” he would like to select from it those things he prefers and eliminate the rest. For instance, he commits himself to the huge and startling generalization that Roman culture was not truly Mediterranean. The lesson of history surely is that the Mediterranean has produced examples of practically all the possibilities of the human mind and temperament, from asceticism to hedonism and from totalitarianism to anarchism. Camus's very strong sense of place, which is such an asset when he is describing moods and landscapes in “The Stranger” or “The Plague” or setting down his own immediate impressions in these essays, proves a very unreliable basis on which to erect an intellectual structure. Strangely enough, Camus does not seem to have noticed how his local patriotism, which is admirable in its specifically literary effects, conflicted with the cultural eclecticism so obvious in his critical articles and in his creative practice. In order to describe Algiers in “The Stranger,” he borrowed certain stylistic features from Hemingway; in “The Plague,” to reproduce the atmosphere of Oran, he made use of two very different models, the 17th-century French writer, Madame de la Fayette and the 18th-century English journalist, Daniel Defoe. These borrowings are totally assimilated and help to reinforce the “Mediterranean” character of the books, a result which presumably shows that the North has something to contribute to the Mediterranean. And this indeed confirms an obvious critical judgment on Camus--that when he is good, he is universal, and that his Mediterraneanism is not a valid doctrine but simply an esthetic accent. Mr. Weightman's essays and reviews of French literature appear in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Return to the Books Home Page

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Lyrical and Critical Essays

By albert camus, part of vintage international, category: essays & literary collections | philosophy.

Oct 31, 2012 | ISBN 9780307827784 | ISBN 9780307827784 --> Buy

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About Lyrical and Critical Essays

Edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy.  “Here now, for the first time in a complete English translation, we have Camus’ three little volumes of essays, plus a selection of his critical comments on literature and his own place in it. As might be expected, the main interest of these writings is that they illuminate new facets of his usual subject matter.”– The New York Times Book Review “…a new single work for American readers that stands among the very finest.”– The Nation

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About Albert Camus

Born in Algeria in 1913, ALBERT CAMUS published The Stranger–now one of the most widely read novels of this century–in 1942. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car… More about Albert Camus

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Lyrical and critical essays

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Concerned that he doesn’t “know any longer whether I’m living or remembering,” Camus tries to reconcile the intractable loss that is life, a digression which often reads more like prose poetry than essay.

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Lyrical and Critical Essays

Albert camus , ellen conroy kennedy  ( translator ) , philip thody  ( editor ).

384 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published September 12, 1970

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Albert Camus

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Lyrical and Critical Essays Mass Market Paperback – September 12, 1970

• Print length 384 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date September 12, 1970
• Dimensions 4.3 x 1.03 x 7.22 inches
• ISBN-10 0394708520
• ISBN-13 978-0394708522
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (September 12, 1970)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0394708520
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0394708522
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.3 x 1.03 x 7.22 inches
• #456 in French Literature (Books)
• #3,028 in Essays (Books)
• #16,584 in Short Stories (Books)

About the author

Albert camus.

Albert Camus (French: [albɛʁ kamy]; 7 November 1913 - 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as one, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations: ""No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."".

Camus was born in Algeria to a Pied-Noir family, and studied at the University of Algiers from which he graduated in 1936. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons to ""denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA"".

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Photograph by United Press International [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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LYRICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS

by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 1968

In one of his nastier moods, Sartre accused Camus of writing like Chateaubriand. The essay-portraits of Algiers and Oran, the nostalgic evocations of Camus' Mediterranean background, his buoyant, often dramatized philosophical love affair with nature—these were the parts of Camus' temperament that Sartre found at odds with the prevailing existentialist gloom of the post-war period when he and Camus held an uneasy alliance as spokesmen for their age. Sartre represented a soi-disant authentic anguish ultimately leading to social revolt, Camus the enigma of a passionate man who sought to triumph over the innate absurdity of life. Lyrical and Critical Essays comprises Camus' youthful reflections. L'Envers et l'Endroit; his two brilliant summations of the sensual world. Noces and L'Etc. both of which shed much light on the varying landscapes of his major novels; and his stray reviews (including comments on Sartre's fiction), interviews, and assorted marginalia. These newly translated works are of inestimable importance in reaching some understanding of Campus' personality, his relationship with traditional values, and (to return to Sartre) the qualified Romantic animism in Camus' style and feeling. In a sense, Sartre is right. There is something intellectually equivocal, even hortatory, in Camus' paradoxical celebration of lucidity amid nihilism, participation amid withdrawal. But Camus is more the measure of man and man's physical and spiritual union with the universe, however idealized.

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1968

ISBN: 0394708520

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1968

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith

by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien

by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

And other essays.

by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955

This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955

ISBN: 0679733736

Page Count: 228

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955

THE ART OF SOLITUDE

by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020

A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.

A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.

“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles , I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars . It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books ( Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World , 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0

Page Count: 200

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

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by Stephen Batchelor

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Lyrical And Critical Essays Summary

Explorations of life's absurdity and the pursuit of meaning.

Audiobook Online

Description, free pdf download, chapter 1 | overview, chapter 2 | the human condition is characterized by an inherent sense of absurdity and the need to find meaning in a world that lacks inherent purpose., chapter 3 | the struggle for freedom, authenticity, and rebellion against oppressive systems is central to human existence., chapter 4 | existentialism emphasizes the importance of individual responsibility and the creation of personal meaning in the face of an indifferent and sometimes hostile universe., chapter 5 | lyrical and critical essays review.

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