FRE 329 - Camus, De Beauvoir & Sartre (in translation)

This course will give an overview of the lives, thought, writings, and political engagement of three important literary and intellectual figures of 20^th-century France: Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. As contemporaries, these figures contended with similar waves of thought and social or geopolitical changes in France and more broadly. As individuals from different backgrounds, however, their varying concerns before questions surrounding these changes and events often led them to different or even opposing positions.

By looking at a selection of their autobiographical, literary, and philosophical works, students will acquire a general understanding of these writers’ thinking, motivations, and contributions to important intellectual and moral debates concerning contemporaneous ideologies, geopolitics, conflicts, and the role of violence in shaping history. During classroom discussions, students will be expected to engage with the material at hand, but also step back in order to define moments of congruence or contradiction within each writer’s corpus, as well as across their separate bodies of work. Because of the historically situated nature of the debates these writers engaged in, significant events such as World War II, German Occupation, the Cold War, and the Algerian War will function as important backdrops to our discussions.

By the end of this course, students will be able to define, distinguish, utilize, or provide context and nuance to important terms and phrases like existentialism, absurdity, feminism, radical freedom, rebellion/revolt/revolution, bad faith, responsibility, engagement/commitment, colonialism and anti-colonialism, concentrationary universe, justice/Justice, etc.

Possible readings include (in whole or in part):

Camus:

The First Man, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, Man in Revolt, Exile and the Kingdom, etc.

De Beauvoir:

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Second Sex, Pyrrhus and Cinéas, Les Belles Images, etc.

Sartre:

The Words, Nausea, Existentialism Is a Humanism, What Is Literature?, No Exit, etc.

Satisfies the ways of knowing requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric.