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La Peste d’Albert Camus : une analyse de la société coloniale algérienne à travers le prisme de l’épidémie

Alessia Berardi    Università Ca' Foscari Venezia    

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abstract

March 2020: as Coronavirus continues spreading across the globe, the well-known novel La Peste (1947) by Albert Camus appeals to new readers all over the world. This article offers a new modest reading of La Peste by adopting an approach which emerges from the intersection between Environmental Humanities and Postcolonial Studies. We will explore to what extent the plague is an allegory of human suffering and isolate the different levels on which the allegory may work. Furthermore, we will focus on the link between the representation of the plague outbreaking in Oran and the French-Algerian, multiethnic society. What will the ‘epidemic fiction’ reveal about social structures and practices in the context of colonial Algeria’s last years of existence, and how? The representation of the epidemic seems to mirror the inequalities of that colonial society that is not depicted in the novel, and yet it reminds the reader that societies are constructed and, thus, can be improved.

Pubblicato
22 Dicembre 2020
Accettato
30 Settembre 2020
Presentato
30 Giugno 2020
Lingua
FR

Keywords: Postcolonial TheoryEpidemic FictionFrench AlgeriaAlbert CamusPlague

Copyright: © 2020 Alessia Berardi. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.