20 Question with Dr. Eric Berg

Peter Francev: ‘Gushing Over Nature, or Janine’s Sexual Exhibitionism’ Abstract: For the past few years, I have been interested in the topic of Albert Camus and empathy and, rightfully so, as I am currently writing a monograph on the subject, it makes sense that I would be interested in such a subject. However, for as long as I have been formally and informally studying Camus (which is surpassing 25 years), I have always been plagued (no pun intended) by the seemingly hard-lined interpretation that the protagonist of one of Camus’s most recognizable short stories ‘The Adulterous Woman’, Janine has been largely contextualized as an unhappily married woman to her husband Marcel and has an ‘affair’ of sorts that is anything but sexual. In this paper, I plan to quickly examine what previous scholars have said about Janine, her mental state of mind and her supposedly adulterous actions, before I offer what seems to me a rather conventional and entirely plausible reading and interpretation of the short story, including Janine’s indeed adulterous actions. And this is not to say that Janine cannot be linked to previous Camusian characters who are both female and aware of their sexuality, namely Marie from The Stranger.

In this episode I review the December 2022 publication of States of Plague: Reading Camus in a Pandemic by Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris, published by The University of Chicago Press.  Enjoy!

A review of a book that is very hard to find: Albert Camus and the Men of Stone from 1971. It is a series of illuminating interviews of men who worked with Camus as coy editors, editors, printers, and typesetters. Enjoy! 

A review by Dr. Berg of a new (2022) important book for the English reading audience. 34 lectures and speeches written by Camus on many important topics. Enjoy! 

A fascinating look into how academic scholarship is advanced. This session is a recording of the question and answer session where the scholars that just presented their work to some of the top Camus scholars in the world defend their views. Enjoy! 

Whilst there is no mention of the empathy or ethics of Edith Stein in the fiction and non-fiction of Albert Camus, one can easily surmise that Camus, being a part of the Parisian café scene during the years leading up to, including and beyond the second world war, would have encountered some discussions of Stein’s thought through Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, prior to his falling out with both men. It is then the purpose of this paper to set out and accomplish several things: firstly, I would like to provide a very brief introduction to the empathy of Stein; secondly, I should like to offer readers a concise summary of Stein’s principle text on empathy (On the Problem of Empathy)1; finally, I would like to offer an exposition and an analysis of Stein’s concept of empathy, from a phenomenological perspective, whilst keeping in mind Camus’s philosophy of the absurd as posited in The Myth of Sisyphus.

Gina Breen: ‘French-Algerian Exile’ Albert Camus’s L’Exil et le Royaume was Camus’s last official literary publication before his death in 1960. It is a collection of six short stories, published in 1957, seven months before he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his acceptance speech, which was misreported, Camus specifically addressed justice and the Algerian situation, by discussing the role of the writer and the importance of truth, communicating his belief that the writer has a social duty as they bear witness to history. In this paper, I will discuss three of the six short stories, namely “La Femme Adultère,” “Les Muets” and “L’Hôte” which are all set in Algeria. Written at the beginning of the armed struggle, the stories were published three years into the Algerian War. I argue that these stories demonstrate the moral dilemmas of the colonial situation, and they are vital to our understanding of Camus’s mythopoetics and the evolution of the pied-noir myth Camus first presents in L’étranger fifteen years earlier. Like Meursault, the characters in these stories suffer from estrangement. As the title suggests, Camus’s identity crisis still exists as he depicts the poverty, self-exile, exclusion, and solitude inherent in these dystopic Algerian spaces. None of the stories end with resolutions and the characters’ neutrality makes them victims of French colonialism. The stories and protagonists also mirror many of Camus’s personal confrontations because they hesitate about the future. They imply a certain degree of hopefulness, but their true feelings remain hidden

In this episode you will here the finest Camus scholars engaging each other on their current research on Camus. It is here that our understanding of Camus and his work is really pushed in new directions. This is a very exciting episode indeed! 

In this episode Tom Hammer gives his paper to the Albert Camus Society's annual conference. The paper is titled "The Formal Structure of Existential Absurdity". It is a very engaging paper and a slight, but rewarding divergence from the typical paper we hear as it has an analytic approach. Enjoy! 

In this podcast you will hear from one of the leading Camus scholars in the world. Professor Heffernan of Merrimack College has been widely published and quoted on Camus across the years. Enjoy this engaging talk on Camus and the question of Meursault's guilt in The Stranger.