RT Article
T1 Camus’s Algerian in Paris: A Prose Poetic Reading of L’Étranger
JF Sophia
VO 50
IS 4
SP 527
OP 541
A1 Rolls, Alistair
LA English
PB Springer Netherlands
YR 2011
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1785591835
AB This paper demonstrates that L'Étranger, Camus's famous novel about an outsider, had by as early as 1946 become just as much of an 'insider' in terms of its affiliation to the Parisian literary tradition. More than an insider simply by virtue of its contemporary place in the French canon, then, the novel is also intertextually bound to a tradition of oxymoronic poetics dating back to Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen (Les Petits poèmes en prose). I shall examine the way in which L'Étranger performs its prose poetics, thereby establishing it as exemplary of a Parisian model of modernity. Additionally, the famous scene on the beach will be considered as a liminal space and as a literary translation of Paris into the desert, which, once a joke for Paris's relationship to provincial France, became after the Second World War a new allegory for the capital's self-alterity.
K1 Chiasmus
K1 Oxymoron
K1 Paris
K1 Modernity
K1 Prose poetry
K1 Baudelaire
K1 L'Etranger
DO 10.1007/s11841-011-0272-2