Albert Camus: Plague and Terror, Priest and Atheist

by John Robert Maze

Overview

This book provides a depth-psychological, analytic reading of all Albert Camus’s imaginative literary works including his essays and reminiscences. The chronological procedure reveals an evolution of unconscious themes underlying the conscious views and attitudes to which Camus kept returning over the course of his life. Topics discussed in this study include the analysis of Camus’s rejection of morality as the enemy of affection and self-fulfilment; his atheism; the apparent qualifications in his opposition to terrorism; and his absolute rejection of the death penalty as an instrument of state terrorism. This group of attitudes is located in the Camus family nexus, both in their external and historical reference and in their emerging internal conscious and unconscious meanings, enriched by autobiographical references in the novels to Camus’s adult character and personal and political life experiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783034300063
Publisher:	Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Publication date:	02/17/2010
Pages:	201
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

The Author: John Robert Maze (1923-2008) was an academic at the University of Sydney, Australia, teaching and publishing on psychoanalytic psychology and other aspects of psychological theory. His longstanding interest in the psychoanalytic study of literature led to publications on Virginia Woolf and on Fyodor Dostoevsky, including a monograph on Woolf. With historian Graham White he published biographies of two members of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal cabinet, Harold Ickes and Henry Wallace.

Table of Contents

Contents: Origins of an Anti-Moralist – A Happy Death - The Happiness of Non-Being – The Outsider - Convicted of Matricide – The Plague - Internal Corruption – Exile and the Kingdom - Solitariness or Solidarity – The Fall - Self-Doubts of a Narcissist – The First Man - Camus Buries his Father.