Existentialisme et littérature: Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon

A substantive introduction to the works of four giants of French existentialist thought: Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. Focusing on short stories, plays and philosophical essays, we will attend to certain difficult but powerful notions in these four thinkers’ writings--being, (self-)consciousness, otherness, absurdity, contingency, facticity, bad faith, anxiety, freedom, responsibility, shame--and their articulation within intense political, philosophical and social debates and struggles of the 1940s-1960s around issues that continue to galvanize us today: the meaning of life, humanity, identity, gender, race, colonialism, revolution. Taught in French.