Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism and Camus’s existentialist philosophy

Abstract

Lê Tuyên was among the most notable literary critics of South Vietnam during the period 1954 – 1975. He has been best known for being one of the first Vietnamese to adopt and apply phenomenological criticism, especially Bachelardian analysis of the imaginaire and poetic reveries. However, in our opinion, there are other philosophical views rather than Bachelardian thought embedded in Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism, one of which is existentialist ideas. In this paper, based on the fact that Lê Tuyên frequently cited Camus and published several articles introducing Camus’s ideas, we would like to discover the notable relationship between Lê Tuyên and Albert Camus with an aim to get deeper insight into the existential perspective in Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism. We thus make a comparison between Camus’s existentialist philosophy and Lê Tuyên’s view of human life presented in his works of literary criticism. There are two main similarities. Firstly, Camus and Lê Tuyên both focused on discovering and analyzing the absurdity of human condition. They also both argued that absurdity is not a property of life, but an experience formed in our relationship with the world. Secondly, while analyzing the revolt of heroes and heroines in Vietnamese late-medieval literature agaisnt absurdity, Lê Tuyên agreed with Camus that illusory hopes, metaphysical beliefs and ignorant rebellions should be criticized, but it is crucial to dialogue with life, to fully understand what life is and what we truly are.