Resisting the Defeatism of Epidemic: A Critical Study of the Plague by Albert Camus

Miss Arti,Dr Muzafar Ahmad Bhat

doi:10.24113/ijellh.v8i11.10846

Abstract

Most plague texts have their genesis in fact. The Plague is no exception. Therefore, to study the aesthetics of plague literature—or more particularly, the aesthetic constructs of destiny in plague literature—is to examine the process by which the factual reality of plague is first perceived and then translated by an author into a literary reality. A process that begins in perception—and indeed, the ancient Greeks defined aesthetics as perception—thus ends in representation; the plague text re-presents plague’s fact.

Highlights

Set in the coastal city of Oran in Algeria in the unspecified year of 194, the genesis of Camus’s The Plague, published in post-war 1947, in all likelihood lies in the outbreak of bubonic plague in Oran in the 1940s
In the composition of the novel, Camus, whose Notebooks attest to his wide reading in plague literature, is likely to have drawn on the accounts of various epidemics that darkened the history of Algeria, a principal one being the cholera epidemic that killed a large percentage of Oran’s population in 1849, following the French colonization
A research report by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that Oran was decimated by bubonic plague in 1556 and in 1678, whereas outbreaks of plague after European colonization—185 cases in 1921, 76 in 1931, 95 in 1944—fell far short of the epidemic described in the novel

Summary

Introduction

Set in the coastal city of Oran in Algeria in the unspecified year of 194–, the genesis of Camus’s The Plague, published in post-war 1947, in all likelihood lies in the outbreak of bubonic plague in Oran in the 1940s. Oran’s last case of plague in a human, prior to publication of Camus’s novel, was recorded in 1946.

Results

Conclusion