Albert Camuss The New Mediterranean Culture

This book was shortlisted for the R.H. Gapper prize 2011. On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural lecture for a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre, in Algiers. Entitled La nouvelle culture mditerranenne (The New Mediterranean Culture), Camuss lecture has been interpreted in radically different ways: while some critics have dismissed it as an incoherent piece of juvenilia, others see it as key to understanding his future development as a thinker, whether as the first expression of his so-called Mediterranean humanism or as an early indication of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality. These various interpretations are based on reading the text of The New Mediterranean Culture in a single context, whether that of Camuss life and work as a whole, of French discourses on the Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria (and French discourses on that country). By contrast, this study argues that Camuss lecture and in principle any historical text needs to be seen in a multiplicity of contexts, discursive and otherwise, if readers are to understand properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camuss lecture as a case study, the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical justification of this multi-contextualist approach.