Alice Kaplan, Yale University

“How Camus became an American Writer—Or at Least a Household Word”

FRANCE AND THE WORLD , Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar Series

The lecture will focus on the mystery of cultural transmission: what factors, other than literal translation from one language to another, go into making a foreign writer a success in the United States? Her example is the beloved French-Algerian writer Albert Camus (1913-1960), whose first novel, The Stranger, was published in New York in 1946 and remains the number one French novel of the 20th century. Central to the story she is telling is Camus's first major American critic, Germaine Bree (1907-2001), whose archives she has explored in order to understand her part in making Camus a household word.

Alice Y. Kaplan is Sterling Professor of French at Yale University and a leading scholar of 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature and history, as well as a literary translator. Kaplan is the author of many books, including French Lessons (1993), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (2000), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, and most recently, Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (U Chicago, 2016), which was a New York Times notable book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Kaplan is a former Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the French Légion d’Honneur.

TO REGISTER:

https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYpcuqqpjwtEt3VdYDzun1G7PpV5NIGlMQZ

No knowledge of French is required.

If you have any questions, please contact Annabel Kim at annabel_kim@fas.harvard.edu