Description
[cross-listed with LIT 3906] Mid-twentieth-century French existentialists responded to the rise of fascism, the reality of genocide, the moral bankruptcy of colonialism, and unprecedented challenges to the Enlightenment’s ideal of freedom. The existentialist movement fused philosophical inquiry with artistic creation in efforts to come to terms with the radical absurdity of the human condition in the aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust, and the first nuclear war. Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugène Ionesco, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and other philosophers, writers, dramatists, and filmmakers recognized that each individual must claim their own freedom by embracing the personal search for life’s meaning. Existentialism’s roots go back to Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Today. a new, global generation of post-existential/postcolonial thinkers and writers continue to struggle with the meaning of freedom in the face of such threats as racism, national