Title: “Albert Camus’ The Plague: The Choice of Maxims and Shifts in the Narrative Stance”
Abstract: In Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague, once again a best-seller because of the Covid epidemic, the narrative stance shifts from that of the near-omniscient narrative, to occasional we-narrative, to the first-person stance. This shift has puzzled numerous readers, despite the feeling of its appropriateness to the material of the novel. My paper offers a new explanation for this shift, by relating it to the difference in the ethical maxims that the protagonist, Dr. Rieux, follows as an official and as a private person.
Bio: Leona Toker, Professor Emerita yet still teaching at the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of numerous articles as well as five books: Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010), and Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading (2019). She has put together the collection Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994) and has co-edited Rereading Texts / Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H. M. Daleski (1996) and Knowledge and Pain (2012). Since 2003 she is Editor of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas.