French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

Un Étranger En Exil: L’Expropriation Des Terres Et La Lutte Identitaire Dans L’Étranger, Suyang Wu

Senior Theses and Projects

While the pied noir writer Albert Camus has usually been depicted as either a “French writer” or an “anticolonial critic,” there are few more nuanced readings of his ambivalent standpoint toward the colonized population and territory of French Algeria. This thesis explores one of his most famous novels, L’Étranger (The Stranger, 1942), in order to elucidate the ways in which the colonial regime affects the material features of the land and the mental state of its inhabitants. In particular, this thesis examines the alienation of Meursault, the pied noir protagonist, by exploring how the pied noir experience is impacted by …