Existentialism never had much influence on Anglo-American philosophy.  Peaking perhaps with Thomas Nagel’s 1971 article “The Absurd,” it has more often been sneeringly dismissed, or simply ignored.  Arriving in translation during the worst decades of the analytic/continental divide (the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy was founded in 1962 because of analytic hegemony at the American Philosophical Association), it was frequently approached by scholars in other disciplines (French, comparative literature, religion) instead.  And yet, almost every philosophy department now still regularly offers a popular class on existentialism, and it is the topic of a disproportionate amount of public-facing philosophy.

Why and how, when and where, does interest in existentialism persist beyond its apogee in mid-twentieth-century France, and well after Camus distanced himself from the label and Sartre turned to socialism?  Following Beauvoir and Fanon, is existentialism still useful in analyzing patriarchy, racism, and colonialism, given Beauvoir’s seeming assumption of a gender binary, the orientalism of texts in the tradition like Andre Gide’s The Immoralist and Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, and how poorly Sartre’s conception of radical freedom seems equipped to explain societal constraints?  Why and how did existentialism get taken up by Richard Wright and Walker Percy in America, and Kobo Abe in Japan?  How do other, more recent novels, like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder or Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, rewrite and critique this tradition?  Are there unappreciated places where existentialism can contribute to current philosophical and theoretical debates?

This seminar welcomes papers on recurrences of interest in existentialism in different historical eras; on how it has been taken up and adapted by more recent writers, filmmakers, and other artists; on its spread to literatures beyond France; and timely reconsiderations of the continued relevance of Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir or forerunners like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Dostoevsky, Ivan Ilyich, and Bartleby, and others who should be understood as existentialists.

Email Ben Roth (ben_roth2@emerson.edu) with any questions.