Date of Award

2024

First Advisor

David Franco

Second Advisor

Eric Trudel

Abstract

In the early 1940s Albert Camus ignited his career as a distinguished Francophone thinker through his creative and theoretical work on Absurdism. Though his conception of the absurd was largely popularized through his novel The Stranger (1942) and his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), he also published and staged an absurdist play in 1944 that garnered mixed response. Caligula (1944) interrogated these philosophical concerns within the setting of the ancient Roman empire, led by the infamous tyrannical emperor of the same name. This project seeks to situate Caligula as an expression of absurdism defined specifically through the dramatic form. Drawing from Camus’s writing on the drama in The Myth of Sisyphus, I consider Caligula as a staged illustration of the conceptual link between the theater and the absurd. I approach the play not only as a dramatic interpretation of absurdism, but as a testimony to the essential conceptual position that theater holds within absurdist philosophy. In cross-examination with Camus’s philosophical work and close-reading of the drama, this project identifies and defines the idea of the ‘absurd actor’ as the fundamental link between theatricality and absurdity in Caligula. I focus primarily on the play’s use of metatheatricality, identifying both implicit and explicit references to internal performance within the drama, as well as the influence of Greek tragedy on the play’s construction. In exposing these formal mechanisms, this thesis explores how Camus corrupts the dichotomies between actor/character, drama/audience, and ultimately reality/representation. Through this analytical work, I seek to reframe Caligula not as a derivative of Camus's previous works but as a unique exploration of absurdity through the theatrical form, and a necessary component of the theory of absurdism.

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