Shaun Tan's 2001 picture book "The Red Tree" features a nameless, redheaded protagonist wandering through a series of surreal, strange and overwhelmingly dark landscapes. Tan himself, together with his commentators, has characterised "The Red Tree's" contents as "absurd," yet this term has not been defined, nor have…

Birzeit University (BZU)--established in 1924 by the Nasir family--was born out of struggle and developed as a microcosm of the Palestinian national movement against the Zionist settler colonial state of Israel. This article explores specific moments of solidarity with BZU and beyond. I map out a genealogy of three modes of solidarity with…

Intertextuality, the term defining the relationship and the similarity of a newly-produced text with previous ones, has provided a broad array of subjects to be studied especially in social sciences. Firstly, literary works have been analyzed within the framework of intertextuality, and striking similarities have been found among literary texts.…

The COVID-19 pandemic can be read as an eruption of the Real: a traumatic event that overwhelms our capacity for symbolization and exposes the fragility of the imaginary. Albert Camus addresses this traumatic dimension in his 1947 novel "The Plague," in which he reserves a rather puzzling statement for the closing paragraph: A plague…

Within the community of inquiry literature, the absence of the notion of genuine doubt is notable in spite of its pragmatic roots in the philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce, for whom the notion was pivotal. We argue for the need to correct this oversight due to the educational significance of genuine doubt--a theoretical and experiential…

In this paper, we will explore how Albert Camus has much to offer philosophers of education. Although a number of educationalists have attempted to explicate the educational implications of Camus' literary works, these analyses have not attempted to extrapolate pedagogical guidelines towards developing an educational framework for children's…

This article examines the concept of the stranger and the experience of strangeness in Albert Camus's "The Stranger." These themes have a range of synergies with educational thought. They also lead us to other concepts that may have a place in educational debate, in particular the concepts of the absurd and rebellion. This train of thought also…

Philosophical works are rich resources in terms of ideological aspects and literary inferences. Since these works aim to transmit the philosophical references to readers, original utilizations should be well-preserved in translation. Nevertheless, certain deviations can be observed in the translation of philosophical works due to the individual…

Over the course of the past few decades, scholars and theorists have engaged in a dynamic and concerted effort to interpret, make sense of, and resist a variety of social phenomena often categorized under the concept of "postmodernism." This project has also been taken up by educators of various stripes, especially those who identify…

The arrival of digital media in early education appears to have been both the cause and effect of an idea of a universal experience of rapidly changing time. In this article, the role and purpose of the phrase "we live in rapidly changing times" is of critical concern. The phrase is questioned in order to avoid taking its meaning for…

Among the most neglected of Albert Camus' literary works is his play "The misunderstanding." Composed while Camus was in exile in occupied France, and first performed on stage in 1944, "The misunderstanding" depicts the events that unfold when a man returns, without declaring his identity, to a home he left 20 years ago.…

This is the second of two articles that are connected in a reading of "The plague" by Albert Camus. The other article is a determined narration of the events of a tragedy that befalls a city on the coast of Algeria. That article resists analysis beyond the decisions that are made regarding text to use, and of course interpretations to…

In one of his notebooks, Albert Camus describes, "The stranger," "The myth of Sisyphus," "Caligula" and "The misunderstanding" as pertaining to a series; a schema that suggests that if one were to write about one of these literary works, one would be writing about parts of a whole unless one also engaged…

Quality education reform in China gives high importance to developing the individual's full potential. However, the education system is dominated by a kind of exclusive competitiveness in which high stakes examinations shape the learning process. This paper seeks to bring a philosophical perspective regarding the disjunction between the intent of…

Over the past half century, Albert Camus's story "The Guest" has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. "The Guest" focuses on the ethical dilemmas faced by Daru, a school teacher in Algeria, and the two visitors he receives one day: Balducci, a gendarme, and an unnamed Arab prisoner. This paper addresses Camus's text from an educational…