Semiotic Issues of Perception in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger

Abstract

Considered as a romantic incarnation of author’s ideas, L’Etranger put us in front of the absurd through the problematic character of Meursault, often studied and commented as subject of this philosophical attitude. The absurd presupposes a relationship between man and the world and is thus inevitably linked to perception: a sensory experience then founds the discourse of the novel, establishing Meursault as percipient/enunciator subject. We will use the resources offered by semiotics of discourse in its phenomenological version for analyzing the perceptual path of Meursault and especially to consider the question of Camus’s absurd under a new light