This book was shortlisted for the R.H. Gapper prize 2011. On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old
Albert Camus gave an inaugural lecture for a new Maison de la culture or community arts centre
in Algiers. Entitled 'La nouvelle culture méditerranéenne' ('The New Mediterranean Culture')
Camus's lecture has been interpreted in radically different ways: while some critics have
dismissed it as an incoherent piece of juvenilia others see it as key to understanding his
future development as a thinker whether as the first expression of his so-called
'Mediterranean humanism' or as an early indication of what is seen as his essentially colonial
mentality. These various interpretations are based on reading the text of 'The New
Mediterranean Culture' in a single context whether that of Camus's life and work as a whole
of French discourses on the Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria (and French discourses on that
country). By contrast this study argues that Camus's lecture - and in principle any historical
text - needs to be seen in a multiplicity of contexts discursive and otherwise if readers are
to understand properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camus's lecture as a case
study the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical justification of this
'multi-contextualist' approach.
