Creation Corrected: Philosophy, Rebellion, and Literature in the Work of Albert Camus

This article challenges views which identify Albert Camus’ philosophy of art and artistic creation with his position in Myth of Sisyphus, a position which he soon moved beyond, as we show in part 1. In the longer part 2 of the paper, I argue that Camus developed and worked with not less than four different ideas of art and artistic creation across his works: those of absurd creation, a restrained neoclassicism associated with the classical French novel, the idea of “creation corrected” which predominates in the sections on art in The Rebel; and the idea of art as bearing witness in a period of political absolutisms and totalistic ideologies, a vision which is stressed in his speeches surrouding the award of the Nobel Prize in 1957