Volume 67, Issue 4  

Honoring the Dead,
Literary Devices Headline Book Project Lectures

by Moshe Hertz

The Yeshiva College Book Project lecture series continued last month as Janny Scott, former reporter for The Los Angeles Times and editor of The New York Times’s series of obituaries on the victims of the September 11 terror attacks, and Dr. Holly Haahr, Assistant Professor of French at YC, spoke to students and faculty about subjects pertaining to Albert Camus’s The Plague, this year’s Book Project text.

On October 23rd, approximately one hundred students and faculty members gathered in Belfer Hall to hear Janny Scott talk about her experiences composing roughly 250-word obituaries for every victim of September 11. Though her presentation did not relate directly to Camus’s book, it segued with the issue of suffering, a prominent theme of The Plague.

Scott explained that the most challenging part of her job stemmed from the necessity to stay within the mandated word limit and to provide each victim with an obituary that steered clear from the generic.  To illustrate these challenges, Scott read a handful of her obituaries to show how much could be captured in just a few sentences if they are crafted dexterously. She said her task was to “bring divinity to the common language.”

Between September 12th and December 31st, 2001, two to four pages of obituaries were included in every issue of the newspaper, she said. A book was also published recently that contains every obituary The Times published about the terror victims.

On October 31st, Dr. Haahr addressed about 25 students and faculty members about the narrative strategies of The Plague.

Haahr highlighted the changes of weather in the book’s storyline, explaining that the cycle of the plague parallels the seasons of the year.  This congruence reflects the book’s overall theme of eternal return and renewal, she said. Haahr also compared the semantic differences of the narration between the English translation and the original French text.

Additionally, Haahr proposed that Camus creates many “intertexts” within The Plague. Through the literary device of allusion, she said, subplots embedded within the narrative supplement and complement the text with additional, subtler themes and ideas.

“In essence, the Plague is hooked in to a network and therefore can be viewed with all the dynamics of these other works,” Haahr said.

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