Plague

Plague or The Plague may refer to:

Agriculture, fauna, and medicine

Historical plagues

New York University

Coordinates: 40°43′48″N 73°59′42″W / 40.73000°N 73.99500°W / 40.73000; -73.99500

New York University (NYU) is a private, nonsectarian American research university based in New York City. Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the largest private non-profit institutions of American higher education. University rankings compiled in 2015 by U.S. News and World Report, Times Higher Education and the Academic Ranking of World Universities all ranked NYU among the 34 most reputable universities in the world. NYU is organized into more than twenty schools, colleges, and institutes, located in six centers throughout Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. NYU's main campus is located at Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan with institutes and centers on the Upper East Side, academic buildings and dorms down on Wall Street, and the Brooklyn campus located at MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn. The University also established NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai and maintains 11 other Global Academic Centers in Accra, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Florence, London, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Sydney, Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C.

The Plague

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

The novel is believed to be based on the cholera epidemic that killed a large percentage of Oran's population in 1849 following French colonization, but the novel is placed in the 1940s. Oran and its environs were struck by disease multiple times before Camus published this novel. According to a research report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Oran was decimated by the plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks, in 1921 (185 cases), 1931 (76 cases), and 1944 (95 cases), were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel.

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings, the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.