What is the literary absurd? What are its key textual features? How can it be analysed? How do different readers respond to absurdist literature?Taking the theories and methodologies of stylistics as its underlying analytical framework, Reading the Absurd tackles each of these questions. Selected key works in English literature are examined in depth to reveal significant aspects of absurd style. Its analytical approach combines stylistic inquiry with a cognitive perspective on language, literature and reading which sheds new light on the human experience of literary reading.By exploring the literary absurd as a linguistic and experiential phenomena, while at the same time reflecting upon its essential historical and cultural situation, Joanna Gavins brings a new perspective to the absurd aesthetic.
In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition. Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett’s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.
What is the literary absurd? What are its key textual features? How can it be analysed? How do different readers respond to absurdist literature?Taking the theories and methodologies of stylistics as its underlying analytical framework, Reading the Absurd tackles each of these questions. Selected key works in English literature are examined in depth to reveal significant aspects of absurd style. Its analytical approach combines stylistic inquiry with a cognitive perspective on language, literature and reading which sheds new light on the human experience of literary reading.By exploring the literary absurd as a linguistic and experiential phenomena, while at the same time reflecting upon its essential historical and cultural situation, Joanna Gavins brings a new perspective to the absurd aesthetic.
A "Business Week" bestseller, this original, contrarian philosophy challenges today's leaders to look past the quick fix and deal thoughtfully with the real complexities of managing people.
First published in 1969, provides a helpful introduction to the study of Absurdist writing and drama in the first half of the twentieth century. After discussing a variety of definitions of the Absurd, it goes on to examine a number of key figures in the movement such as Esslin, Sartre, Camus, Ionesco and Genet. The book concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the term ‘Absurd’ and possible objections to Absurdity. This book will be of interest to those studying Absurdist literature as well as twentieth century drama, literature and philosophy.
Mr. David Madden lives in L.A. He's an ordinary man. Every day, he gets up and drives to work. Only he never gets there. Instead, he drives from here to there, from Westwood to Santa Monica, Santa Monica to Venice . . . and so on. It seems he's always just going from point A to point B. Of course, driving from point A to point B--that's pretty much what people do in L.A. But then one day a mishap occurs, a breakdown of sorts, on Santa Monica Boulevard. Soon the media takes notice, and overnight Mr. Madden is transformed into a pioneering cultural figure as his "A-to-B thing" goes viral and becomes the defining issue of our time. Questions are asked, solutions offered, and blame assigned as therapists, academics, police, and lawyers all get involved. Safe to say, no one escapes unscathed in this caustic, irreverent, and hilarious social satire. Pierre Schlag is University Distinguished Professor and Byron R. White Professor of Law at the University of Colorado. He lives in the foothills of Boulder with his wife, the author Elisabeth Hyde. His three children have grown up and escaped relatively unharmed.
This book is an attempt to read the totality of Camus’s oeuvre as a voyage, in which Camus approaches the fundamental questions of human existence: What is the meaning of life? Can ultimate values be grounded without metaphysical presuppositions? Can the pain of the other penetrate the thick shield of human narcissism and self-interest? Solipsism and solidarity are among the destinations Camus reaches in the course of this journey. This book is a new reading of one of the towering humanists of the twentieth century, and sheds new light on his spiritual world.
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “How To will make you laugh as you learn…With How To, you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with How To.” —CNET “[How To] has science and jokes in it, so 10/10 can recommend.” —Simone Giertz The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a 90's kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the Sun. By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and fun illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.
This is a remarkable account of a personal journey exploring the evidence for, and far-reaching implications of, human evolution. It is also a powerful inside look at the experience of lecturing on controversial matters at the academic meccas of America. In 1964, Raymond Nogar, a Dominican Scholar Priest and author of the highly regarded book, The Wisdom of Evolution, set out on a ten campus tour that took him to the Universities of Illinois, California, Stanford, North Carolina, Harvard, Michigan and Notre Dame, among others. The Lord of the Absurd is not a collection of Nogar's Lectures, but rather a series of reflections about interaction with audiences, challenging modes of thinking, understanding the risk of unsettling ideas, and the deepening of the author's own convictions in the very presentation of his lectures. He came to realize that the "transforming effect of speaking, in its most creative phases, calls forth much more interpersonal existence, one in which the speaker, the listener and the word are caught up in a drama of human experience which reinterprets the world and gives directions to an existence which otherwise would remain utterly senseless." One sees in Nogar's reflections on his lecture experiences a progressive deepening of his own thought and spirituality. The same evidence for human evolution that has led some to atheism and a view of existence itself as Absurd, the result of nothing more than chance, circumstance and complexity, leads Nogar to a deeper appreciation of the mystery of creation. He acknowledges that the human situation is filled with frivolity and fate, wonders and strangeness and happenings whose apparent meaninglessness pose a dilemma. But, for Nogar, it was exactly in that human situation that Christ presented himself. His life, death and resurrection show him not as the Lord of cosmic order but as Lord of the Absurd. This book can be read with profit by anyone who wishes to probe the truly profound questions of life.
