Absurd Literature Research Articles

Absurdity as an inconsistently conducted reduction

The subject of the study is the connection between the absurd and phenomenology.The texts of representatives of the absurdist trend in literature and philosophy (Camus, Kafka, Musil), as well as the works of academic philosophers of the phenomenological direction (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Fink) are considered. The commonality of phenomenological interpretations of reality for some texts of the absurdist genre is proved. As a hypothesis, the existence of an epistemological dimension of meaning in the works of the absurd is put forward, interpreted by the author as a reception of the views of phenomenologists, problematized in the inconsistent reduction of phenomena. The methodological basis was the general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, as well as the critical analysis of the text. The scientific novelty lies in the attempt to present phenomenology as a precursor of absurdism, connected with it through the sphere of axiology. The main contribution of the author is the actualization of the epistemological layer of such a multifaceted phenomenon as the absurd, namely, the elaboration of the hypothesis that in many works of absurdists, the metamorphoses of the characters' consciousness are in fact an inconsistent reduction consisting in explicit metamorphoses of the Ego, as well as violating subject-object relations but not actually bracketing the idea of the world. Many literary contemporaries of Husserl devote their thoughts to the problems of phenomenology to one degree or another, which makes the connection between absurd literature and the key theses of early phenomenology logical.

Литературное творчество Даниила Хармса и супрематизм

Daniil Kharms is one of the representatives of the Russian avant-garde and absurd literature. His literary works, written in a variety of genres, are greatly infuenced by the art of avant-garde painting, especially by Malevich’s Suprematism. This article outlines the innate connection between the concept of Suprematism and Daniil kharms’s poetics, and analyzes the manifestations of Suprematism in Daniil Kharms’s literary works from the artistic perspective.

Eastern analysis of sizif plot and image

Absurd this is a complex of specific observations about the meaning of a dilapidated World, life, living. The Absurd work is a life phenomenon, which has become a habit, is valuable when it provokes a new perception of processes, arguing. The Absurd work is not an indifferent, indifferent attitude, but a product of rebellion in thought, in the soul. Let's not forget that the owner and theorist of Absurd creativity Kamyu said that “Absurd is the mind that understands the limit of its own”, “what I demand from though, I expect the same from absurd creativity -rebellion, freedom and colorfulness”! According to the theorists of Absurd literature, even in the bisot of writers who do not belong to absurd creativity, an absurd idea, a sense, an absurd hero can be looked at; an absurd problem can be put. For Example, F. Kafka is not an absurd creator, but in the works of this great writer the whole problem of absurdity is illuminated by keskinligi. The same can be observed in the work of such genius realist writers as Gogol, Dostoyevsky in world literature, and not Bugina. Also, the scope of absurdity is also incredibly wide. As is demonstrated in the narratives about you, this feeling, the idea can be manifested in works with a wide range of prose and eternal meanings, as well as in works with simple everyday real events taken in pencil.

The Absurdity of Human Life in Sampar Novel by Albert Camus

Absurdity experienced by humans in various fields of life, including its representation in the field of literature. The representation of Absurdity in literary works, especially translation literature, is widely known and has even been used as teaching material for students. The absurd literature of the translation, especially Albert Camus' Sampar novel, the authors chose to study and reveal the absurdist approach. This novel has become a material for teaching literature in Indonesian universities, so the results of this study can be used as reference material for teaching. The problem in studying an absurd novel is whether the feeling of Absurdity is only felt by the individual or the community in which the event occurred. In the novel Sampar, a collective absurdity will be described, which has not been revealed in Albert Camus's novel studies. The qualitative research methods are used with content analysis seen from existentialism philosophy. The most prominent consequence felt by the Oran community was the closure of the city door so that the Oran people experienced a sudden separation from people they loved without preparation. Sampar itself is a representation of collective Absurdity. The existence of sampar itself is also bizarre, weird, and irrational. Albert Camus shows his thoughts about human existence more thoroughly than other novels, acknowledging solidarity, friendship, and togetherness. According to Albert Camus, the absurd existence of humans is experienced at both individual and collective levels. There is no room for rationality, values, and moral-religious beliefs. These values have been devastated by the plague of world war, the crime of humanity that brought people to fear and despair. In the Sampar novel, there are individual absurdities felt by the leaders and the collective Absurdity felt by the people of Oran as a sense of solidarity with fellow human beings. High student learning motivation will affect better learning achievement. An understanding of human history after World War II and its absurd conditions can attract students to study absurd literary works.

Lithuanian Literature and Shakespeare: Several Cases of Reception

The article is based on the reception theory by Hans Robert Jauss and analyses how Shakespeare’s works were read, evaluated and interpreted in Lithuanian literature in the 19th to 21th centuries. Some traces of Shakespeare’s works might be observed in letters by Povilas Višinskis and Zemaitė where Shakespearean drama is indicated as a canon of writing to be followed. It is interesting to note that Lithuanian exodus drama by Kostas Ostrauskas is based on the correspondence between Višinskis and Zemaitė. The characters of the play introduce the principles of the drama of the absurd. Gell’s concept of distributed personhood offered by S. Greenblatt is very suitable for analysing modern Lithuanian literature that seeks a creative relationship with Shakespeare’s works. The concept maintains that characters of particular dramas can break loose from the defined interpretative framework.
 Lithuanian exodus drama reinterprets Shakespeare’s works and characters. The plays by Ostrauskas and Algirdas Landsbergis explore the variety of human existence and language, the absurd character of the artist, meaningless human existence and the critique of totalitarianism. Modern Lithuanian poetry interprets Shakespeare‘s works so that they serve as a way to contemplate the theme of modern writing, meaningless human existence, the tragic destiny of an individual and Lithuania, miserable human nature, the playful nature of literature, the clownish mask of the poet, the existential silence of childhood, the topic of life as a theatrical performance, the everyday experience of modern women in theatre. The most frequently interpreted dramas are Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth – Lithuanian literary imagination inscribed them into the field of existentialist and absurd literature.

Navigating the Mechanics of Secondary Imagination in the Select Works of Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter

The phrase “Science and Imagination”, in the most modern usage, has beckoned the interest of many critics across the globe to dwell on the many possible connections between the two conflicting concepts evoking myriad responses from social commentators. There are those who would dismiss the role of reason in imagination as the infringement of ethics in creative writing. Aesthetic imagination in creative writing perhaps demands going one step beyond the contours of reason to achieve what is artistically termed as the miraculous representation of reality. The juxtaposition of Science and Imagination is well explained in the words of Coleridge in Biographia Literaria as “To make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature_this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts”[223]. The confluence of science and imagination breaks down the seemingly opaque barrier between the heart and the head leaving the path open for the meeting and merging of intellect and emotion. The present paper works upon the ways by which the writers or artists of absurd literature, especially of drama, have used secondary imagination to recreate the experiences of their conscious will. The proposed paper titled “Navigating the Mechanics of Secondary Imagination in the Select Works of Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter” tries to explore the nuances of secondary imagination in Amedee or How to Get Rid of It and Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco and The Birthday Party and The Caretaker by Harold Pinter. The paper further intends to focus on how authors of absurd literature, like Ionesco and Pinter, reflect the futility and absurdity of human existence by making use of Secondary Imagination in their works.

Devalorizarea semantică a cuvintelor în publicitatea sportivă

Sport is one of the rituals of modern life. It reunites appropriate words when engaging in advertising, but the number of terms is rather limited. The ads prefer to include the image of a sports personality and brand name. Since the advertising hero is notorious, the persuasive force is assured by few verbal arguments. Typically, the pictures speak for themselves, joining a musical background and some funny instances. Words, which normally send so much information, are subjected to a gradual semantic loss. Our paper intends to comment upon this worrying aspect of vocabulary dynamics, highlighting terms used in spots (i.e. myth, legend, team, success, value, passion, good, thrilling etc.) but whose significance goes unnoticed or is misunderstood by the public. Our purpose is to illustrate the crisis of language and communication. They do not decompose like in the case of absurd literature, but become platitudes for a segment of the audience either ignorant or illiterate.

Unfolding of Romanian Fantasy Literature

민담에서 모호함과 마법은 자연의 법칙이 되며, 환상적 인물들과 사건은 필수적인 요소가 된다. 민담은 흔히 현실로부터 출발하지만 이내 일탈하여, 초현실 속에서 꿈의 세계가 아닌 인간이 추구하는 상상의 세계를 통과하는 데, 이는 환상계 속에서의 치환을 보여주는 전형적인 유형이다. 환상은 현실에서는 일어날 수 없는 사건들에 적절한 개연성을 부여하여 이 세계와 다른 세계의 경계를 허무는 것을 의미하게 된다. 루마니아 민담이 ‘환상성’ 을 담보할 수 있었던 것은 서사구조와 상징인물을 통한 여러 겹의 환상적 안전장치를 통해서이다. 구조적으로 볼 때, 민담의 서사전개 (도입상황 → 도입상황의 혼란과 난제 → 영웅적 행위에 의한 반전 → 상황의 재건 및 영웅의 보상)에 ‘서두와 결말의 동태’, ‘대조와 반복의 법칙’, ‘삼회화(三回化) 된 보조요소’ 등 다양한 서사법칙이 가미되어 환상구조의 발단과 매끄러운 전개를 보장하게 된다. 또한 다양한 모습으로 등장하는 인물들은 환상적 전통과 상징성을 위해 선과 악이라는 일반화된 관념을 대변하게 된다. 이 인물들 사이의 상관관계는 사건 진행의 간접적 반영이 되며, 더 나아가 사회질서와 연계하여 오랜 시간 그들 자신의 가치를 담보해준다. 루마니아 민담 으로부터 기원되고 구체화된 환상성의 전통이 근대에 이르러 크레안거에 의해 승계되고 진화하였다면, 본격적 예술장르로서 환상문학의 발전과 오늘날의 위상은 에미네스쿠와 엘리아데에 의해 이루어졌다고 할 수 있다. 민담의 다양한 실체들을 모태로 하여 전개, 발전된 루마니아 환상문학의 요소 들은 이후 20세기에 접어들면서 초현실주의나 부조리문학 등 다른 문학에 새로운 방향과 가능성을 마련해주었다.In folktales (especially in fairy tales), the ambiguity and the magic become the laws of nature, and the fantastic characters and episodes become essential elements. The story of folktale often departs from reality but deviates soon, and in a supernatural atmosphere it passes through the imaginary world that human beings pursue rather than the dream world. This is a typical type of substitution in the fantasy world. Fantasy gives appropriate probabilities to the episodes that can not happen in reality and breaks the boundaries of this world and the other world. The Romanian folktale was able to secure this fantasy through multiple layers of safeguards for fantasy literature such as narrative structures and symbolic characters. Structurally, various narrative laws or formulas (such as ‘basic formal unit of the beginning and ending of folktales’, ‘the law of contrast and repetition’, ‘auxiliary element of triple conversion’ etc.) are added to the unfolding of folk narration (initial situation → confusion and difficulties of initial situation → reversal by heroic action → reconstruction of situation and reward of hero), and then these ensure the smooth progress of narration and the development of the fantastic structure. In addition, characters appearing in various forms represent the generalized notion of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ for fantastic tradition and symbol. The correlation between these characters is an indirect reflection of the progress of the narration, and further assures their own value for a long time in connection with their social order. If the tradition of fantasy originated and embodied from Romanian folktales has been succeeded and evolved by Creangă during the transition to modern times, as a genuine art genre, the fantasy literature and its present status have been made by Eminescu and Eliade. The elements of Romanian fantasy literature, originated and developed with various figures of folktales, provided new directions and possibilities for other literatures, such as surrealism, absurd literature etc. in the 20th century.

The Absurd Aspect Of The Death Of God

After the death of God we came up against the loss of supreme value and thus loss of meaning, some philosophers and some writers (especially absurdist ones) call the new world as chaotic and absurd. In this paper, we will investigate the relationship between the death of God and absurdity. Our main question: Does the death of God have the absurdist vein? For this inquiry, first of all, we will try to introduce what is the meaning of the-death-of-God in absurd literature and then we will make a short conceptual analysis of absurd to show relationship between them.

Teaching Absurd Literature – Ionesco's Transgressive Dramatic Discourse in Dialogue with other Texts

The literary work has continually been subjected to comments. Any literary text can convey regular meta-linguistic and meta-pragmatic elements, and may call on codes and meta-linguistic and meta-pragmatic skills to eliminate misunderstandings or misconceptions. Our work aims to address the manner in which Eugene Ionesco's absurd dramatic texts fall under the sign of metatextuality and how this approach was integrated in a theatre of the absurd course at university level, in order to foster students’ thorough understanding of Ionesco's plays. Through a well structured theory presentation and through concrete analysis of some of Ionesco's plays, students have managed to see how the dialogue with other texts can become meaningful and eventually understand the author's message in detail.

Teaching Absurd Literature–A Pragmatic Approach to Ionesco's Transgressive Dramatic Discourse: The Conversational Maxims

This paper aims to present a rhetorical-pragmatic approach to Eugène Ionesco's plays in order to be used when teaching a theatre of the absurd course at university level. Students often feel confused when studying absurd literature as they find it hard to understand the authors’ message thoroughly. We discovered that if we approached the absurd dramatic discourse from a transgressive point of view with regard to Grice's conversational maxims, the literature course proved to be more productive and entertaining at the same time.

Sisyphus and Caesar: the opposition of Greece and Rome in Albert Camus' absurd cycle

Albert Camus’ reception of the ancient world is a subject deserving greater consideration than it has currently received. This article will discuss the importance of Greece and Rome in Camus’ Absurd cycle and its implications in the context of colonial Algeria. I begin with an analysis of Camus’ instinctive polarization of Greece and Rome (Greece as artistic and democratic; Rome as violent and imperialist), before arguing that this antithesis was vital in two of Camus’ most lasting creations: Sisyphus and Caligula. I will examine both the complex use of Greek myth in Le Mythe de Sisyphe and Camus’ contrasting representation of Roman society in the play Caligula. These receptions will then be situated within the political and literary contexts in which Camus wrote, particularly that of colonialism. Camus’ reception of the ancient world reveals much about his complex relationship with Algeria. Even as he rejected the Latinizing tropes of previous colonial writers, his own concept of Graeco-Mediterraneanism was equally predicated on Eurocentric discourses. Camus’ vision of the ancient world goes to the heart of understanding not only his Absurd literature but ultimately, I suggest, reveals a writer at a crossroads between Europe and Africa.

The Irrational in Politics

In the sixties I attempted to comprehend the Zen paradox: 1,400 years of handing down a tradition through absurd statements. I had to construct a theory of the absurd. It led me to the conclusion that not only connections among words could be absurd (patently wrong); connections among objects themselves (new, uncustomary, unrealized) could also be absurd. God hung on the cross seemed an absurdity. The Apostle Paul acutely felt this absurdity, and later Tertullian felt it even more acutely. A thousand years later, for Aquinas, the sense of absurdity had subsided, and the diminution of God to the perspective of the slave became a postulate of scholastic reason. In all transitional periods, when the world is out of joint, a palpably absurd situation arises, and grotesque, absurd literature is created. Francois Villon became popular in Russia in the twentieth century, not very long before Kafka; the poem written for the contest in Blois engraved itself in my memory. The poem is rational in its own way, i....

The Irrational in Politics

In the sixties I attempted to comprehend the Zen paradox: 1,400 years of handing down a tradition through absurd statements. I had to construct a theory of the absurd. It led me to the conclusion that not only connections among words could be absurd (patently wrong); connections among objects themselves (new, uncustomary, unrealized) could also be absurd. God hung on the cross seemed an absurdity. The Apostle Paul acutely felt this absurdity, and later Tertullian felt it even more acutely. A thousand years later, for Aquinas, the sense of absurdity had subsided, and the diminution of God to the "perspective of the slave" became a postulate of scholastic reason. In all transitional periods, when the "world is out of joint," a palpably absurd situation arises, and grotesque, absurd literature is created. François Villon became popular in Russia in the twentieth century, not very long before Kafka; the poem written for the contest in Blois engraved itself in my memory. The poem is rational in its own way, i.e., it describes well the realities of life itself.