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"Absurd (Philosophy)"
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Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd
Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shephard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole. The collection's interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.
eBook
Curiosity Without Curiosity: Challenging an Absurdity in the Structural Affect Theory
Placing the outcome at the beginning of a story before the reasoning for that outcome does not necessarily make the reader curious, contrary to what some structural affect theorists posit. Using reader-response theory, this article explores six instances drawn from Thousand and One Nights and The Odyssey where the outcome appears at the beginning and the details leading up to that outcome are later explained. The main difference between these two in terms of generating curiosity in the reader through structural manipulation is that the author of The Odyssey waits an unreasonably long time before addressing the situation again, with the author distracting the reader with unnecessary side stories in the interim. The author of Thousand and One Nights, on the other hand, stays focused on the situation first raised when stating the outcome. While one might think that such a difference is only a matter of degree, the difference has a significant impact on the reader's experience inasmuch as the approach in Thousand and One Nights generates feelings of actual curiosity in the reader, while that of The Odyssey does not. This article represents a pilot study of how readers react to literature, based on the reader-response theory, with a focus on tension between the different notions of curiosity. In essence, the difference in these two types of curiosity resembles the difference between the efferent stance and the aesthetic stance of reader-response theory, with the first focusing on the personal experience of the reader, while the second focuses on pure analysis of the text's structure. Keywords: Structural affect theory, curiosity, world literature, reader-response theory
Journal Article
Anger and Absurdity
I argue that there is an interesting and underexplored sense in which some negative reactive attitudes such as anger are often absurd. I explore implications of this absurdity, especially for our understanding of forgiveness.
Journal Article
Albert Camus and education
This book continues the story about education and the absurd. Its specific focus is on the work of Albert Camus. It tries to summarise the ways in which his writing has already inspired and influenced educational thinking and practice, and it offers a new set of educational interpretations of six of his major works. These set out the exciting challenge about how we might think about the purposes and practices of education in the future, how to talk about these, plan and deliver.
Book
Faith and the Absurd: Kierkegaard, Camus and Job’s Religious Protest
Religious protest, such as the protest that Job expresses, reveals the manners in which believers experience the absurd while hanging on to God. The purpose of this article is to explore the “grammar” of this paradoxical faith stance by bringing Kierkegaard and Camus to bear upon it, and thereby to show the “family resemblance” between Job, Camus’s “absurd man,” and the Kierkegaardian believer. I begin with a discussion of experiences of the absurd that give rise to religious protest. I then turn to Kierkegaard to explore the manners in which “faith’s thought” renders the “experience of the absurd” a religious one, while pushing the believer further into the absurd. I end with a discussion of Job as an absurd rebel in Camus’s sense.
Journal Article
Sillinity as Survival: Humor and the Modern Refugee Condition in Three Narratives
This paper explores the concept of \"sillinity\", an intentional lighthearted absurdity, as a narrative strategy in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and contemporary refugee memoirs: Atef Abu Saifs Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide (2024) and Yusra Mardini's Butterfly: From Refugee to Olympian--My Story of Rescue, Hope, and Triumph (2018). While Twain's novel is celebrated for its humor and satire, this study argues that its sillinity operates as an emblem of resilience and survival under precarious conditions. By examining Huck's humor to navigate societal and geographical borders, alongside Abu Saifs and Mardini's use of humor to confront displacement and state violence, the paper highlights sillinity's ability to transcend temporal and geographical boundaries. This analysis positions Huckleberry Finn as a timeless text that offers a nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between humor and endurance in the contemporary refugee narratives and establishes sillinity as a universal tool for reclaiming agency and resisting subjugation. Index Terms--refugees, humor, sillinity, resistance, displacement
Journal Article
Reporting from a Migrant Camp ‘with Humour and Humanity’
Abstract In Les Nouvelles de la Jungle de Calais [News from the Calais jungle], authors Lisa Mandel and Yasmine Bouagga report on the 2016 migrant camp dismantlement. Instead of opting for a descriptive empathetic approach aligning with the expected humanitarian discourse, the narrator resorts to humour to highlight the absurd situations migrants encounter. This article demonstrates that humour, an effective narrative engine, underpins a powerful criticism of the system migrants must navigate. Humour is used to mitigate the representational effect of the spectacle of harsh living conditions and redirects our attention to the shortcomings of the humanitarian approach and to the key role played by journalists in disseminating simplistic or inaccurate reports. Through absurd humour, the book avoids many representational pitfalls and invites the reader to reflect on their own positionality.
Journal Article