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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Belliotti unravels the paradoxes of human existence to reveal paths for crafting meaningful, significant, valuable, even important lives. He argues that human life is not inherently absurd; examines the implications of mortality; contrasts subjective and objective meaning, and evaluates contemporary renderings of meaningful human lives.

The foundations of modern administrative law were laid in 1980, with the disparate opinions of a sharply divided Court in Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute (commonly referred to as the \"Benzene Case\"). Consider four points. (1) The Benzene Case is now understood to be the first contemporary appearance of the Major Questions Doctrine. (2) The Benzene Case marked the return of the nondelegation doctrine, signaled most plainly by then-Justice William Rehnquist's elaborate concurring opinion but also by a favorable reference in the plurality opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens and an open-minded sentence from Justice Lewis Powell. (3) The Benzene Case is the origin of contemporary cost-benefit default principles, permitting or requiring agencies to exempt de minimis risks, to consider costs, and to engage in some form of cost-benefit balancing, unless Congress has squarely said otherwise. (4) The Benzene Case essentially defined \"significant risk,\" with a precise numerical definition (one in one thousand) that persists at the Department of Labor to this day. At the same time, a close analysis of the plurality opinion in the Benzene Case shows that it is best understood as a specification, above all, of the Absurdity Canon--a Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States for the modern administrative state--with the specific purpose of ensuring against the imposition of high costs for small benefits, and thus of requiring a kind of proportionality between costs and benefits. So understood, the Benzene Case had, and continues to have, an important and salutary effect on regulatory programs. Its significant and much broader current role, more than four decades after the opinions were issued, is an intriguing case study in doctrinal development, and in particular, how Supreme Court decisions can plant small seeds that become big trees.