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This paper addresses the concept of the absurd in Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Fatos Kongoli’s The Lost One, works that come from different temporal and regional realities. Through a comparative method, it aims to reveal how the absurd is experienced and presented in two distinct literary worlds. In this context, similarities and differences are highlighted in the ways the characters confront the absurd: Meursault accepts it without resistance, while Thesari accepts it in an imposed manner because there is no other choice. This concept is viewed from different perspectives, also taking into account social factors, as social and political conditions play an important role in Kongoli’s absurd, whereas Camus’s absurd is deeply existential. It is understood that this comparative analysis emphasizes the universality of the theme of the absurd in literature, where the challenges faced by the individual in different cultures are also evident.

The literary poetics of Mexican writer Juan José Arreola (1918–2001), one of the great figures of 20th century Latin American narrative, rests on three pillars: his inscription in a specific literary tradition, an authorial position as a “cultural megaphone” and his preference for fantastic literature. Within that literary tradition, for Arreola Kafka, perhaps like no other author, provides a possible literary lens to examine in depth the human being of our time. The purpose of this paper is to traverse this Arreola-Kafka literary bridge and to read some edges of the Kafkaesque in Arreola’s work, paying special attention to the possible communicating vessels between the two literary projects.

The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the absurdity of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist means of re-education, which left a deep imprint on the history of Romanians by condemning not only the physical but also the spiritual death of the people. In this paper I have highlighted how the process of re-education took place in many circumstances. The class of intellectuality was the one that suffered the most as a result of these events, which can also be noticed in the case of the characters Axente Creangă and Leonte Pătrașcu from \"Luntrea lui Caron\". Using terror as an instrument of governance, censorship, propaganda and raising their ideology to the rank of universal principle, the Bolsheviks succeeded by the absurdity of the methods to massacre the population.

According to purpose theory (PT), God’s existence, telic creation of human beings, and human libertarian free will are necessary conditions for human life to be objectively meaningful. In this paper, I raise and respond to four objections to PT: two concerning insufficiencies and two regarding ambiguities in the theory. I conclude that PT-advocates have relatively effective replies to the second insufficiency objection and to both ambiguity objections, but that PT is vulnerable to the first insufficiency objection.

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

The study highlights Wilfred Owen's anger over the Loss of Young Soldiers' Lives in the Poem \"Anthem for Doomed Youth\". The objectives of the study are to show the anger of Wilfred Owen over the loss of young soldiers' lives, to show the physical and psychological state of the soldiers after the war, and to highlight the language of war poetry emphasizes some topics, such as suffering and death, violence, terror by the army, and hopelessness presented by the poet. The paper used a descriptive and analytical methodology to comprehend Owen's message about his refusal to funeral young soldiers in war. According to the study's conclusion, greater consideration must be given to those who defend their country, and their sacrifice when they pass away in war has to be recognized and appreciated. Consideration must be taken of the psychological state of those soldiers.

Wole Soyinka and Samuel Beckett apparently occupy distinct places in the literary space, in all ramifications. Specifically, while the former’s dramaturgy is definable within the context of the traditional convention of playwriting, otherwise known as well-made plays, the latter is inherently non-conformist in this regard. Hence, the effort in this paper was to locate a nexus in their writings, using two of their plays, Death and the King’s Horseman and Endgame, respectively. Theatre of the Absurd, as an offshoot of existentialism, provided the ground for the critical intersection of philosophical and ideological geometry of the two plays. The critical paradigm essentially relied on the interconnectivity of absurdist writings and existentialist thoughts, as the holistic context which fundamentally defines modernism, to assess what is conceived as modernist theatricality in the two plays. Building on the modernists’ interrogation of man’s existence and essence in the world in which existential meaning is presumably lost, the paper concluded that the two texts are largely intoned with modernist thoughts, regardless of their formal or structural distinction. It arrived at this by placing particular emphasis on the playwrights’ attempts, in these works, at demanding a more spontaneous response to the question of the essence of the individual and his/her place in the universe in which meaning in existence, in the modernist sense, is believed to have been lost.

Organisational absurdity is an emerging field of study in management sciences. Often described in conceptual terms in the existing literature as a loss of meaning arising from the collapsing frontiers of rationality, there have been few attempts to engage empirically with this absurdity, particularly from the perspective of new recruits joining organisations, and more specifically those who have recently completed their studies. Our research seeks to explore the ways in which young graduates respond to organisational absurdity and its consequences. To do this, we use an original empirical approach, which has been recognised elsewhere as a pertinent means of tackling absurdity, namely, fictional analysis. We thus propose an analogy between today’s young graduates and the young Romantics of the 19th century, invoking a number of literary references for heuristic ends, in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon in question. Now as in centuries past, upon coming face-to-face with absurdity, a considerable number of young people respond by retreating from their professional responsibilities. This state of affairs is illustrated by a series of 35 interviews, revealing a profound sense of disenchantment, which, in many cases, can lead young professionals to turn inwards and withdraw from their professional environments. In the face of this distress, our research invites organisations to rethink the way they manage young graduates.

While Reinhart Koselleck articulated the limits of conceptual history in relation to social history, and the limits of historiographical understanding in his discussion of the event, his thinking about the limits of the conceptual as such is harder to trace. However, a close reading of key texts where he discusses situations or events marked as “meaningless” or absurd, allows us to uncover both his ethics and analytics of the limit of meaning, of what we call “the ungraspable.” It is further argued that Koselleck's conceptual mapping of European modernity can be fruitfully extended by bringing it into contact with the ideas of thinkers such as Michel De Certeau, Edourd Glissant, and Francis Affergan who have contemplated how especially “the colonial” both represents the outside to and is the site from which the limit of European modernity and its conceptual universe might be (re)thought.

Although the concept of the Absurd seems to be characteristic only of modernity, especially since WWII, we face the intriguing opportunity to investigate its likely first emergence in the early thirteenth century in Der Stricker’s Pfaffe Amîs (ca. 1220). While the narrative framework insinuates that meaning and relevance continue to be the key components of the priest’s life, especially because he constantly seeks new sources of income for his own generosity and hospitality, his various victims increasingly face absurd situations and are abandoned even to the threat of insanity and death. The analysis of the verse narrative suggests that the protagonist begins to embrace crime and violence as the norm for his operations as a fake merchant. Thus, in some of the episodes of this famous Schwankbuch, elements of the absurd become visible, creating considerable irritation and frustration, if not horror and desperation, among the priest’s innocent victims.