Reading the Absurd

ISBN-13: 9780748669264 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 224 str.

Joanna Gavins

Opis

Challenges traditional scholarship on absurdist literature, privileging the reader and the genre's stylistic achievementsSince Martin Esslin coined 'the Theatre of the Absurd' to describe experimental drama in the mid-twentieth century, the term 'absurd' has been adopted as a means of discussing a vast array of literary text. Many accounts have focused on the philosophical and thematic concerns of absurd prose fiction, but literary-criticism has failed to agree on the stylistic, generic, and temporal. This volume takes an alternative approach: its core aim is to provide a coherent, linguistically rigorous examination of the discourse features which characterise the absurd in literature.In order to understand how such a critically ill-defined term continues to have value and relevance to a global readership in the twenty-first century it takes as its starting point the readers who regularly use absurd terms and investigates their discussions in online fora, on literary tagging websites, and in face-t

Spis treści

List of Figures; Acknowledgements; 1 The Literary Absurd, THE ABSURD IN PHILOSOPHY, THE ABSURD IN LITERARY CRITICISM A NEW APPROACH, READERS OF THE ABSURD; 2 IDENTIFYING THE ABSURD, CATEGORIES AND CATEGORISATION, CONTEXT, COMMUNITY AND SITUATED CONCEPTS, A CLINE OF EXPERIMENTALISM, WRITING ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE ABSURD, READING ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE ABSURD, BUILDING ABSURD WORLDS, EXPERIMENTING WITH ABSURD WORLDS, HUMOUR AND THE ABSURD, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR; 3 ABSURD MINDS, A SINGULARLY MASCULINE PHENOMENON?, CHARACTER-BUILDING, READING OTHER PEOPLE’S MINDS, VERSIONS OF UNRELIABILITY, ESTRANGING MINDS, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR; 4 ABSURD FICTIONS, ABSURD WORLD-BUILDING REVISITED, ABSURD LANDSCAPES AND EMOTIONAL RESONANCE, TIME, SPACE, AND FICTIONALITY, MIXING GENRES, MIXING MODES, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR ; 5 ABSURD VERSES, THE STYLISTICS OF ABSURD PROSE FICTION, READING THE ABSURD IN PROSE FICTION, READING THE ABSURD IN POETRY, STYLISTIC FAMILY RESEMBLANCES ACROSS POETIC TEXTS, TOWARDS A STYLISTICS OF ABSURD POETRY, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR ; REFERENCES