Bridging third wave HCI with infrastructure studies, this paper examines the relationship between infrastructural visibility, breakdown, and experience through an existentialist lens. We present and ...theorize a state of infrastructural functionality - which we term 'hyper-functionality' - that renders infrastructure visible because of its experiential effects on end-users, not necessarily because of malfunction. We introduce this term through the presentation of a story from the life of one of the authors in which an infrastructural assemblage behaved unexpectedly, giving rise to the experience of the absurd - a feeling of alienation from oneself and the technological assemblages that constitute one's daily world. We explore the applicability of hyper-functionality for the interpretation and theorization of larger-scale scenarios by using it to interpret reactions to the role that social media - Facebook in particular - played in the troubled United States presidential election in 2016. We contend that the existentialist-tinted lens of hyper-functionality constitutes a novel and meaningful way of analyzing the human experience of the mundane in relation to infrastructures, thus forming the basis for a humanistic infrastructure studies.
By questioning the presence of the work of Albert Camus in the novel Meursault, contre-enquête (Barzakh, 2013 and Actes Sud, 2014) by Kamel Daoud, the marks appear of a political and poetic ...commitment that arises today as yesterday from a concern due to the absence of landmarks.Two authors, both writers and journalists, from one side to the other of colonial history, raise the fundamental question of the reason of hate. Daoud with his Arab, like Camus with his Meursault, find the answer beyond ideologies, but in the absurd. Is this the price to pay to free oneself from a story haunted by the colonial fracture ?
Rationalizing "absurdity" Huang, Jim
The Yale law journal,
05/2024, Letnik:
133, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Critiqued as a blank check for judicial intervention, the absurdity canon has been all but abandoned by modern textualists. But this Note argues that its total dismissal is unwarranted. By dissecting ...the multiple meanings of "absurdity," this Note reframes the absurdity canon as a form of constitutional avoidance. Properly understood, the absurdity canon enforces constitutional values of rationality embedded in the Equal Protection Clause. This conception should have broad appeal to both textualists and nontextualists alike, calibrating judicial deference with traditional rule-of-law values.
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.
Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on ...certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and selected works, before moving on to discuss four key writers: Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien. The absurd in literature will be of compelling interest to a considerable range of students of comparative, European (including Russian and Central European) and English literatures (British Isles and American) – as well as those more concerned with theatre studies, the avant-garde and the history of ideas (including humour theory). It should also have a wide appeal to the enthusiastic general reader.
Existentialism has influenced a lot of literary works throughout history. Existentialism can be studied in literary works by means of foregrounding the existential themes and techniques. Some of ...these themes are being, change, freedom, selfcognizance, isolation, responsibility, free-will, and alienation. Traversing the boundary between philosophy and literature, this essay aims to analyse the existential themes of Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit or Huis Clos (1944) and Hasan Ali Toptaş’s Shadowless1 or Gölgesizler (1993) with an intertextual and comparative approach. This essay considers Sartre’s No Exit and Toptaş’s Shadowless as postmodern texts. Before exploring the existentialist themes and techniques in No Exit and Shadowless, this study aims to discuss the tradition of existentialism in literature. After presenting an introductory review on such existentialist concepts in literature as existence, essence, freedom, angst, and absurd, some recurrent themes in Sartre’s and Toptaş’s works will be highlighted and analysed. After a brief exploration of the influence of existentialism on Turkish literature, the essay will focus on the textual analysis. No Exit will be analysed from the perspective provided by such concepts as “being-for-itself”, “being-for-other”, “isolation and claustrophobic existence”; as for Shadowless, “being and nothingness” and “anxiety of uncertainty, emptiness and meaninglessness” will serve as the existential themes reflected in the novel. Within the framework of existentialism, an intertextual approach to and a comparative analysis of Shadowless from Turkish Literature along with No Exit from French Literature is an attempt of situating Modern Turkish Literature within the broader regional and global context. As a last point, this paper also aims to contribute both to critical studies on Sartre’s work and scholarship on the woks of Hasan Ali Toptaş work whose works of fiction have rarely been discussed from a comparative or world literature studies perspective.
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