This paper seeks to demonstrate the critical utility of the concept of the absurd in the exploration of the combined and uneven apocalypse known as the Anthropocene. Drawing inspiration from ...absurdist literature, and based on extensive field research, it takes the form of a psychogeographical journey down a non-existent highway in the Peruvian Amazon. The route of this long-promised megaproject is inhabited by people adrift in the midst of meaningless ruins, haunted by spectral infrastructures that were promised but never came, and plagued by monstrous apparitions of extractive violence. Consistent with absurdist method, the paper resists the temptation to leap out of this disconcerting domain into the normalizing rituals of academic sensemaking, and aims instead to grasp and convey the disorienting lived experience of ‘space out of joint’. In doing so, it suggests that an absurdist sensibility can contribute to current debates in cultural geography on spectrality, psychogeography, and creative writing, through its emphasis on irrationality and indeterminacy, its exploration of chaotic and disintegrating spaces, and its evocation of fragmentation and disjuncture in the form of jagged shards of stark and vivid prose.
Published in 2021, both monographs on Tennessee Williams — Stanley Gontarski’s Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater and Laura Michiels’ The Metatheater of Tennessee ...Williams: Tracing the Artistic Process Through Seven Plays perform the dual task of offering new perspectives on the playwright’s wellstudied plays and elaborating on the lesser-known material with its non-obvious cultural functions. Researchers show the complexity of Williams’ late oeuvre, demonstrating how his plays of the 1960s and early 1980s continue theatrical experiments of the second half of the 20th century. Developing the themes of his earlier period (theatricality of life and experience, the vulnerability of beauty and artistry, the fragility of memory, and the conflicts between the strong and the weak), Williams has enriched both poetic and naturalistic theater styles through absurdist aesthetics, his use of stylistic excess and an emphasis on metatheatre — spectacles about spectacles. Gontarski's book discusses Williams' influence on subsequent popular culture and its representation of the images of masculinity. Gontarski shows how Williams' success across the Atlantic depended on censorship (“The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil” being an intriguing part of Chapter 2) or greater stage freedom (Sweden). Late plays (In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Two-Character Play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel) allow the author to take a closer look at Williams’ absurdist poetics and the intriguing process of “becoming Beckett,” which the American playwright reenacts. Laura Michiels explores different types of metatheater in Williams’s work: “mythical” (Orpheus Descending), “esoteric” (Two-Character Play), “marauding” (Clothes for the Summer Hotel), “multiplying" and “negotiating” (Sweet Bird of Youth, Something Cloudy, Something Clear). Michiels shows how Williams' dramas open up to issues important for contemporary interdisciplinary studies: the audience’s emotional and affective responsiveness, the work of memory, and intermedial dialogism. Michiels’ book offers a wide range of tools for unpacking metatheatricality of the 20th-century drama.
What if we imagined a mirror that reflects the city’s reality to itself? What if the city’s components identified themselves and defined meaning in their own reflections? This article aims to explore ...the critical dimensions of the contemporary reality of a place from multiple and unexpected points of view. It explains the theoretical framework of a project which is being conducted as part of wider research that focuses on the informal behaviors and interventions in the urban morphology that is made by the inhabitants of the urban cluster around Damascus.
The stage of the ’50s brings a new aesthetic attitude, initially perceived as a threat to the theatre itself. Many voices talked about the death of representation, about final aesthetics, but time ...has proved that it was merely an effort to adapt the art of performance to the demands of contemporary society. The idea of cruelty in the theatre, stated by Antonin Artaud and transformed into aesthetics by the playwrights of the 1950s, means not only the necessity of the shock effect of the new theatre in order to make a real connection with the audience, as it often appears in literary criticism, but also understanding theatre as the theatre of life, as an essential form of knowledge.
Considéré comme l’incarnation romanesque des idées de son auteur, L’Étranger nous met face à l’absurde à travers le personnage problématique de Meursault, souvent étudié et commenté en tant que sujet ...de cette attitude philosophique. Or,comme l’absurde présuppose une relation entre l’homme et le monde ,il se trouve ainsi immanquablement lié à la perception: une expérience sensible fonde alors le discours du roman tout en instituant Meursault en tant que sujet percevant/énonçant. Nous ferons appel aux ressources qu’offre la sémiotique du discours dans sa version phénoménologique pour analyser le parcours perceptif de Meursault et surtout pour examiner sous un jour nouveau la question de l’absurde camusien.
Considered as a romantic incarnation of author’s ideas, L’Etranger put us in front of the absurd through the problematic character of Meursault, often studied and commented as subject of this philosophical attitude. The absurd presupposes a relationship between man and the world and is thus inevitably linked to perception: a sensory experience then founds the discourse of the novel, establishing Meursault as percipient/enunciator subject. We will use the resources offered by semiotics of discourse in its phenomenological version for analyzing the perceptual path of Meursault and especially to consider the question of Camus’s absurd under a new light.
Algerian graphic novelist Nawel Louerrad always probes questions of identity and memory in her texts. In Les Vêpres algériennes (2012) and Bach to Black (2013), she argues for an understanding of ...these concepts as multiple and fluid, thus countering memorial discourses by advocating instead for spaces where individuals can be constructed and deconstructed at will. This paper analyzes how Louerrad's aesthetic and thematic treatment of shapes and sounds clears a path for original representations of identity formation. In giving the narrator a multitude of shapes, the artist hints at the internal conflicts present within each body and generates a graphically striking visual heteroglossia. Similarly, Louerrad's obsession with sounds and music destabilises meaning by fragmenting semiotic systems at play within her bandes dessinées.
Algerian graphic novelists and mangakas are both opening and broadening the space for their media in the rapidly evolving field and market of the ninth art. Often, however, their productions still allude to Algeria's colonial past as a lingering trauma. Not unlike her peers, Louerrad is very careful to maintain the fictional dimension of her art, dismissing western expectations that postcolonial subjects be overtly political. The absurd turn of her plots ensures that her metaphysical quests, while also political, remain above all artistic endeavours.
Taking the absurd seriously Phelps, Nicholas A.
Progress in human geography,
12/2018, Letnik:
42, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A focus on the absurd reveals points of tangency between political economy and humanistic geographical approaches. I argue that capitalism’s contradictions have broadened and deepened absurd ...phenomenal experiences, the reflexive internalization of which – in processes of reification or self-alienation – has recursive effects on the constitution of societies. The paradoxes mobilized as part of dialectical reason provide a means of taking the absurd seriously in our emotional and intellectual responses to it. These arguments are illustrated with respect to the consumption of stuff. In conclusion, I note how the absurd poses unsettling questions for human geographical theory and praxis.
In this article, we recommend the drama of theatre of the absurd as a novel space for critically reflecting upon management and management education as shaped by the forces of emotion, irrationality ...and conformism rather than reason. We discuss the theatre of the absurd as uniquely relevant to understanding our troubled times. We present a brief overview of the history of business schools and management education. We apply the idea of absurdity to the world of business schools and management education, focusing on the work of one of the theatre of the absurd’s leading proponents, Eugène Ionesco. We emphasise the importance of fiction and fantasy as key aspects of organisation and education. We contribute to debates about management education by reflecting on possible futures for management education and the business school, embracing the humanities as a core disciplinary focus. We suggest that this will help rebalance management education, retaining the best of the existing curriculum, while re-situating the study of management in its broader historical and philosophical nexus.
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