The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd

The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd PDF

Author: Michael Y. Bennett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-10-26

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1107053927

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This accessible Introduction provides an in-depth overview of absurdism and its key figures in theatre and literature, from Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to Tom Stoppard. Essential reading for students, this book provides the necessary tools to develop the study of some of the twentieth century's most influential works.

Re-Thinking Character in the Theatre of the Absurd

Re-Thinking Character in the Theatre of the Absurd PDF

Author: Carmen Dominte

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-09-23

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1527559882

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Using the character as a central element, this volume provides insights into the Theatre of the Absurd, highlighting its specific key characteristics. Adopting both semiotic-structuralist and mathematical approaches, its analysis of the absurdist character introduces new models of investigation, including a possible algebraic model operating on the scenic, dramatic and paradigmatic level of a play, not only exploring the relations, configurations, confrontations, functions and situations but also providing necessary information for a possible geometric model. The book also takes into consideration the relations established among the most important units of a dramatic work, character, cue, décor and régie, re-configuring the basic pattern. It will be useful for any reader interested in analyzing, staging or writing a play starting from a single character.

The Cambridge Companion to Camus

The Cambridge Companion to Camus PDF

Author: Edward J. Hughes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-04-26

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1139827340

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Albert Camus is one of the iconic figures of twentieth-century French literature, one of France's most widely read modern literary authors and one of the youngest winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. As the author of L'Etranger and the architect of the notion of 'the Absurd' in the 1940s, he shot to prominence in France and beyond. His work nevertheless attracted hostility as well as acclaim and he was increasingly drawn into bitter political controversies, especially the issue of France's place and role in the country of his birth, Algeria. Most recently, postcolonial studies have identified in his writings a set of preoccupations ripe for revisitation. Situating Camus in his cultural and historical context, this 2007 Companion explores his best-selling novels, his ambiguous engagement with philosophy, his theatre, his increasingly high-profile work as a journalist and his reflection on ethical and political questions that continue to concern readers today.

Modern Literature and the Tragic

Modern Literature and the Tragic PDF

Author: K. M. Newton

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2008-06-20

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0748636749

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This book explores modern literature's responses to the tragic. It examines writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the later twentieth century who respond to ideas about tragedy. Although Ibsen has been accused of being responsible for the 'death of tragedy', Ken Newton argues that Ibsen instead generates an anti-tragic perspective that had a major influence on dramatists such as Shaw and Brecht. By contrast, writers such as Hardy and Conrad, influenced by Schopenhauerean pessimism and Darwinism, attempt to modernise the concept of the tragic. Nietzsche's revisionist interpretation of the tragic influenced writers who either take pessimism or the 'Dionysian' commitment to life to an extreme, as in Strindberg and D. H. Lawrence. Different views emerge in the period following the second world war with the 'Theatre of the Absurd' and postmodern anti-foundationalism.

The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature

The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature PDF

Author: Michael Y. Bennett

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-29

Total Pages: 803

ISBN-13: 1040001610

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The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature is the first authoritative and definitive edited collection on absurdist literature. As a field-defining volume, the editor and the contributors are world leaders in this ever-exciting genre that includes some of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. Ever puzzling and always refusing to be pinned down, this book does not attempt to define absurdist literature, but attempts to examine its major and minor players. As such, the field is indirectly defined by examining its constituent writers. Not only investigating the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd,” this volume wades deeply into absurdist fiction and absurdist poetry, expanding much of our previous sense of what constitutes absurdist literature. Furthermore, long overdue, approximately one-third of the book is devoted to marginalized writers: black, Latin/x, female, LGBTQ+, and non-Western voices.

Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd

Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd PDF

Author: M. Bennett

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-04-25

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 0230118828

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Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd , which suggests that 'absurd' plays purport the meaninglessness of life, this book uses the works of five major playwrights of the 1950s to provide a timely reassessment of one of the most important theatre 'movements' of the 20th century.

The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing

The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing PDF

Author: Christopher Innes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-05-02

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0521844495

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The director was fundamental to the development of modern theatre. This Introduction explores the emergence of the director's artistic force.

The Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd PDF

Author: Martin Esslin

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-04-02

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0307548015

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In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition. Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett’s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.