1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature
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.
Introduction: What Is Absurdist Literature? And Is that What We Are Calling It Now?
Michael Y. Bennett
PART I Origins
SECTION 1 What Led to Absurdist Literature?
1 Historical Precursors, I: Ancient Tragicomedy and Pastoral Plays
Claire Sommers
2 Historical Precursors, II: Nonsense! From Carroll and Lear through Wilde and Sitwell to the Postmodern
Holly A. Laird
3 Historical Precursors, III: Gogol and Dostoevsky
Irina Erman
4 Bartleby and Beckett
Graley Herren
5 Kafka as Literature of the Absurd
Meindert Peters
6 OBERIU: The Absurd as a Critique of Poetic Reason
Evgeny Pavlov
7 The Absurd: Dada and Surrealism
Elza Adamowicz
8 T. S. Eliot and the Group Theatre
Geoffrey Lokke
SECTION 2 Philosophical Origins: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus
9 Nietzsche’s Absurd Tragedy
Elliott Turley
10 Kierkegaard and the Absurd
Leonardo F. Lisi
11 Sartre and the Absurd
Christopher Minor
12 Camus and Absurdity
Ronald Aronson
PART II Absurdist Literature
SECTION 3 Samuel Beckett
13 Show not Tell: The "Absurdist" Theatre of Samuel Becket
Linda Ben‑Zvi
14 Beckett’s Fiction
Paul Sheehan
15 Credo quia absurdum est: The Subversion of the Rational in Samuel Beckett’s Early Poetics
Chris Ackerley
16 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays
Jonathan Bignell
17 Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays
Pedro Querido
SECTION 4 1950s: The First Wave
18 Arthur Adamov
Richard Jones
19 Jean Genet
Stefano Boselli
20 Eugène Ionesco
Julia Elsky
21 Harold Pinter and the Theatre of the Absurd
Ann C. Hall
SECTION 5 1960s: The Emergence of a So-Called "Movement" – Absurdist Literature in English
22 Edward Albee, Absurdist
Matthew Roudané
23 Amiri Baraka
Susan Stone‑Lawrence
24 Jack Gelber
John P. Bray
25 Arthur Kopit
David Coley
26 He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box: Adrienne Kennedy’s Absurdist Dreamwrighting
David A. Crespy
27 Tom Stoppard and the Absurd
James N. Loehlin
28 Guerrilla Theatre as Absurd Performance
Chris McCoy
29 Understanding the Absurd under the Shadow of Late Capitalism: Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut
Eyal Tamir
30 Arrabal’s Panic Allowances for the Absurd
Felicia Hardison Londré
31 Friedrich Dürrenmatt
René Koglbauer
32 St. Sisyphus: Günter Grass’s Absurdist Social Democracy
Alex Donovan Cole
33 (Re)Considering Sławomir Mrożek
Conrad Alexandrowicz
PART III Absurdist Legacies
SECTION 6 Feminist, LGBTQ+, and Multiethnic Absurdist Literature
34 Amusing and Shocking: Caryl Churchill’s Absurdist Drama
Peta Tait
35 Split Britches and the Camp Absurd
Benjamin Gillespie
36 "Beckett Just Seems So Black to Me": Suzan‑Lori Parks as Absurdist Playwright
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
37 (Multi)Ethnic Absurdist Theater
Kimberly May Jew
SECTION 7 World Absurdist Literature
38 Luminaries of the Aesthetics of the Absurd in Latin America
Ramona Hernández and Pedro José Ortega
39 Response and Resistance: A Bird’s‑eye View of the Absurd in the Spanish‑speaking Caribbean
Nancy Bird‑Soto
40 Middle Eastern Absurdist Literature
Marvin A. Carlson
41 Indian Theatres of the Absurd: Cultural Politics of Transformation
Arka Chattopadhyay
42 Postcolonial Absurdist Literature
Mike Marais
43 Decolonisation and the Theatre of the Absurd
Nic Barilar and Hannah Simpson
44 Absurdist Cinema, Television, and Adaptations around the World
Shai Tubali
Biography
Michael Y. Bennett is an Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA. In addition to being a past Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, UK, where he was a Visiting Fellow. In addition to being on the Advisory Boards of Comparative Drama and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, he is the President of The Edward Albee Society, the Editor of the book series, Routledge Studies on Edward Albee and American Theatre, and is the Editor of the journal, Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes. A theatre theorist and critic known for his work on absurd drama, philosophy of theatre, Edward Albee, and Oscar Wilde, he is the author or editor of fifteen books.
