The Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd
Author: Martin Esslin
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2009-04-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0307548015

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.

Modern Literature and the Tragic

Modern Literature and the Tragic
Author: K. M. Newton
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2008-06-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748636749

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.

Re-Thinking Character in the Theatre of the Absurd

Re-Thinking Character in the Theatre of the Absurd
Author: Carmen Dominte
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2020-09-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527559882

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.

Edward Albee and Absurdism

Edward Albee and Absurdism
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2017-01-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004324968

In Edward Albee and Absurdism—the inaugural volume in the new book series, New Perspectives in Edward Albee Studies—Michael Y. Bennett has assembled an outstanding team of Edward Albee scholars to address Albee’s affiliation with Martin Esslin’s label, “Theatre of the Absurd,” examining whether or not this label is appropriate. From scholarly essays and lengthy review-essays to an important interview with the noted playwright and director, Emily Mann, the aim of this collection is to, at last, directly (and indirectly) confront Esslin’s label in regards to Albee’s plays in order to create a scholarly atmosphere that allows future Albee scholars to move on to new and, frankly, more relevant lines of inquiry. Contributors are: Michael Y. Bennett, Linda Ben-Zvi, David A. Crespy, Colin Enriquez, Lincoln Konkle, David Marcia, Dena Marks, Brenda Murphy, Tony Jason Stafford, and Kevin J Wetmore Jr.

Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd

Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd
Author: M. Bennett
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-03-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781349295203

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.

Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd

Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd
Author: Carl Lavery
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2015-11-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1472513207

Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shepard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole. The collection's interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.

The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd

The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd
Author: Michael Y. Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2015-10-29
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1316395359

Michael Y. Bennett's accessible Introduction explains the complex, multidimensional nature of the works and writers associated with the absurd - a label placed upon a number of writers who revolted against traditional theatre and literature in both similar and widely different ways. Setting the movement in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, Bennett provides an in-depth overview of absurdism and its key figures in theatre and literature, from Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to Tom Stoppard. Chapters reveal the movement's origins, development and present-day influence upon popular culture around the world, employing the latest research to this often challenging area of study in a balanced and authoritative approach. Essential reading for students of literature and theatre, this book provides the necessary tools to interpret and develop the study of a movement associated with some of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential cultural figures.

Politics and Theatre in Twentieth-Century Europe

Politics and Theatre in Twentieth-Century Europe
Author: M. Morgan
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2013-12-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137370386

This book explores the connection between politics and theatre by looking at the works and lives of Shaw, Brecht, Sartre, and Ionesco, providing a cultural history detailing the changing role of political theatre in twentieth-century Europe.

The Theater of Arthur Adamov

The Theater of Arthur Adamov
Author: John J. McCann
Publisher: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Romance Studies
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1975-01-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9780807891612

First recognized with the likes of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco as a defining figure at the forefront of the "theater of the absurd," French playwright Adam Adamov had a fairly prolific career, writing twenty plays between 1947 and his death in 1970. Now, although he has fallen somewhat into obscurity, John J. McMann provides a study of Adamov's work which traces the playwright's artistic development and explores his role in defining the avant-garde and political theaters of France.