Literature: Absurdism In Literature

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He Yucong
Gregory Robbins
AP English and Literature
12 Sep 2013
Senior Paper: Absurdism in Literature
This paper focuses on the use of absurdism in post-World War II literature and its influence on contemporary society. Specifically, this paper first introduces the origin of absurdism, where the paper connects nihilism and existentialism and briefly compares the difference between these similar concepts. After clarifing the concept of absurdism, the second part of this paper examines some representative post-World War II literature that is famous for its utilization of absurdity, such as Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The American Dream by Edward Albee, The Outsider by Albert Camus, and so on. In this process, this paper introduces the representative genres of absurdism with regard to certain individual literature, categorize these genres, and explore a general understanding which is possible. In the third section, this paper extends the general genres in details, looks at the exact words and sentences in which the author applies absurdity, and analyzes the intention and effect of absurdism in corresponding literature.
The fourth part discusses the influence of these literature on contemporary society, with special regard to absurdity and the effect it creates on readers, for absurdism both serves as a literary device and an instruction of thinking. This part focuses on absurdism as a social idea rather than a philosophical concept: how absurdism in literature reflects and influences collective thinking in the society. In the final part, this paper explores the instructive value of absurdism with its possible application in nowaday society and ourselves, and attempts to solve our problems with absurdist philosophy and ideas as p...

... middle of paper ...

...er and moralistic laughter, a laughter that proclaims come kind of disease. Even as we move out of the Elizabethan period and towards the eighteenth century, absurdism took a place in the literature. According to The Origins of English Nonsense by Noel Malcolm, long before the acknowledged masterpieces of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, before the English reached their nonsensical apogee in the reign of Victoria, a few privileged Elizabethans were already developing a surreal and proto-Carrollean sense of humour. (16) The outcome of this period is the English nonsense poetry. In some cases, the humor of nonsense verse is based on the incompatibility of phrases which make grammatical sense butsemantic nonsense at least in certain interpretations, as in the traditional:
'I see' said the blind man to his deaf and dumb daughter as he picked up his hammer and saw.

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