The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature

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.

Introduction: What Is Absurdist Literature? And Is that What We Are Calling It Now?; PART I Origins; SECTION 1 What Led to Absurdist Literature?; 1 Historical Precursors, I: Ancient Tragicomedy and Pastoral Plays; 2 Historical Precursors, II: Nonsense! From Carroll and Lear through Wilde and Sitwell to the Postmodern; 3 Historical Precursors, III: Gogol and Dostoevsky; 4 Bartleby and Beckett; 5 Kafka as Literature of the Absurd; 6 OBERIU: The Absurd as a Critique of Poetic Reason; 7 The Absurd: Dada and Surrealism; 8 T. S. Eliot and the Group Theatre; SECTION 2 Philosophical Origins: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus; 9 Nietzsche’s Absurd Tragedy; 10 Kierkegaard and the Absurd; 11 Sartre and the Absurd; 12 Camus and Absurdity; PART II Absurdist Literature; SECTION 3 Samuel Beckett; 13 Show not Tell: The "Absurdist" Theatre of Samuel Becket; 14 Beckett’s Fiction; 15 Credo quia absurdum est: The Subversion of the Rational in Samuel Beckett’s Early Poetics; 16 Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays; 17 Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays; SECTION 4 1950s: The First Wave; 18 Arthur Adamov; 19 Jean Genet; 20 Eugène Ionesco; 21 Harold Pinter and the Theatre of the Absurd; SECTION 5 1960s: The Emergence of a So-Called "Movement" – Absurdist Literature in English; 22 Edward Albee, Absurdist; 23 Amiri Baraka; 24 Jack Gelber; 25 Arthur Kopit; 26 He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box: Adrienne Kennedy’s Absurdist Dreamwrighting; 27 Tom Stoppard and the Absurd; 28 Guerrilla Theatre as Absurd Performance; 29 Understanding the Absurd under the Shadow of Late Capitalism: Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut; 30 Arrabal’s Panic Allowances for the Absurd; 31 Friedrich Dürrenmatt; 32 St. Sisyphus: Günter Grass’s Absurdist Social Democracy; 33 (Re)Considering Sławomir Mrożek; PART III Absurdist Legacies; SECTION 6 Feminist, LGBTQ+, and Multiethnic Absurdist Literature; 34 Amusing and Shocking: Caryl Churchill’s Absurdist Drama; 35 Split Britches and the Camp Absurd; 36 "Beckett Just Seems So Black to Me": Suzan‑Lori Parks as Absurdist Playwright; 37 (Multi)Ethnic Absurdist Theater; SECTION 7 World Absurdist Literature; 38 Luminaries of the Aesthetics of the Absurd in Latin America; 39 Response and Resistance: A Bird’s‑eye View of the Absurd in the Spanish‑speaking Caribbean; 40 Middle Eastern Absurdist Literature; 41 Indian Theatres of the Absurd: Cultural Politics of Transformation; 42 Postcolonial Absurdist Literature; 43 Decolonisation and the Theatre of the Absurd; 44 Absurdist Cinema, Television, and Adaptations around the World