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Existentialism and Absurdism
Existentialism and Absurdism notes
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Existentialism and AbsurdismWhen?
1950’s after WWII
Who?
Playwrights – Alfred Jarry, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Edward Albee,
Harold Pinter
Theorists – Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre
Artists – Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali
Why?
An attempt to understand life after the chaos and brutality of war
- Between WWI and WWII plays were light hearted and commercial
- Provided relief for hardships of the time
- After WWII people were disillusioned and negative about humanity
- Horrors of Nazi concentration camps, destructive power of atomic bomb
- Nuclear holocaust – raised doubt about human ability to act rationally
- Doubt about the validity of reason itself
- Contradictions between morals and war
- Christianity promotes loving one’s neighbor
- Violence of war underpinned idea that one lives in a world of contradiction
- Movement emerged out of anxiety and doubt
Myth of Sisyphus
According to Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished for all eternity to roll a
rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down to the bottom when he
reached the top. Camus claims that Sisyphus is the ideal absurd hero and that
his punishment is representative of the human condition: Sisyphus must
struggle perpetually (forever, eternally) and without hope of success. When he
accepts that there is nothing more to life than this absurd struggle, then he
can find happiness in it
The movement is defined as Absurdism
- Expresses failure of traditional values to fulfil mans spiritual and emotional
needs
- Influence spread through Europe and America
- Roots go back to the 19th century
The first movement with an essentially Absurdist outlook was dadaism
- More notably traced to visual art
- Mocked and rejected all principles of aesthetic art
- World in a state of complete insanity
- Replace logic and reason with calculated madness
, The Absurdist’s also borrowed techniques from surrealism
- Subconscious mind is the source of the artist’s most significant
perceptions
The most significant foundational theoretical concept that Absurdism is based on
is
Existentialism
- Meaning of existence
- What does it mean to exist
- Sartre and Camus
Sartre
- Confirmed atheist – not believe in the existence of God
- Man feels alien in a world which has no meaning
- Feeling of alienation – despair, boredom, absurdity
- Out of harmony with one’s surroundings
- No moral values or norms we can adhere to
- World is neutral – facts and events have no meaning – only meaning man
has attached
- Regard action as immoral – only because we have chosen to label it as
such
Sartre said that man is condemned to be free
- Freedom is a curse
- Not created himself
- Responsible for everything he does
- Did not ask to be created as a free individual
- Condemns us to make choices throughout our lives
- Free and responsible only to themselves
- Duty to find values and act in accordance with them
- Take responsibility for constructing own reality and values - accept
consequences
- To exist is to create your own life
man is adrift in a world with no purpose. Therefore, man is free and
responsible only for himself. Man has a duty to find his own values and
act in accordance with them
Camus
- French writer, dramatist, philosopher
- Find own way and own set of standards in a world of chaos
- Lost comfort of being able to explain world by logic and reason
- Modern world is absurd and makes no sense
- Threatened by isolation – cut off from others by difficulties of
communication
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