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Reading the Absurd

By Joanna Gavins

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£95.00

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About this book

Challenges traditional scholarship on absurdist literature, privileging the reader and the genre’s stylistic achievements

What is the literary absurd? What are its key textual features? How can it be analysed? How do different readers respond to absurdist literature?Taking the theories and methodologies of stylistics as its underlying analytical framework, Reading the Absurd tackles each of these questions. Selected key works in English literature are examined in depth to reveal significant aspects of absurd style. Its analytical approach combines stylistic inquiry with a cognitive perspective on language, literature and reading which sheds new light on the human experience of literary reading. By exploring the literary absurd as a linguistic and experiential phenomena, while at the same time reflecting upon its essential historical and cultural situation, Joanna Gavins brings a new perspective to the absurd aesthetic.

Reviews

The absurd is arguably one of the most significant literary genres of the second half of the 20th century and as a genre it has received plenty of scholarly attention from literary scholars. Over the years, the features of absurd drama have received some attention from stylisticians, but Gavins’s monograph constitutes the first comprehensive stylistic study of absurd narrative prose. She employs a variety of stylistic models to analyse this genre… I was impressed to see how Gavins uses the framework in tandem with so many other stylistic models, cognitive and traditional.
Reading the Absurd is an elegant and eclectic exploration of the concept of the absurd in a range of literary genres. Productively enriched by reader response theories, Gavins’s model of the absurd is built solidly on the analytic techniques of contemporary stylistics and cognitive-poetics. In all, this is a compelling and groundbreaking study of a concept that has hitherto been largely the preserve of drama and theatre studies.
Table of contents
List of Figures; Acknowledgements; 1 The Literary Absurd, THE ABSURD IN PHILOSOPHY, THE ABSURD IN LITERARY CRITICISM A NEW APPROACH, READERS OF THE ABSURD; 2 IDENTIFYING THE ABSURD, CATEGORIES AND CATEGORISATION, CONTEXT, COMMUNITY AND SITUATED CONCEPTS, A CLINE OF EXPERIMENTALISM, WRITING ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE ABSURD, READING ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE ABSURD, BUILDING ABSURD WORLDS, EXPERIMENTING WITH ABSURD WORLDS,HUMOUR AND THE ABSURD, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR; 3 ABSURD MINDS, A SINGULARLY MASCULINE PHENOMENON?, CHARACTER-BUILDING, READING OTHER PEOPLE’S MINDS, VERSIONS OF UNRELIABILITY, ESTRANGING MINDS, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR; 4 ABSURD FICTIONS, ABSURD WORLD-BUILDING REVISITED, ABSURD LANDSCAPES AND EMOTIONAL RESONANCE, TIME, SPACE, AND FICTIONALITY, MIXING GENRES, MIXING MODES, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR ; 5 ABSURD VERSES, THE STYLISTICS OF ABSURD PROSE FICTION, READING THE ABSURD IN PROSE FICTION, READING THE ABSURD IN POETRY, STYLISTIC FAMILY RESEMBLANCES ACROSS POETIC TEXTS, TOWARDS A STYLISTICS OF ABSURD POETRY, THE LITERARY ABSURD, SO FAR ; REFERENCES
About the author

Joanna Gavins

Professor Joanna Gavins is Chair in English Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield, where she teaches courses in cognitive linguistics, stylistics, and ecolinguistics. She is the author of Poetry in the Mind: The Cognition of Contemporary Poetic Style (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Reading the Absurd (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and Text World Theory: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).