front cover of Around the Absurd
Around the Absurd
Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama
Edited by Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn
University of Michigan Press, 1990
When Martin Esslin published The Theatre of the Absurd in 1961 he caught the pulse of Western drama as it burst into bold and surprising new forms after the Second World War. Around the Absurd is the first book to examine the history, impact, and legacy of that theater. In provocative essays by leading critics from both sides of the Atlantic (including Jan Kott, Herbert Blau, Katharine Worth, Theodore Shank, and Benedict Nightingale), this forum carries forward Esslin's seminal work by surveying the theater terrain both before and after that time. Featuring original studies of Maeterlinck, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, Pinter, Fornes, and the international scene of performance art, this timely collection details the key role of the absurd in the transformation from a modern to a postmodern repertory. Around the Absurd will appeal to scholars, students, and critics of the dramatic arts as well as to the theater-going public
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front cover of The Man with the Black Coat
The Man with the Black Coat
Russia's Literature of the Absurd
Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky
Northwestern University Press, 1997

front cover of Postmodernism and a Sociology of the Absurd
Postmodernism and a Sociology of the Absurd
Absurd And Other Essays on the "Nouvelle Vague" in American Social Science
Stanford Lyman
University of Arkansas Press, 1997

In the fifth volume in the Studies in American Sociology Series, Stanford M. Lyman offers commentaries on and critiques of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction, posing questions concerning theoretical and epistemological problems arising from what appears to be a “nouvelle vague.”

Postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism are interrelated aspects of the newest theoretical development in sociology and the social sciences. This new wave of thought challenges virtually all paradigms currently in use. In this, his fifth volume in the Studies in American Sociology Series, Stanford M. Lyman offers commentaries on and critiques of this new perspective, posing questions concerning theoretical and epistemological problems arising from what appears to be a nouvelle vague.

Among the basic themes and issues explored are the allegation that modernity has defaulted on the promise of the Enlightenment; the question of whether the rational basis for knowledge and action is still valid; the controversy over the place of metanarratives and macrosociological outlooks; and newer concerns over race, gender, sexual preferences, the self, and the “Other.”

Professor Lyman provides empirically based and historically specific analyses of the relation of the race question to the problem of otherness and to the legal construction of racial identity in American court proceedings. Focusing on the issues of citizenship affecting European, Middle Eastern, and Asian immigrants; African Americans; and the special cases of the Chinese and Native Americans, he relates major public problems to the modern as well as the postmodern perspectives on justice. The debate over assimilation and multiculturalism, the dynamics of gender-specific emotions as expressed in six decades of Hollywood films, and the postmodern approach to deviance are each examined. He also offers proposals for a social science attuned to, but critical of, postmodernism and poststructuralism. Such a sociology might offer a perspective that treats the drama of social relations in the routine as well as the remarkable aspects of everyday life. Professor Lyman provides not only a new understanding of postmodernism but also a program of how to proceed with respect to its challenges.

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front cover of Reality Principles
Reality Principles
From the Absurd to the Virtual
Herbert Blau
University of Michigan Press, 2011

“Herbert Blau’s long sustained inquiry into theater’s most provocative questions—presence, liveness, and finitude—are, at their deepest level, queries into life. Reality Principles returns us to Blau’s inspiring provocations and extends them to new subjects—9/11 and Ground Zero, the nature of charisma, Pirandello and Strindberg.”
—Peggy Phelan, Stanford University

Reality Principles gathers recent essays by esteemed scholar and theater practitioner Herbert Blau covering a range of topics.  The book’s provocative essays—including “The Emotional Memory of Directing,” “The Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of the Absurd,” “Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness,” “The Human Nature of the Bot”—were given as keynotes and/or memorial lectures and are collected here for the first time. The essays take up a remarkable array of topics—from body art and the self-inflicted punishments of Stelarc, Orlan, and the Viennese Actionists, to Ground Zero and 9/11—and allow Blau to address critical questions of theater and theory, performance and relevance, the absurd and the virtual, history and illusion, community and memory. Reality Principles offers a panoramic view of Herbert Blau’s perspectives on life and the imitation of life on stage.

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