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When approaching the climate crisis, there appears to be a universal tendency towards philosophical suicide. When faced with the sheer scale of the problem at hand, falling for the façade of easy solutions seems to be an expected response. However, this tendency towards philosophical suicide may complicate the fight against the climate crisis by drawing attention away from the problem at hand. To approach this problem, the overarching purpose of this article is to determine how the change in the philosophical approach to the absurd may assist in framing the fight against climate change. During the investigation into this problem, it was found that philosophical suicide is a real problem that may be chosen when easy solutions are offered for a problem that sufficiently threatens the individual’s state of existence. Furthermore, this philosophical suicide threatens the fight against climate change due to it leading individuals to believe lies perpetrated through strategies like greenwashing. This is of crucial importance since philosophical suicide threatens the fight against the climate crisis by not allowing individuals to consciously approach the problem. However, there does appear to be some hope. If the newer generations are sufficiently educated on the topic, there may be a chance that philosophical suicide, as well as the prevailing sense of dread that appears to be rampant in the younger generations, can be countered. In this way, educating individuals may enable them to consciously approach the absurdity of the climate crisis and, in doing so, revolt against it.

The last of Bernard Shaw’s “Irish” plays, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman (1921), raises the same concerns over colonialism, nationalism, and identity explored in John Bull’s Other Island (1904) and O’Flaherty V.C.: A Recruiting Pamphlet (1915) but does so from outside his preferred dramatic style, theatrical Realism. In this proto-Absurdist experiment, Shaw invents an Ireland in which differences of religion, class, and politics are moot; in 3000 A.D., age is the only category of social distinction. Experimenting with dramaturgical form and eschewing mimetic scenic design, Shaw utilizes Ireland’s mythic wildness and the transformational effect of its climate as an affective element of the play’s argument. Through Shaw’s treatment of space, this future Ireland with its inherently Irish inhabitants becomes the utopic home to a superior race that portends a life beyond the oppressive British/Irish and later intra-national binary partisan reality of post-WWI and pre-Free State Ireland.

By using Freud’s theory of humour (1927) and his Jokes in their relation to the unconscious (1905), we follow the dominant features of the humour-pathos nexus from the late Victorian to the postmodernist literary decadence, taking in our stride the two peaking twentieth century modernist texts published by T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in 1922 Britain. We begin with Oscar Wilde’s popular The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in relation to Walter Pater’s less well-known autobiographical novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), showing what relation the latter has with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The modernist genial humour of Eliot’s 1939 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is contrasted with Tom Stoppard’s in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and with the dark humour closer to pathos in The Life and Songs of the Crow (1970) by Ted Hughes.

Many scholars discussing the pandemic issues tend to use Western perspectives. To question this hegemony, this paper investigates Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947) by using Islamic perspectives to challenge the dominant views in evaluating literary canon and pandemic studies. By engaging with postcolonialism and pandemic studies with the frameworks of Islamic studies, this research investigates what differences in pandemic issues are explored in Camus’s novel and how Islam advocates for Muslims to deal with the pandemic problems. The focus of this novel is mainly on European culture and perspectives, although the setting of the novel is Algeria, which is one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. Thus, it is essential to apply the Islamic perspectives in investigating this novel to understand how Islam encourages Muslims to believe and worship God as a way of living instead of being atheists, selfish, and hedonists, as this novel reveals. This research found that the author uses the ideas of absurdism, isolation, and superstitions by depicting the characters as struggling to face the bubonic plague. However, the characters still live in atheism and believe in superstitions instead of worshipping God as Islam advocates.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need to “think outside the box”. As societies across the planet gradually become more interconnected, the dominance of outmoded social practices surrounding human interaction, work, leisure and space is being challenged on a daily basis. Mediatic productions such as film have always presented opportunities for expanding the reach of particular messages and disseminating topical views and perspectives. In honour of Federico Fellini (1920-1993) on the 100th anniversary of his birth, this paper undertakes a comprehensive comparison between the bold and absurdist cinema of the Post-Neorealist filmmaker and today’s also strange and perplexing social environment. Contextualising his cinema within an auteurist framework, we highlight how ground-breaking Fellini was in embracing the unconventional; by doing so he provided a practical guide for navigating contemporary reality. With productions that seduce and impress viewers worldwide, Fellini defied established cinematographic practices, as exemplified by his experimentation with overlapping narrative styles. His films bestir a new way of thinking by generating an anomalous world, one where events take place beyond the scope of what the viewer anticipates as “natural”. But the appraisal of what is “natural” is contingent upon the viewer’s belief structure: by presenting a world where events happen outside the realm of practical expectations, Fellini’s timeless cinema questions outdated belief systems and sets the guidelines for how to navigate the unanticipated complexities of the contemporary world. Reality and fiction merge into one.

This paper argues that through an engagement with cross-media hybridity, Irish comedy duo The Rubberbandits have established a dynamic cross-media forum that aims to restore the Irish public’s capacity for critical social and political engagement. Central to this process is The Rubberbandits’ ability to use their absurdist satire as a foundational tool that can serve as the basis of this cultural forum, while also facilitating the negotiation of social and political issues across a variety of media. Given that this cultural forum exists across different media, platforms, and formats, this paper sets out to analyse the various ways in which the duo have adapted their satirical style to suit the demands of these different media forms, and what implications this process of adaption has had on their work. Beginning with an analysis of the social and critical functions of satirical comedy more broadly, this paper will then focus on the specific brand of satirical social commentary employed by The Rubberbandits, paying particular attention to the role of absurdity in their critical engagement with prominent issues facing Irish society. As this paper will demonstrate, by embracing the hybridity of the cross-media environment, all the while maintaining their absurdist satirical style, The Rubberbandits have established a dynamic and carnivalesque cross-media forum that aims to restore the Irish public’s capacity for critical social and political engagement.

Flooded by rising seas and resurgent nationalist politics, ours is a world in peril. How should we comport ourselves for the climate crisis? To answer this question, this essay reviews several works of Albert Camus, the prescient Algerian-French philosopher of the previous century. Camus's concept of the Absurd may help us understand our plight in a changing climate, whereas his ethic of rebellion advises a way of living that begets solidarity in crisis and affirms a shared humanity. Camus's ideas have urgent relevance today, and we ought to heed them as we carry on the fight for climate action.

Whenever it is said there is no truth in place, this question comes up as to whether the truth itself does exist or not? Two answers are offered for this question. First, there is no truth other than the truth that there is no truth (modern nihilism). Secondly, there is no truth even the truth that there is no truth (postmodern nihilism). This paper aims at exploring the second answer by presenting examples of the claim in postmodernism. While pluralism states that there is no absolute truth, nihilism asserts that there is absolutely no truth and that the same truth is not true as well. Hence, postmodern nihilism is self-contradictory based on its realistic interpretations and self-reflective based on its nihilistic interpretations. Post-structuralism is nihilist from the epistemological perspectives because it claims that no cognizance can be generalized and adjusted to the world but it is probably not nihilist in terms of semiotics because it does not deny the principle of implication. Deconstruction is nihilistic and devastative for the authorship-oriented person exercising centralism. Post-colonial nihilism is also indicative of the destruction and disapproval of the identity of the colonialized lands as well as reflective of the denial of the identity of the minority races like the black. Gender nihilism engages in denial of gender and queer nihilism denies any sort of sexual, gender, and identity normality.

Theorizing about literature over the centuries has been a significant intellectual exercise of high degree that has, among other things, majorly kept the study of literature afloat. The thrust of theory, on this note, is to give perspectives to literature; that is, a conceptual framework for its critical investigation. Against this background, this study has also attempted to conceptualize a relatively novel critical framework in dramatic studies which has been referred to as ‘existential-tragedy’. The concept is woven around the philosophical nexus of Absurdism and Tragedy with the theoretical assumption drawn from the Nietzschean principle of ‘Primal Unity’ in Birth of Tragedy. It encapsulates man as a being in existence who is caught up in an enclosed journey between creation and annihilation, and who constantly demonstrates an unconscious awareness to this underlying reality through his series of engagements in life. This unconscious phenomenon is contextualized in this study as ‘death anxiety’ which silently characterizes man’s struggles with life, as actors on the stage. Ultimately, the study is being established as a move towards theorizing a new conceptual framework and/or critical context, not only in the analysis of tragic and absurd plays, but also in literary criticism at large.

This article was written within the educational project “The Virtual Museum of Writers of the Southern Urals” of the Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “South Ural State University (national research university)”. The purpose of the museum is to identify and demonstrate the enormous literary potential of the Southern Urals. This article is based on the material of the creative work of the poets of Chelyabinsk, since they are the key personnel of the virtual museum. The purpose of the article is to investigate current literary tendencies related to the regional text phenomenon (mythologization of urban space, urbanism, autobiography of poetry) in the works of three generations of modern poetry of Chelyabinsk: older, middle and younger. The image of regional climatic features and landscape features is one of the current thematic trends for those older Chelyabinsk poets who continue the traditions of classical and Soviet poetry. At the same time, such emblematic figures of the regional literary process as N.F. Boldyrev, V.O. Kalpidi continue the avant-garde traditions, are engaged in the search for new forms of expression in poetry. So, N.F. Boldyrev experiments with genres of oriental lyrics (haiku), V.O. Kalpidi - with the synthesis of different genres and literature directions. The peculiarity of the poetry of the Chelyabinsk authors of the middle generation is the confession and autobiography associated with a specific locus - Chelyabinsk. Most poets of the middle generation entered the literary life in the 90s, which was reflected in their poetics in the image of chaotic and absurd everyday reality. In the description of the Chelyabinsk space, the authors of the middle generation (A. Samoilov, J. Grants) inherit the Lianozovo school tradition of capturing the life of the suburbs, minimalism and aestheticism of the authors of the Lianozovo group. For the younger generation (A. Manichenko, D. Masharygin, E. Obolikshta, R. Yapishin) the cosmopolitan myth becomes an actual tendency, in which the lyrical hero moves in the intertextual space uniting a multitude of cultural texts

de[re]territorialisation adopts a bi-column structure as a method to explore how meaning is distributed between human and digital voices. This bi-discursive paper was generated via a performative gesture where words spoken by a human subject, occupying the left-hand column, were translated by a digital subject to produce text for the right-hand column. de[re]territorialisation explores the potentiality for new narrative flows to be produced through errancy and anomaly, and the capacity for the interplay between the human voice and computational voice recognition systems to deterritorialise and reterritorialise content.

A new 25 minute radiophonic ethnodrama by Paul Antick and Jo Langton, Smith in Belfast is the account of one man's journey through a series of situations and conversations, the contents of which refer in sometimes roundabout ways to the linguistic, legal, architectural, social and sartorial aftermath(s) of 'the Troubles' in Northern Ireland. Composed of a series of relatively unsettling, often absurdly oblique vignettes - staged in pubs, ‘chippers’, parks and on street corners - Smith in Belfast culminates in the troubling impersonation - by its English protagonist Smith - of an ex-paramilitary tour guide careering though memories of old photographs and film footage of ‘the Troubles’ in front of a concerned group of visitors somewhere on the Falls Road. As Brexit negotiations stumble on, Smith in Belfast – an expurgated version of which originally aired on Resonance FM in 2017 - is a strange and timely reminder that although the war in Northern Ireland may be over, many of the contradictions that fuelled the conflict there, contradictions that ostensibly turned on the relationship between issues of national sovereignty and social identity, have never been entirely resolved. Smith in Belfast is a radiophonic alert to the possibility that the pain Brexit could conceivably inflict on the province (and beyond) might, in the face of political solipsism and creeping English nationalism, potentially involve more than a hike in the price of wine. Note that although this production explicitly references some ‘real life’ historical figures and events, and also (apparently) draws on conversations and situations its author enjoyed on the ‘Troubles tours’ of Belfast he attended during the summer of 2014, it, like all of the characters in it, is almost emphatically fictional.

Since the late 1950s, the Argentine writer Abelardo Castillo has published the cultural magazines El Grillo de Papel (1959-1960), El Escarabajo de Oro (1961-1974) and El Ornitorrinco (1977-1986). Under Sartre's notorious influence, their pages framed the theater in philosophical, sociological, and political discussions. This study of critical reception shows different ways in which these publications intervened accompanying the irruption of European absurdity in the Río de la Plata cultural field: from the beginning in the transdisciplinary and experimental El Grillo ..., to the interest in avant-garde expressions and the problems they present in front of the models of traditional representation, deployed in El Escarabajo ... This trail inscribes traces of a genealogy of the independent theater, as well as episodes of the debate on the social function of theater.