MAJOR LITERARY MOVEMENTS

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2 EXISTENTIALISM

• Existentialism is a philosophy that focuses on the existence of mankind. It deals with

their efforts of finding a way in this hostile universe. The writers apply existentialist
philosophy in their texts to underpin the efforts of dejected, tormented and alienated
humans, how they find themselves facing certain choices in the world. It is based on
the concept that humans should choose their paths of life independently, and, try to
make rational decisions in the irrational universe.
• In this sense, it liberates them from the clutches of moral values, social norms, and
religious beliefs. Several literary pieces of the modern age demonstrate this
philosophy in one or the other way. Etymologically, the word existence is derived from
the Latin word “existere” which means “to stand out.”
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• Existentialism is based on the idea that human beings try to make

rational decisions in an irrational universe. They choose their own
ways through life and are therefore liberated from moral values and
religion.
• Existentialists believe that the world intrinsically has no
objective meaning, but through a combination of free will,
awareness, and personality responsibility, we can create our
own subjective meaning.
4 HISTORY

• Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of philosophers

since the 19th century who, despite large differences in their positions,
generally focused on the condition of human existence, and an
individual’s emotions, actions, responsibilities, and thoughts, or the
meaning or purpose of life.
• Existential philosophers often focused more on what is subjective, such as
beliefs and religion, or human states, feelings, and emotions, such as
freedom, pain, guilt, and regret, as opposed to analyzing objective
knowledge, language, or science.
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• Existentialism is a movement in philosophy and literature that
emphasizes individual existence, freedom and choice. It began in the mid-
to-late 19th Century, but reached its peak in mid-20th Century France. It is
based on the view that humans define their own meaning in life, and try to
make rational decisions despite existing in an irrational universe.
• It focuses on the question of human existence, and the feeling that there
is no purpose or explanation at the core of existence. It holds that, as there
is no God or any other transcendent force, the only way to counter this
nothingness (and hence to find meaning in life) is by embracing existence.
6 CHARACTERISTICS OF EXISTENTIALISM

• A central proposition of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence,

which means that the most important consideration for individuals is that
they are individuals rather than labels, roles, stereotypes, or definitions.
• Absurdism is the idea that there is no meaning in the world beyond the
meaning we give it
• The primary virtue of existentialism is authenticity.
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• Existential philosophers often focused more on what is subjective,

such as beliefs and religion.
• Existential philosophers focus on human states, feelings, and
emotions, such as freedom, pain, guilt, and regret, as opposed to
analyzing objective knowledge, language, or science.
8 FATHER OF EXISTENTIALISM

• Existentialism in its currently recognizable form was developed by

the 19th Century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
• Søren Kierkegaard is best known as the “Father of
Existentialism”. But unlike many of his Existentialist
peers from Nietzsche to Camus, Kierkegaard was not an
atheist. He was a devout Christian.
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• Across his career the core theme of Kierkegaard’s work is faith. And faith
for Kierkegaard is above all a personal relationship with a personal God.
Another central element of Kierkegaard’s philosophy is a preference for
passion over reason. He saw faith as the “highest passion”. It was
something you lived. It was something that required action rather than
logic and reason.
10 KEY THEMES OF EXISTENTIALISM

• Freedom and the necessity to choose

• Meaning and absurdity
• Self-deception and authenticity
• The individual and ‘they’
• Irreligion and religion
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• Freedom and the necessity to choose

• To be an existing human being means to be free. In contrast with most everything else in
the world, a human being is not determined by ‘laws of nature.’ The human being has a
unique freedom to determine his or her own behavior. However, this freedom is in itself a
kind of determination which we cannot escape. We are ‘condemned to freedom.’ For the
great majority, this tension is too great. As the pop group, Devo, put it in the 1980s,
‘Freedom of choice is what you’ve got. Freedom from choice is what you want
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• The lack of norms, and anxiety

• Nature is an arena of facts, but the arena of human freedom is where norms and values
feature. However, since nature does not supply them, our freedom is a freedom to make
values and norms by which we will abide. The weight of this responsibility produces
anxiety, also known as angst, or dread. For Kierkegaard, this is closely related to the guilt
of a sinful existence.
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• Meaning and absurdity

• Knowing that we are the ones who make the meaning of our lives also creates a tension
when it comes to the validity of those meanings. There is a kind of bleak absurdity to the
prospect of committing our lives to vales and meanings that we know ourselves to have
invented.
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• Self-deception and authenticity

• Nevertheless, to hide from the knowledge of our freedom and pass off our responsibility
onto other people, ideas or institutions as if they can take care of our anxiety and
absurdity is to engage in ‘bad faith,’ to use a term used by Sartre. To exist as a human
being means to be willing to take up the challenge of one’s freedom. There is ‘no exit’
(the title of one of Sartre’s plays) by which we could get ourselves off the hook.
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• The individual and ‘they’

• The demand for authenticity also has a social and a political dimension. Some
existentialists have been extremely individualistic, while some have been involved in
liberation movements.
• Buber argued that authentic existence was impossible without a serious relationship with
other persons.
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• Irreligion and religion

• The viability of religion is a contested matter among existentialists. Sartre argued that the
existence of a God who was free, and so religiously interesting, would entail the
cancellation of human freedom; but humans are free, therefore God does not exist.
Others saw God as the ultimate Thou who, by engaging in relationship with us, could
give authentic meaning to our otherwise absurd existence.
17 UNDERSTANDING ABSURDIM

• All human beings seem to crave meaning, search for it, and create it. We constantly make
up stories out of our lives to give them meaning. And we search for explanations for the
universe in general. Religion may be the most popular source of meaning for people;
believing in a god or gods, a spirit-world, an afterlife, or a holy book, or practicing ritual,
prayer, or meditation makes life meaningful for many people.
• And religion is not the only possibility: people find meaning for their lives in
nationalism, science, Marxism, art, and many other beliefs and practices.
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• Absurdists see all of these attempts as ultimately doomed, in a sense. Not that absurdists
think it’s pointless to do anything, but they believe that no matter what you do, you
cannot escape the absurdity of being a human being. It’s not exactly the universe which is
absurd in absurdism, but rather the fact that humans are innately driven to look for
meaning in an ultimately meaningless universe.
• Whatever stories we tell to give meaning to our lives are just that — stories, fictions. So
what can we do?
• Does it not feel a bit absurd, though, that we work hard to make money to
sustain ourselves, only to keep working hard so we can keep sustaining
ourselves? Are our lives trapped in an absurd cycle in which we go around
in circles to avoid the problem of the absurd? Have these goals become
our secular gods?
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• Absurdism tackles these questions and more, examining the tension

between our need for meaning and the universe's refusal to provide it.
Absurdity became a serious philosophical problem in the 20th century, an
era that saw two World Wars.
• philosophers, prose writers, and dramatists turned their attention to this
problem and tried to present and confront it in prose and drama form.
21 DEFINITION

• In literature, Absurdism refers to literary works produced from the 1950s to the 1970s
that present and explore the absurd nature of existence. They took a good look at the
fact that there is no inherent meaning in life, yet we keep on living and keep trying to
find meaning.
• This was achieved by being themselves absurd in form or plot, or both. Literary
absurdity involves the use of unusual language, characters, dialogue and plot structure
that give works of absurdist literature the quality of ridiculousness (absurdity in its
common definition).
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• Absurdism refers broadly to all types of literature, including fiction, short stories, and
poetry (such as Beckett's) that deal with the absurdity of being human. When we speak of
the Absurdist plays composed by these playwrights, this movement is specifically known
as 'The Theatre of the Absurd' - a term assigned by Martin Esslin in his 1960 essay of
the same title.
23 ORIGINS AND INFLUENCES OF ABSURDISM IN
LITERATURE
• Absurdism was influenced by several artistic movements, writers, and
playwrights. For example, it was influenced by Alfred Jarry's avant-
garde play Ubu Roi which was performed only once in Paris in 1986.
The play is a satire of Shakespearean plays that uses bizarre costumes and
strange, unrealistic language while providing little backstory for the
characters
24 ABSURDISM EXAMPLES: THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

• The Theatre of the Absurd was a movement identified by Martin Esslin. Absurdist
plays were distinguished from traditional plays by their exploration of the absurdity
of the human condition and the anguish this absurdity inspired at the level of form
and plot.
• Although the early Absurdist plays of Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel
Beckett were mostly written around the same time in the same place, in Paris,
France, the Theatre of the Absurd is not a conscious or unified movement.
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• Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

• Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin, Ireland, but lived in Paris, France for
the majority of his life. Beckett's absurdist plays had a huge impact on
other Absurdist playwrights and on the literature of the absurd as a whole.
Beckett's most famous plays are Waiting for
Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), and Happy Days (1961).
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• Waiting for Godot (1953)

• Waiting for Godot is Beckett's most famous play and it was hugely influential. The
two-act play is a tragicomedy about two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting
for someone named Godot, who never comes. The play has two acts that are
repetitive and circular: in both acts, the two men wait for Godot, another two men
Pozzo and Lucky join them then leave, a boy arrives to say that Godot will come
tomorrow, and both acts end with Vladimir and Estragon standing still.
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• There are many different interpretations as to who or what Godot is or

represents: Godot could be God, hope, death, etc. Whatever the case, it
seems that Godot is likely representative of some sort of meaning; by
believing in Godot and waiting for him, Vladimir and Estragon find
comfort and purpose in their depressing lives.
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• The influence of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) on Absurdism cannot be overstated.

Kafka is known for his novel The Trial (published posthumously in 1925) about a
man arrested and prosecuted without ever being told what the crime is.
• Also famous is the novella 'The Metamorphosis' (1915), about a salesman who
wakes up one day transformed into a giant vermin. The unique strangeness found in
Kafka's works, known as 'Kafkaesque', was hugely influential to the Absurdists.
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• The philosophy of Absurdism

• The philosophy of Absurdism, developed by French philosopher Albert Camus, emerged
as a response to the problem of the Absurd, as an antidote to nihilism, and as a departure
from existentialism. Let's start at the beginning - of the philosophical Absurd.
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• Nihilism
• Nihilism is the rejection of moral principles as a response to the meaninglessness of
existence. If there is no God, then there is no objective right or wrong, and anything
goes. Nihilism is a philosophical problem that philosophers try to tackle. Nihilism
presents a moral crisis since if we abandon moral principles, the world would become an
extremely hostile place.
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• Existentialism
• Existentialism is a response to the problem of nihilism (the rejection of
moral principles in the face of life's meaninglessness). Existentialists
argue that we can deal with the lack of objective meaning by creating our
own meaning in our lives.
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• Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

• The Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's ideas of freedom, choice, and the absurd
were influential to the existentialists and the absurdists.
• The absurd
• Kierkegaard developed the idea of the absurd in his philosophy. For Kierkegaard, the absurd is the
paradox of God being eternal and infinite, yet also being incarnated as the finite, human Jesus.
Because the nature of God makes no sense, we cannot believe in God through reason. This means
that to believe in God, we must take a leap of faith and make the choice to believe anyway.
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• Freedom and choice

• To be free, we must stop blindly following the Church or society and confront the
incomprehensibility of our existence. Once we acknowledge that existence makes no sense, we are
free to determine our own paths and views for ourselves. Individuals are free to choose whether
they want to follow God. The choice is ours to make, but we should choose God, is Kierkegaard's
conclusion.
• Although Kierkegaard's aim is to reinforce the belief in God, this idea that the individual must
evaluate the world and decide for themselves the meaning of it all was highly influential to the
existentialists, who argued that in a universe without meaning, the individual must make their own.
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• Albert Camus (1913-1960)

• Camus saw Kierkegaard's decision to abandon reason and take a leap of faith as
'philosophical suicide'. He believed the existentialist philosophers were guilty of the
same thing, as, instead of abandoning the pursuit of meaning altogether, they gave in to
the need for meaning by claiming that the individual should forge their own meaning in
life.
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• In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus defines the absurd as the tension that emerges
from the individual's pursuit of meaning in a universe that refuses to provide evidence of
any meaning. So long as we are living, we will never know if God exists because there is
no evidence of this being the case. In fact, it seems as though there is plenty of evidence
that God doesn't exist: we live in a world where terrible things happen that don't make
any sense.
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• Camus argues that the solution to the suffering brought on by our obsessive need to find
meaning is to abandon the quest for meaning altogether and embrace that there is no
more to life than this absurd struggle. We should rebel against meaninglessness
by enjoying our lives with the full knowledge that they have no meaning whatsoever.
For Camus, this is freedom.
• Camus imagines that Sisyphus has found happiness in his task by abandoning illusions
that there is any meaning to it. He is condemned to it anyway, so he might as well enjoy
it rather than be miserable trying to find purpose in his turmoil.
38 HOW DO WE SOLVE IT? CAMUS SAYS WE HAVE
THREE OPTIONS, AND WE HAVE TO CHOOSE
ONE.
• Choice #1.
• The first is suicide, which isn’t a good idea according to Camus. Suicide only makes the
Absurd more absurd, and it ends your life, which was sort of a miracle to begin with.

• Choice #3.
• Finally, we have option three, wherein we can embrace the Absurd and realize that
we’re truly free. From there, we’re free to pursue anything we want and try to embrace
what life has to offer.
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• Choice #2.
• Then there’s option two, ‘The Leap of Faith.’ Basically, we can do
what Camus refers to as “commit philosophical suicide” and
pretend there’s a higher power that gives our life meaning — in
other words, God. We’d have to pretend that make-believe was the
actual truth and accept a limited role of freedom in our lives. By
accepting the imposed moral codes of faith, we may be
suppressing what we truly believe and want deep down.
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• Absurdism vs. Existentialism Absurdism and existentialism are very closely related, so
much so that Albert Camus (the main absurdist philosopher) is usually considered an
existentialist, even though he always claimed that he was not one. These two
philosophies start from the same place: human beings have a deep need for meaning, but
the universe provides no answers. They strongly deny the validity of religion and other
pseudo-religious philosophies such as nationalism—because they seem to be based on
blind faith and wishful thinking. And they raise the same question: how can we live with
this meaninglessness?
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• From there, however, the two philosophies go very different ways.
• Existentialism escapes into the idea of free will. Existentialists believe that even
though the universe is meaningless, human beings still have freedom, and make life
meaningful by exercising that freedom. Although the universe is inherently
meaningless, we are free to make our own meanings. Thus, existentialism ends up in
a hopeful place despite its extremely bleak starting-point.
• In absurdism, things are not so easy. Absurdists flatly deny the existence of free will,
claiming that it is just one more sad fiction invented by human beings to avoid
despair.
• Instead, absurdists take one of two routes (we’ll learn more about them in section IV):
The Leap of Faith: Although absurdism starts off from a complete denial of religion, it
doesn’t necessarily end up there.

• The Acceptance of Absurdity: If religion still doesn’t seem like an acceptable option, we can
always decide to make our peace with the absurdity of the universe; we can try to find sources
of happiness that don’t involve the need for meaning. It would be a little like a sick person
learning to accept their illness and being OK with the fact that they will never be well again.