The Absurd in Literature

Cornwell, Neil

doi:10.7228/manchester/9780719074097.001.0001

Cited by 28 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…In order to understand Yan's idiosyncratic adaptation of the absurd, we must consider the specific meanings that he incorporates into his work. In his seminal work, The Absurd in Literature , Neil Cornwell observes that “for most commentators, absurdity is to be equated with nihilism” (, p. 4) and that “the absurd […] is born of nihilism” (2006, p. 5). Martin Esslin similarly defines the common theme of the Theatre of the Absurd as “metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition” (, pp.…”

Section: The Absurd In Chinese Literature and Prohibited Area Number mentioning

confidence: 99%

The absurd as method: The Chinese absurdist hero, enchanted power, and the alienated poor in Yan Lianke's military literature

Xie

2020

Literature Compass

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As one of the most prolific and outspoken of contemporary Chinese writers, Yan Lianke has won international recognition for his writing from the margins. However, while his novels have been extensively studied, Yan's military literature has received much less scholarly attention. This paper explores Yan's adaptation of the absurd in Western literature to Chinese military literature, investigates how he constructs Chinese absurdist heroes, and reconstructs the concepts of "the poor" and "power" in his narratives. Focusing in particular on his 2009 collection of military novellas Sihao jinqu (Prohibited Area Number Four), this paper argues that the absurd in Yan's military texts serves not only as a formal experiment for exploring the alternative imagination of the alienated and marginalized peasant soldiers in contemporary China but also as an implicit means of articulating Yan's own socio-political commentary, one which cannot allow itself to be explicitly political.

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Section: The Absurd In Chinese Literature and Prohibited Area Number mentioning

confidence: 99%

The absurd as method: The Chinese absurdist hero, enchanted power, and the alienated poor in Yan Lianke's military literature

Xie

2020

Literature Compass

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“…Having generated much media and scholarly attention in the 1950s and 1960s, the theory of the absurd fell from grace thereafter (Braun 1974), albeit the 'absurd hero' continued to flourish in some literary sectors (Galloway 1981;Cornwell 2006). For some, the rejection of ethics and hope in favour of a tryst with death and despair posed an insurmountable problem to purposive action designed to change the world (Hochberg 1965;Trundle and Puligandla 1986).…”

Section: We Have Never Been Logicalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peering into the Abyss: Environment, Research and Absurdity in the ‘Age of Stupid’

Bryant¹

2010

The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, Second Edition

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“…6) by using not just one CLEAN beam, but a set of CLEAN beams of different scales. In practice, two variations, multiscale CLEAN (Cornwell & Holdaway 2006) and adaptive scale pixel (ASP) decomposition (Bhatnagar & Cornwell 2004) work better and differ in how they use and set the variously scaled beams. For structures larger than the standard CLEAN beam, their behaviour should fall somewhere between smear fitting and standard CLEAN, if natural weighting is used, with somewhat reduced flexibility because of the finite number of choices.…”

Section: Multiple Scale Cleanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Smear fitting: a new image-deconvolution method for interferometric data

Reid

2006

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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A new technique is presented for producing images from interferometric data. The method, ‘smear fitting’, makes the constraints necessary for interferometric imaging double as a model, with uncertainties, of the sky brightness distribution. It does this by modelling the sky with a set of functions and then convolving each component with its own elliptical Gaussian to account for the uncertainty in its shape and location that arises from noise. This yields much sharper resolution than clean for significantly detected features, without sacrificing any sensitivity. Using appropriate functional forms for the components provides both a scientifically interesting model and imaging constraints that tend to be better than those used by traditional deconvolution methods. This allows it to avoid the most serious problems that limit the imaging quality of those methods. Comparisons of smear fitting to clean and maximum entropy are given, using both real and simulated observations. It is also shown that the famous Rayleigh criterion (resolution = wavelength/baseline) is inappropriate for interferometers as it does not consider the reliability of the measurements.

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The Absurd in Literature

Cited by 28 publications

References 0 publications

The absurd as method: The Chinese absurdist hero, enchanted power, and the alienated poor in Yan Lianke's military literature

The absurd as method: The Chinese absurdist hero, enchanted power, and the alienated poor in Yan Lianke's military literature

Peering into the Abyss: Environment, Research and Absurdity in the ‘Age of Stupid’

Smear fitting: a new image-deconvolution method for interferometric data

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