The Afterlives of Absurdism @ NeMLA 2025 (NeMLA)
Philadelphia, PA
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
Northeast Modern Language Association
March 6-9, 2025
Philadelphia, PA
Panel: The Afterlives of Absurdism
Literary absurdism is a haunting and forgotten specter. This panel interrogates the absurd, an encounter with a meaningless world.
Albert Camus (1942) addressed it with his ethic of living as if the world is meaningless—being the sufferer of meaninglessness and bearer of meaning-making. Doesn’t this seem old news, or so common it hides in plain sight? Critics have consigned absurdism to its afterlife. Our moment is correct to suspect absurdism of a universalizing gesture without recourse to lived experiences of minoritized bodies. Eurocentrism—e.g. Martin Esslin (1961) over-relying on theaters of Beckett, Adamov, and Ionesco—is another reason its discourse has fallen out of favor.
Gilles Deleuze reminds us the absurd is “that which is without signification” (1969), or, in Brian Massumi’s term, “asignifying” (2002). From Victorian nonsense to Daniil Kharms to Neil Cornwell’s study (2006), it activates paradoxes whose events yield worlds to come.
2025 marks 100 years of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. It’s due time to reassess absurdism’s evolution with an understanding that absurd encounters that affect bodies are always political.
This panel honors diversity. How can we conceive absurdism as an impulse that traverses unsung literatures e.g. pre-modernist, contemporary, minor, and postcolonial?
This panel hinges on political urgency. Following recent accelerations of systems—global capital, control society, black box surveillance, and the Anthropocene—how can absurdism re-describe impersonal forces?
This panel considers theoretical shifts. How can we revise absurdism in light of recent academic “turns,” be they new materialist, affective, ontological, speculative, nonhuman, animal, plastic, transnational, theistic, pessimistic, etc? How can absurdism shed counter-light on “turns” performing themselves into spotlight, or perform a “turn” of its own?
This panel renews and re-theorizes absurdism and nonsense, then mines their revolutionary kernels. Preference will be given to abstracts prioritizing diversity, political urgency, and theoretical currency.
Submit 300 word abstract by Sept 30, 2024 to https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21080
See conference details at https://www.nemla.org/convention.html
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21080
Daniel Amaral