AbsurdAdjective: --wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate: completely ridiculous--having no rational or orderly relationship to human life

Noun:an absurd state of affairs.

The Absurd and Social Commentaries

Absurdity as a Device

Hyperbolic Logical Fallacies

Absurdism andNon Sequitur

Breaking Social Conformity

Anecdotes in which characters take socially unacceptable actions to confront socially accepted emotions.

Absurdism

• life is irrational, illogical, incongruous, and without reason

Camus, Kafka, and Absurdism

Camus (possibly the greatest Existential novelists) believed that Kafka was the first to perfectly marry Absurdism to Existential ideals – both in a philosophical sense and a literary sense.

Franz Kafka

Albert Camus

Surrealism

Gala Éluard, 1924Max Ernst (French, born Germany, 1891–1976)Oil on canvas 32 x 25 3/4 in. (81.3 x 65.4 cm)The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, Gift of Muriel Kallis Newman, 2006 (2006.32.15)© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photo: This Is the Color of My Dreams, 1925

Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983)

Oil on canvas; 38 x 51 in. (96.5 x 129.5 cm)

The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002 (2002.456.5)

© 2011 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Margritte, Rene. The Treachery of Images. Oil painting. 1928-1929.

Los Angels’ County Museum of Art

Dali, Salvador. The Persistence of Memory. Oil painting. 1931.