... self-critique censorship absurdity ...

... emerging viruses Cameroon absurdity powerlessness Nathan Wolfe ...

... In this essay, Yan Lianke turns his attention to his own literary works and his more general writing practice. He notes the particular challenge of writing fiction in contemporary China, when reality is often more absurd than the most absurd scenarios that fictional authors could come up...

... these high-profile researches by pointing out their absurdity, powerlessness, and obscenity. Drawing inspiration from this critique, I suggest that the fight against bushmeat viruses has a nihilistic potential: as unknown, nonexistent viruses were turned into priorities, largely fictive programs...

....” Subsequently the chapter considers Chester Himes’s discrepant engagement of America in the language of the hard-boiled tradition and the black absurd toward a reframing of noir. Textual analysis of Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) examines the possibilities of genre function (noir) and the discursivity of race...

... In this queer take on erotica fiction, the love triangle among Fire, Wolf, and their shared object of desire, Qi Shishi, spans decades and is nothing short of spectacular, comical, and absurd. The story contains all the elements that romantic erotica should have, but in a departure from...

... Jankélévitch presents Bergson’s idea that the plenitude of life contradicts the absurd idea that the Nothing is the smallest conceivable existence from which the real could be pieced together. Something always precedes nothing, in human thought and action as in the cosmos. Bergson’s creation...

... This chapter focuses on Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin (1975) as an exercise in the racial grotesque. The film casts blackness as an absurd modality of critical dialogism with, among other things, the history of American animation, the New South ideal, vernacular cosmopolitanism, the blaxploitation...

... I want to embrace this in some ways absurd oxymoron: the feminist picaresque. I’ll drop common associations that don’t serve my purpose, but some of those naughty, rejected meanings of picaresque may linger on as irony. In my travels with feminism, I have been neither a rogue nor a maker...

... to enhance public safety, the specter of “future Willie Hortons” introduced a new common sense, according to which furloughs entailed an unreasonable risk and were evidence of the supposed absurdity of rehabilitative approaches to incarceration. Although prisoners, their families, and correctional...

... of the present for their potentials of (rational) absurdity and (technological) self-destruction. In this chapter, these issues are explored in the work of three different novelists. Daren Goh's The HDB Murders updates Michael Young's satirical The Rise of the Meritocracy, and deals with the competitive...

... criticized these high-profile researches by pointing out their absurdity, powerlessness, and obscenity. Drawing inspiration from this critique, I suggest that the fight against bushmeat viruses has a nihilistic potential: as unknown, nonexistent viruses were turned into priorities, largely fictive programs...

... was an instrument of absurdity as it constantly foregrounded the distance between the utopian world it depicted and the actual experience of socialist lives. After discussing the specificities of the comic register of socialist television, I step farther back and assess how TV humor concentrated around specific...

... Tenorio proved the perfect foil. Ubiquitous in Mexican popular culture, Don Juan epitomized all that was wrong with traditional male scripts: arrogance, impetuosity, misogyny, cruelty, and egotism. For penny press writers, local tenorios were figures of fun, ridiculed for their absurd seductions...

.... Television was an instrument of absurdity as it constantly foregrounded the distance between the utopian world it depicted and the actual experience of socialist lives. After discussing the specificities of the comic register of socialist television, I step farther back and assess how TV humor concentrated...

... for a proxy battle in the war on crime. Whereas a decade earlier furloughs were heralded as a tool to enhance public safety, the specter of “future Willie Hortons” introduced a new common sense, according to which furloughs entailed an unreasonable risk and were evidence of the supposed absurdity...

...The Feminist Picaresque I want to embrace this in some ways absurd oxymoron: the feminist picaresque. I’ll drop common associations that don’t serve my purpose, but some of those naughty, rejected meanings of picaresque may linger on as irony. In my travels with feminism, I have been neither...