Academic literature on the topic 'Concept of absurdity'

The textbook actualizes interdisciplinary discourse as a principle of studying cultural experience in its versatility (creative personality and features of its activity; the existence of artistic culture in the society of different epochs, including in the modern world; Russia-specific problems of artistic influences: absurdity, totalitarianism). The material is presented on the basis of philosophical, psychological and social methodology, based on art criticism ideas. The author's concept of the publication is based on a non — trivial choice of analyzed cultural phenomena corresponding to the triad "man- chronotope — culture".
 The publication can be used to deepen the theoretical positions studied in accordance with the new state educational standard for social and humanitarian specialties in compulsory and elective courses.
 It is intended for students of universities and pedagogical universities, universities of culture and art: cultural scientists, historians, sociologists, philologists, art historians, graduate students in the Humanities and teachers.

This chapter shows how the concept of the trajectory of a quantum particle almost vanished in the battle between Werner Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Erwin Schrödinger’s wave mechanics. It took Niels Bohr and his complementarity principle of wave-particle duality to cede back some reality to quantum trajectories. However, Schrödinger and Einstein were not convinced and conceived of quantum entanglement to refute the growing acceptance of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics. Schrödinger’s cat was meant to be an absurdity, but ironically it has become a central paradigm of practical quantum computers. Quantum trajectories took on new meaning when Richard Feynman constructed quantum theory based on the principle of least action, inventing his famous Feynman Diagrams to help explain quantum electrodynamics.

On Being and Becoming offers a new approach to existentialist philosophy and literature, as responding to competing demands for universal truth and the defense of the irreducible singularity of the individual. On Being and Becoming traces the heterogeneity of existentialist thinking beyond the popular wartime philosophers of the Parisian Left Bank, demonstrating their critical dependence on sources from the nineteenth century and their complements in modernist works across the European continent and beyond. While quintessentially modern, existentialism inherits ideas of the past and anticipates challenges of the present. Despite its individualism, existentialist attention to the human self is related to conceptions of world, others, the earth, and the more encompassing concept of being. The predominance of ideas of authenticity, individuality, and self-determination makes any existentialist manifesto self-contradictory, while existentialist thinkers above all wanted to make their philosophy relevant to concrete human existence as it is lived. Prevailing models of existential authenticity life tend to overlook the rich diversity of its prospects, which, as this volume shows, involve not only anxiety, absurdity, awareness of death and of the loss of religious reassurances, but also hope, the striving for happiness, and a sense of the transcendent—all of these grounded our human capacity to create meaning. In spite of the diversity of existentialism, all of its thinkers recognize the self as becoming, and recognize the courage and creativity human individuality demands. On Being and Becoming elaborates pragmatic and philosophical relevance of existentialism for being human in the contemporary world.

Chapter 2 portrays Active – Back Sooner as ‘it’ starts to disintegrate. It shows how upon arrival in one of the municipal units charged with the implementation of the trial, the original project design is undermined and recreated by the multiple local concerns to which it must adapt or defer. Developing the analytical metaphor ‘vector of concern’ the chapter documents how contradictory decisions were being made from minute to minute, all generated by attempts to make the interventions sensible and purposeful. The chapter concludes that when implementation fails it does so because implementation is in fact a second planning phase characterised by a high degree of instability.

We have seen, in Section 2.5, how the superposition principle leads to the existence of entangled states of two or more quantum systems. Such states are characterized by the existence of correlations between the systems, the form of which cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by any classical theory. These have played a central role in the development of quantum theory since early in its development, starting with the famous paradox or dilemma of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR). No less disturbing than the EPR dilemma is the problem of Schrödinger’s cat, an example of the apparent absurdity of following entanglement into the macroscopic world. It was Schrödinger who gave us the name entanglement; he emphasized its fundamental significance when he wrote, ‘I would call this not one but the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces the entire departure from classical thought’. The EPR dilemma represents a profound challenge to classical reasoning in that it seems to present a conflict between the ideas of the reality of physical properties and the locality imposed by the finite velocity of light. This challenge and the developments that followed have served to refine the concept of entanglement and will be described in the first section of this chapter. We start by recalling that a state of two quantum systems is entangled if its density operator cannot be written as a product of density operators for the two systems, or as a probability-weighted sum of such products. For pure states, the condition for entanglement can be stated more simply: a pure state of two quantum systems is not entangled only if the state vector can be written as a product of state vectors for the two systems. In the discipline of quantum information, entanglement is viewed as a resource to be exploited. We shall find, both here and in the subsequent chapters, that our subject owes much of its distinctive flavour to the utilization of entanglement.

The third movement of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, Recitativo, lays bare the soloists, foregrounding and undercutting them simultaneously. More strangely, the movement ends with quotations from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and from Berg’s Violin Concerto just before its climax. This chapter further discusses Schnittke’s sketches for the Concerto Grosso no. 1. Particular attention is given to Schnittke’s reference in these sketches to Adelbert von Chamisso’s novella “Peter Schlemiel,” and the parallels that might be drawn between it and the Concerto Grosso no. 1. This chapter also considers more fully what this composition says about Schnittke’s polystylism at the time and his changing accounts of balancing often irreconcilable opposites. What does it all mean? Was he earnest or not? Schnittke insisted that he viewed all of the themes in the Concerto Grosso no. 1 “completely seriously,” but he was as prone to laughing as crying in the face of absurdity.

The use of Grice’s cooperative principles, conversational maxims and implicatures are of great utility in deciphering the semantic meanings of Ionesco's “absurdist” plays. Based on these concepts of pragmatic linguistics, we evaluate the meaning of Ionesco's short plays (The Bald Soprano, The Lesson and The Chairs) in relation to the communicative situation. Pragmatics is the field of linguistics that studies the meaning in conversation, as it is communicated by the speaker/writer and decoded to be understood by the listener/reader. Pragmatics is also the study of contextual meaning and how we communicate more than we say. Absurdist plays are particularly appropriate for such analysis, since reference and inference play an essential role in understanding the situation as well as the meaning of the characters in the tirades they utter on stage.

Throughout Being John Malkovich, reflexive narrational strategies, diegetic absurdities, and fantastical plot points seek to disrupt the expectations and viewing practices associated with the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema—yet Jonze and Kaufman’s film does not abandon these conventions. Being John Malkovich (like all of Jonze’s films to date) is not comfortably categorized as “arthouse” or “experimental.” Rather, Jonze’s work employs the conventions of the dominant Hollywood norm in concert with eccentric plot devices and irony at various moments in order to subvert audience expectation, which results in an “offbeat” tone or aesthetic. Wilkins argues that the most absurd, or eccentric, narrative elements of Being John Malkovich—its ironic focus on celebrity and the ludicrous Malkovich portal—are precisely the mechanisms that enable an essentially unresolvable existential conundrum to be shaped into the conventionally linear narrative structure. Yet these utterly bizarre narrative inclusions also function as diversions; they aim to distract from or make humorous the very existential concerns they narrativize.

Chapter Seven takes up the topic of Zen cartoons, which provide further glimpses of Zen and Zen art concepts, perceptions, and desires in operation away from the canon, even as they draw at times from canonical works and have their own “canonical” tropes. The chapter also explores the larger question of Buddhist/Zen humor in order to think through the very question of cartooning Zen. It proposes the category, “Bodhi-characters,” various figures drawn from the classical Chan/Zen pantheon along with recent Zen-master-esque figures, such as The Dude from The Big Lebowski (1997), who perform and are adored for their counter-normative if not absurdist attitudes and utterances that intimate (to some) Zen philosophical and spiritual truths. These figures create, I suggest, a modern-contemporary neo-“pantheon,” that embodies often the conception of Zen as residing in particular attitudes and demeanors, often linked to the comedic.