THEA 2210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre
Document Summary
What beckett says in his plays is not totally new. Philosophers had questions about modern life: objectivity, authenticity, authority . A challenge to the norms and values of western culture as a whole. The artist world in the post-war: radical changes in art. Change in our way of knowing: from relative knowledge to knowing through the body (embodiment became import at this point) Change in the relationship of art to reality: from representation (realism) to oppression (using the conceptual world as a subject) Change in the relationship between art and history. Experiments with dramaturgy and the absurdist theatre. The absurdist theatre is the theatre movement of the 1950s and 60s that expressed the existentialist philosophy of meaninglessness and the absurdity of life. Sartre and camus (1950s): rejection of rationalistic views of the universe: the rationalistic view is that there is logic in life and reason.