Who knows about black humor theory, dystopian theory, and the relationship between existentialism and dystopian theory?

Black humor, English name: black humor

A modern American literary genre. Prevalent in the mid-to-late 1960s, in 1965, Friedman compiled the works of 12 writers into a collection of short stories titled Black Humor, from which the genre got its name. Black humor novels strive to highlight the absurdity and coldness of the living environment, ridicule and attack traditional values and aesthetic concepts, and express the alienation of the world, the degradation of human nature and the brokenness of emotions. Some critics call it "humor under the gallows" or "jokes in the face of disaster". Black humor can be said to be anti-rational and anti-idealist literature.

The novelist of "black humor" highlights the absurdity of the world around the characters and the oppression of society on the individual, and expresses the incompatibility between the environment and the individual (i.e., the "ego") with an attitude of hopeless irony, and magnifies and distorts this incompatibility into a phenomenon that can be transformed into the "black humor" of the individual, which is the most important thing in the world. The phenomenon of such incongruity is magnified, distorted and transformed into deformity, which makes them appear more absurd and ridiculous, and at the same time makes people feel heavy and bitter. Therefore, some critics refer to "black humor" as "humor under the gallows" or "humor in the face of disaster". Writers of "black humor" often portray some eccentric "anti-hero" characters and use their ridiculous words and deeds to insinuate the social reality and express the writers' views on social problems. In terms of depiction, "black humor" writers also broke with the tradition, the plot of the novel lacks logical connection, often mixing the narration of real life with fantasies and memories, and mixing serious philosophies and gags into one. Examples include Heller's The Twenty-Second Army Rule, Pynchon's The Rainbow of Gravity, and Vonnegut's First Class Breakfast. Some "black humor" novels mocked the crisis of the human spirit, such as Bass's The Tobacco Broker and Purdy's Keppert Wright Begins.

"Black humor" as a form of aesthetics, belongs to the category of comedy, but it is a kind of perversion of comedy with tragic overtones. The emergence of "black humor" is linked to the turbulence of the United States in the 1960s. The absurdity and ridiculousness of contemporary capitalist society and the contradictions of "comedy" are not created by the subjective will of writers, but are a reflection of that social life. Although this reflection has a certain social significance and cognitive value, and although the writers also attacked all the authorities, including the ruling class, they emphasized that the social environment is difficult to change, and thus their works often show pessimistic and despairing emotions

Existentialism (Existentialism), also known as existentialism, is one of the major schools of contemporary Western philosophy. Its fundamental characteristic is to treat the irrational conscious activity of an isolated individual as the most real existence, and as the starting point of all its philosophy. It claims to be a human-centered philosophy that respects human individuality and freedom. It is a philosophical non-rationalist trend to emphasize the individual, independence and subjective experience. It was first proposed by S?ren Obe Kierkegaard. Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger can be seen as its forerunners. It circulated very widely in the 20th century. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the writer Albert Camus are its representatives.

Background of emergence

The emergence of existentialism is inseparable from the social background of the era in which it was born: the First World War was the beginning of the end of bourgeois civilization in Europe. With the advent of the modern period, man entered the irreligious phase of its history. At this time, although he has unprecedented power, technology, and civilization, he also simultaneously finds himself homeless. With the loss of religion, the all-embracing framework, man becomes not only dispossessed, but a fragmented being. Without a sense of belonging, he considers himself an "outsider" in this human society, alienating himself. Existentialism came into being when he desperately needed a theory to dissolve his alienation.

The main theoretical sources of existentialism are voluntarism, individualism, and phenomenology

Existentialism is not a unified philosophical system, but a philosophical trend,

Relationship between Existentialism and Dystopian Literature

Dystopia, in the most general sense, is a state of enmity between human beings and the world, the way of human being being is dystopian, and human beings are being alienated by He is swayed by an unnamable force of alienation, he is powerless to change his own situation, and there is no communication between man and man, or man and the world, and man exists in a meaningless world. This "dystopian" view centrally embodies the universal spiritual crisis and pessimism in the Western world. This universal crisis and pessimism is the soil from which Western dystopian literature was born. In the 1920s, literature based on this "dystopian" view appeared in Western modernist literature. Kafka is the representative of this kind of dystopian literature. His The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis, The Hole in the Ground and so on can be said to be the representatives of dystopian novels. In the 30's and 40's, the rise of existentialist philosophy, Sartre, Camus and other existentialist philosophers used literature to publicize "the world is absurd", "the existence of man is absurd" which are the basic propositions of existentialist philosophy, and created a number of famous absurdist novels such as "Nausea", "The Outsider" and so on. The Outsiders" and other famous absurdist works. Absurdist drama accepted the basic propositions of existentialist philosophy and surrealism and other schools of literary concepts and methods of expression, and blended them to form their own unique style, pushing absurd literature to the peak. It should be said that the overall tendency of the content of the existentialist literary thought led by Sartre and Gamut is basically the same, but the difference is that the absurdist drama chooses a unique form of expression, which is the main reason why they can exist as an independent theater school. Absurdist drama is to use absurd forms to express absurd contents, such as grotesque, vague, sickly and ugly characters, if any plot, deviation from common sense stage settings, upside down and gibberish dialogues, and so on. This grotesque approach aptly expresses the theme of absurdity, and makes this genre appear in the world literature with its "anti-theater", "anti-literature", "vanguard" appearance, and become a unique and influential genre. It became a theater genre with a unique style and great influence.

References: The Absurdity of Absurdism, The Beginning

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