Author(s): Pratha R. Jaya

Abstract: The conditioning of human lives in the modern era tends to be hazy as both advantages and adversities intertwine equitably. Comfort and calamities taking up their twists and turns, the age also penetrates the people’s consciousness by encountering the euphoric emancipation in the midst of the absurd industrialized extremities. When the war and the bloodshed haunted and detained the human senses, the aftermath of destruction had unique bizarre effects on the survivors. Out of which emerged the Theatre of the absurd during the mid-twentieth century, reflecting not the surface level crisis but the deeper level darker reality. In accordance with their introspection and the interpretation of the revolutionary world, the playwrights of the absurd theatre shared a socio- cultural psychological climate with their spectators blended with circumlocutory hollow themes. This paper analyzes the reception stimuli in the audience of the absurd theatre in relation with the readerly‘gaps’ and the hermeneutic codes patterned in the absurd drama context.

Keywords: Absurd theatre, hermeneutic code, dissimilation, aesthetic reception, anti-play.

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.53.29