On "Black Humor" And The American "Absurd World" In The 1960s

The sixties of the 20th century is an eventful age in American history, in which social unrest and economic ups and downs led directly to the collision of cognition and the boiling of culture, in which the emergence of a large number of famous works and a variety of literary genre innovations formed a flourishing stage of American Literature, "mini-renaissance" periods. As a symbol carrier of the social and cultural concept, literature was imprinted by history, and meanwhile changed people's cultural attitudes and behavioral patterns, to a certain extent. The literary genre, black humor, which grown in rich soil of the American politics, economy and culture focused on the metaphysical catastrophe in human destiny. Conflicts between its tragic flavor and comic atmosphere resulted in describing the absurd world in American history by the unique expression technique and artistic features. Black humor has simultaneously become a kind of diffused mood of the US in the 1960s. Based on the connotations and the outside features, by using the method of postmodern historiography and two-way expounding of "historicity of literature" and "textuality of history", the thesis penetrates into the absurd world to comprehend the history of the 1960s, and re-criticize the humane system, values, social consciousness of US in the 1960s from another angle.In terms of academic theories basis for history and culture research in area of literature, the thesis bridges the gap between black humor and history in the 1960s. The thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter explores the cultural sources and social sources of black humor, as well as the development history, in the contingency and necessity of popularity of black humor in USA in the 1960s. It demonstrates a series of social crisis behind the emergence of black humor, and analyzes the contradictions between the ideal and the reality by expounding the gestation of the various anti-rational philosophical trends and the social trends of modernist school towards black humor. The second chapter gives a discourse on the breaking of social consciousness, the fuzziness of cultural values and the loss of moral standards during the historical process from 1950s to 1960s. Thereout, it reaches a conclusion that abrupt transfer of literature in social and cultural circumstances resulted in black humor during 1950s and 1960s that could be called a special period as watershed in American cultural history, so that it is destined that the strong characteristics of the times is the birthmark of black humor. After further clarifying the times feature and historical role of black humor, this part of the thesis goes deep into excavating the historical and cultural value of black humor—black humor that has a profound cultural relation with fantastic literature records or resurrects the absurd world in American history with a tortuous form. The philosophy foundations, ideology inclines, value orientation, social psychology, emotional and aesthetic characteristics of the literary genre contain rich historical and cultural information that could illustrate thoroughly the 1960s. The third chapter reviews a series of social movement and cultural movement that broke out in USA in the 1960s. Along various clues that are revealed social essence by black humor, it discusses the serious social problem systematically, and reveals a wide variety of absurdity in USA in the 1960s, as well as the circulation, interlocution and the communication of social energy between American history and black humor in the 1960s based on the intertexuality. The last chapter has a micro-perspective on the reflection of the American "absurd world" in the typical black humorist such as Heller, Vonnegut, Pynchon and whose masterpieces. By this means, it probes into the historical truth that exists in the 1960s that was licked into shape by a kind of social and cultural forces, black humor, and meanwhile shows the animadvert on America's humanistic systems, values, social awareness in the 1960s.Black humor that rooted in social reality fermented a holistic cultural context of the 1960s in USA, and made the history vivid, even participated in constructing the history of the 1960s. The thesis contributes to a re-recognition of the historical outlook, social conditions and cultural ideas in the observation of the American people's ideological tendency and attitude towards life from the literary redivious reality, and moreover, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the overall American history and culture with the help of observation of black humor by section. It has active impact on helping people to understand the absurdity and craziness of modern capitalist society.More than this, the related enlightenments are finally expounded in the thesis. Author attempts to call for interactivity between historical life and present situation across space and time, in which people could think deeply about the cultural trends and social movements during the economic, cultural and political expedited transition period in the course of Chinese modernization.