A Study Of Absurd And Its Aesthetic Value Major

Absurd, as an aesthetic category, has won universal public attention in the field of Western Art for a long time since last century. It has profoundly revealed the distorted capitalist social relations in modern Western society, as well as the feelings of despair, disillusionment, desolation, loneliness, alienation, and being abandoned brought by the two World Wars. The theme of absurdity is not only reflected in theater of the absurd, but also in Western existential literature, black humor novels in European and American literature, and magical realist literature, etc. Actually,"absurd" is deeply rooted in human’s existential state and the antagonistic and paradoxical relationship between human and the world, and is always associated with the long historical process of human society. Therefore, absurd is shown as a universal, trans-time and trans-national existential state and existential experience. In this sense, absurd is not merely a literary and aesthetic proposition, but a philosophical proposition, deeply related to the mutually antagonistic relationship between human and the world; the essence of absurdity is manifested as man’s relationship with the world and its results. Thus, human’s absurd situation and the sense of absurdity reflected in literature are essentially a kind of "simulation", metaphor or insinuation. It depends on the objective relationship in the aesthetics of absurdity,"absurd paradox":only when we view absurd existence, absurd situations, and absurd feelings of objects with an objective, calm and rational attitude, will we be able to fully comprehend the absurdity of literary objects’ existence. Our study of the aesthetics, appreciation and acceptance of absurdity is based on the premise that we ourselves do not fall into any absurd situation.In contemporary Chinese literature, there are some works in absurd style or showing the aesthetics of absurd i ty. Particularly, in some thoughtful and realistic films, we may always find film makers’thinking and reflection on the absurdity of human existence in current society. In the present paper, the author briefly discusses the aesthetics of absurdity in contemporary Chinese films, by taking examples of the film texts of Devils on the Doorstep directed by Jiang Wen and Cow directed by Guan Hu.