Teaching Absurd Literature–A Pragmatic Approach to Ionesco's Transgressive Dramatic Discourse: The Conversational Maxims

This paper aims to present a rhetorical-pragmatic approach to Eugène Ionesco's plays in order to be used when teaching a theatre of the absurd course at university level. Students often feel confused when studying absurd literature as they find it hard to understand the authors’ message thoroughly. We discovered that if we approached the absurd dramatic discourse from a transgressive point of view with regard to Grice's conversational maxims, the literature course proved to be more productive and entertaining at the same time.