Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter

- Grammatical errors abound and the writing is clumsy in this hastily published project. (Sample of his writing: "The world, especially in the 1930s, was gearing up for unilinear progress. The claims of an Aryan nation proved this fact.")- Consists mostly of the "this is how everyone reacted to this production" school of analysis.- The "reassessment" of Camus occupies a page and a half and consists entirely of quoting from the last page of a single essay. Although the author seems to have made it to page 4 of The Rebel, not a single other Camus text is considered.Three very serious errors stand out among many:- There are approximately two texts that have been read in their original French, an article by Ionesco and Sisyphus by Camus. This is a book that promises to think about plays written in French but does not include French criticism or readings of the plays in French- Bennett more than once claims to make an original contribution to scholarship only to sneak into an endnote that, actually, loads of people have come to his conclusions before. As he admits several times, thinking about the theatre of the absurd as a theatre of parables isn't really his idea and people have been doing it for decades.- While Bennett has read and used a great deal of other people's insights on these plays, he has not read a great deal of the playwrights' works. The bibliography of this reassessment of the theatre of the absurd includes two entries for Beckett (both in English) and two for Genet and two for Pinter. Ionesco gets has four entries (three in English).Apparently academic journals have lined up to praise this book.