Editing Absurdist fiction (section)

==Overview==
The absurdist genre grew out of the [[modernist literature]] of the late 19th and early 20th century in direct opposition to the [[Victorian literature]] which was prominent just prior to this period. It was largely influenced by the [[Existentialism|existentialist]] and [[Nihilism|nihilist]] movements in [[philosophy]], and the [[Dada]] and [[Surrealism|surrealist]] movements in art. Existential and nihilistic philosophical influences on absurdist fiction were resultant of the post-war disillusionment. Absurdist fiction novelists and composers demanded freedom from the conventions prevalent in the 1940 philosophical movement in France. Other historical events that impacted the literary movement's style and philosophy include the atomic bomb and the Cold War.

Psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of British Columbia published a report in 2009 showing that reading absurdist tales improved test subjects' ability to find patterns. Their findings summarized that, when people have to work to find consistency and meaning in a fragmented story, it increases "the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities".<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Jacobs|first1=Tom|title=This Is Your Brain on Kafka|journal=Pacific Standard|date=16 September 2009|url=https://psmag.com/this-is-your-brain-on-kafka-b199db5a7786}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Proulx|first1=Travis|last2=Heine|first2=Steven J.|s2cid=7630993|title=Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar|journal=Psychological Science|date=September 2009|volume=20|issue=9|pages=1125–1131|doi=10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02414.x|pmid=19656338}}</ref>