This paper analyses three of Eugen Ionescu's plays, namely The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, and The Chairs, by employing methodology specific to pragma linguistics and literary theory. In the ...aforementioned plays, the characters behave like puppets, and are devoid of inner life. Their communication turns into gibberish that fails to convey additional information, while the characters cling to words as if they were lifebelts saving them from drowning in nothingness. The study follows the characters' inability to have communicative competence: the speakers are mere operators of language, which they "bend" on the level of the signified and signifier alike.
L'objectif de cet article est de décrire les procédés stylistiques provoquant l'effet ironique dans Le roi se meurt ainsi que les modes de les transposer en langue polonaise dans une traduction ...d'Adam Tarn. L'analyse comparative de deux versions linguistiques permet de constater que pour rendre l'ironie, qui masque le tragique de la condition humaine, le traducteur utilise généralement les mêmes procédés stylistiques. Il arrive cependant que la dérision dans la traduction soit encore plus accentuée par le registre familier du langage dont se servent les personnages en version polonaise.
The epidemic has put at the forefront of our consideration the limits of scientific and political capabilities. It forces us to question our ability to control not only the virus, but also our human ...destiny. We will explore in this chaotic context Eugène Ionesco's Jeux de Massacre in which a mysterious infectious disease is disseminating communities, and Camus's L'État de siège. We study both plays in light of the permanent "state of emergency" that French authorities have put in place in the age of Covid. Elected officials from the Left and the Right denounced the government's measure which they claim was infringing on people's liberty. We examine through the plays the questions of power/authority, paranoia/violence, but also responsibility in a historical and contemporary context.
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Discussions about the so-called ontology of performance typically concern the paired ideas of presence and disappearance, recording technologies and documentation, trace and memory—all of which posit ...in some way the living, breathing body of an actor often co-present with those in the audience. To do that, they cultivated a charged atmosphere of heightened sensory stimulation, using color, light, sound, and even scent to suffuse the space of the audience and blur its distinction from the fictional world of the stage. Curtin discusses the implied catastrophes that shape the dystopian worlds of Samuel Beckett's Endgame and Happy Days, and Marguerite Duras's Yes, Maybe, noting the trauma that survivors of such "death events" experience in his consideration of Edward Bond's The Tin Can People, Józef Szajna's Replica, and Howard Barker's Found in the Ground.
Practitioners of xiqu (traditional Chinese theater) have long appropriated Western plays and theatrical ideas to modernize Chinese tradition for new theatricalities. Primarily, plays driven by plot ...and characterization have been selected to highlight themes germane to Enlightenment modernity. Yet recently, there have been a few intercultural attempts to adapt the so‐called Absurdist drama with xiqu, in a deliberate deviation from metanarratives that have characterized modern Chinese theater for nearly a century, to reflect better the existential conditions of contemporary individuals. By investigating the actors’ reframing of nothingness in Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe’s adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs, this article argues that Ionesco’s original absence‐presence dynamic has been displaced and transformed in the Chinese context; his concern with frightening nothingness is replaced by kunju’s philosophical reflection on emptiness, which aims at a positive negativity. This adaptation also suggests a new path for Western modernist plays to communicate with classical Chinese culture.
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Matyla Ghyka can be included in the series of writers saved by exile, a series including, among others, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran and Eugene Ionesco. Lesser-known in Romania, in comparison to the ...aforementioned writers, he lived a life extremely rich in events, and created work that sprung from his passion for the philosophy of numbers, for harmony in nature and arts. His books, written in exile, either in France or the United States, harmoniously complement the philosophical thinking of Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran, without having the same impact or access to media coverage as his fellow countrymen. As a result, reading and interpreting Ghyka, a forbidden writer in communist Romania, appreciated by the interwar and postwar literary elites of Paris and New York, but still largely unknown to the public of the old and new worlds, is all the more necessary.
The play opened with the wife's (Shen Yili) failed attempts to fetch water with a bamboo basket, while the husband (Wu Shuang) smiled at her conduct, saying, "did I not tell you, to fetch water with ...a bamboo basket only ends in nothing?" This line was a variation of a Chinese proverb that means futile effects. ...the couple fed each other with tea and wine, first pouring them in cups, then offering them to the other, and drinking the cup or trying to make it cool before drinking—except that there were no cups, bottle, nor teapot onstage, much like earlier there had been no basket nor rope in the wife's hands. While Ionesco did claim that The Chairs is about the nonexistence of all characters and the unreality of reality and that everything is like a dream, the philosophy underlying nothingness/emptiness in the kunju adaptation differs from that of the original play in that it is less pessimistic.
This is a study on bilingualism as an aesthetic dimension of a literary work, based on analyses of some pieces of the moldovan writer Ion Druţă (born in 1928). Inspired by several literary ...traditions, especially Ionesco’s theater of the absurd, Drutian writing evolved mainly during the Russo-Soviet occupation, but also during the postmodern era. Thus, the technique of collage, by means of bilingualism, introduces the stylistic dissonance into the dramatic work and enriches the category of the absurd. Bilingualism is the new and decisive element of the absurd.
