Rethinking Ionesco’s Absurd: The Bald Soprano in the Interlingual Context of Vichy and Postwar France

Rereading Eugène Ionesco’s postwar play La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in the light of the original, wartime Romanian version alongside archival materials concerning his political activity in Vichy France allows us to reconsider his role in the theater of the absurd. Instead of staging the emptiness of language in a conformist world, the Romanian play dramatizes how language and language exchange created meaning but also upheld state violence during the Second World War. Although the French version of the play adapts this theme to the postwar context, traces of state power over language remain. This new approach to a central text of the theater of the absurd invites us to reexamine the politics of language and language learning in wartime and postwar France

Time out of mind: The poetics of custom and common law in early modern England

This dissertation argues for the centrality of a category whose importance has been occluded by modernity\u27s relentless demand for novelty: custom in early modern literature. It seeks to account for custom\u27s appeal to early modern writers in verse and prose, particularly as they confronted the history of their generic forms, they language, and their native land. When discussed by literary scholars, custom usually is employed as a loose synonym for popular, rustic traditions. But, as intellectual historians have long recognized, early modern lawyers and historians considered custom to be synonymous with England\u27s common law, imagined to have existed since time out of mind. I argue that writers such as Thomas More, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Anne Clifford draw upon the legal discourse of custom in order to construct national and literary history in terms of a continuous, unbroken past. While the appeal to custom might work to entrench backward looking impulses, I propose that it also opened up poetic and political possibilities at a time when novelty was viewed as anarchic and insurrectionary. A legally-inflected iteration of custom forms the basis of More\u27s society without private property and repairs Sidney\u27s ideal kingdom; it authorizes Clifford\u27s resistance against patriarchal inheritance and Spenser\u27s imposition of Latin meter onto English verse and of English law onto Irish land. Custom, which governed the ownership and devolution of land, emerges conspicuously in these texts when land holding is at issue, whether in familial property disputes or in large-scale imperial claims. The formal and rhetorical elements of the texts I analyze are likewise shaped by common-law custom, particularly its emphasis on repetition and its foundation in communal consensus. Custom lends new valences to More\u27s ubiquitous use of proverbs, the copia of Sidney\u27s prose romance, Spenser\u27s project to classicize English verse, and Clifford\u27s diary form. But the connection between explicit and formal invocations of custom reveals over and again that, rather than uncritically availing themselves of England\u27s legal concept of custom, these authors examine and question the fundamental distinctions that constituted it – conquest and consent, written and unwritten, foreign and native

Eugène Ionesco, 1942-1944 : Political and Cultural Transfers between Romania and France

This article discusses the cultural and political exchanges organized by the playwright Eugène Ionesco when he worked for the Romanian Delegation to Vichy between 1942 and 1944. Drawing on unstudied archives of the Romanian Ministry of Propaganda, it analyzes exchanges between French and Romanian professors and students, as well as the role Ionesco played in seeking faculty positions for Romanian professors in France. Ionesco’s reports reveal a cultural policy with two goals: promoting Franco-Romanian relations and combatting Hungarian propaganda in France, often through literary, cultural, academic, and linguistic exchanges. This article examines the notion of circulation in cultural diplomacy and its political stakes during the Second World War.Cet article traite des échanges culturels et politiques organisés sous l’égide d’Eugène Ionesco, lorsque ce dernier travaillait pour la Délégation roumaine à Vichy entre 1942 et 1944. À partir des archives inédites du Ministère roumain de la propagande, ce travail analyse la nature et les enjeux des échanges académiques entre professeurs et étudiants français et roumains, mais aussi le rôle de Ionesco dans le recrutement d’enseignants roumains pour la France. Les écrits diplomatiques de Ionesco mettent en lumière une diplomatie culturelle, qui se donnait deux objectifs : promouvoir les rapports franco-roumains et combattre la propagande hongroise en France, au travers des échanges littéraires, culturels, académiques et linguistiques. Au-delà de la figure de Ionesco, cet article souhaite ainsi mettre l’accent sur la notion de circulation dans la diplomatie culturelle pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, en détaillant ses moyens, ses processus et ses enjeux y compris politiques, pour les différents acteurs