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Fernando Arrabal's "Ars Amandi": The Theme Of Love In Selected Plays, Peter L. Podol

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The evolution in Arrabal's treatment of the theme of love reflects both the development and enrichment of his dramatic techniques and the resolution of his own deep-seated psychological conflicts. Arrabal's theater utilizes his concept of dramatic ceremony to project his intense desire for personal, political and artistic liberation. Psychological and social forces combine to frustrate the fulfillment of love in his early theater (Fando and Lis, 1956) but ultimately love functions to obviate both internal and external constraints. Sexual union, which receives its most rapturous affirmation in Arrabal's plays written during the late 1960's (The Law of …

The Function Of Love In Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, John Schillinger

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, like Boris Pasternak before him, insists upon the primacy of life over any socio-political system. To lead truly meaningful lives, his characters must comprehend that they are responsible for their own actions; that they are engaged in an existential struggle which pits individual freedom against the will of authority.

In The First Circle, this struggle is clearly reflected in the theme of love which, when analyzed in terms of the suppression or triumph of its four basic elements (sex, eros, philia, and agape), offers a convincing allegory of man's existential self-definition by free choice.