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Full-Text Articles in Modern Languages
Rethinking Ionesco’S Absurd: The Bald Soprano In The Interlingual Context Of Vichy And Postwar France, Julia Elsky
Rethinking Ionesco’S Absurd: The Bald Soprano In The Interlingual Context Of Vichy And Postwar France, Julia Elsky
Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications and Other Works
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 …
Sins, Sex, And Secrets: The Legacy Of Confession From The Decameron To The Heptaméron, Nora Martin Peterson
Sins, Sex, And Secrets: The Legacy Of Confession From The Decameron To The Heptaméron, Nora Martin Peterson
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
A quick digital search for the term ‘confession’ in Boccaccio’s Decameron yields 75 results (Decameron Web). Confession in Boccacio’s text is conspicuously present and, I argue, not coincidental: it highlights the increased attention to the sacrament after the Fourth Lateran Council made annual confession mandatory in 1215. Decameron 1.1 depicts a false confession performed by a wicked man on his deathbed. His confessor follows the protocol of confession manuals, which began to appear in increasing number following 1215, but his interpretive skills do not extend beyond the questions he is bound by protocol to ask. In Boccaccio’s world, …