Renata Jakubczuk

The current article is a preliminary sketch of the study of recurring motives found in the dramatic works of Anna Langfus. After a short presentation of the profile of the writer and the role of the theater in her life, we look into an unpublished play Amos ou les fausses espérances / Amos or False Hopes (1961). The concept of “patterns of transitivity”, proposed by Jean-Pierre Richard in Onze études sur la poésie moderne / Eleven Studies on Modern Poetry, is guiding our reading of Langfus’ play in this context.

This article – focused on two plays about the Roman Emperor Caligula – has a double objective: firstly, it puts aside two dramatic versions of history of Caligula, and, secondly, it asks a question whether it is more legitimate to consider Caligula as a madman or as a mental patient. After introducing the playwrights Karol Hubert Rostworowski and Albert Camus, as well as the basic terminological concepts concerning the notion of madness and mental illness, the article analyses the symptoms of the illness and the madness included in the studied texts.

This article intends to confront the literary and stage functioning of Lui, the protagonist of the Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger (1890) and of the play of the same name created by Téo Spychalski within the theatre company, Groupe de la Veillée, in Montreal, in 1996. Using the terminological concepts developed by David Le Breton, professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg, I explore various aspects of the notion of pain present in the novel and its stage adaptation. What is particularly interesting for me in both texts is the influence of pain on the existence of a human being, on the life of an individual.

In this paper, I analyse the plays of Belgian author Paul Willems in terms of the richness of their genre. To achieve this, I identify elements foreign to the art of classical theatre (according to Jacques Scherer’s concept). The analysis concerns the dramatic construction of the plays, the forms of the dialogue, the sequences of the paratext as well as the hermeneutical elements. In my approach, I rely on the theoretical propositions of Witold Wołowski.

More than thirty years apart, two major figures of the Quebec theater scene – Marcel Dubé and Wajdi Mouawad – take up the mythical story of The King of Thebes, who killed his father and slept with his mother,  and propose its "Quebec versions". The two plays, Au retour des oies blanches (1969) and Incendies (2003), are well anchored in the contemporary reality of their respective authors: the Quiet Revolution for Dubé and the civil war in Lebanon for Mouawad. Both returns to the myth of Oedipus depict young people who, like the mythical character, pursue a quest for their roots and reach the end of their respective investigations. This article aims to take up the key elements of the myth and to study their dramaturgical functioning in modern texts.