In 1811, the poetic academy of Toulouse awarded an epistle about hope in medical practice, by Jean-Marie Caillau, a now unknown physician who combined medicine and writing. This article provides contextualizing and close reading. It presents Caillau’s works and reputation, and highlights how he defined himself as a doctor-writer. Then it focuses on the didactic epistle, in which hope is regarded as a moral palliative, or a soothing and comforting illusion that the empathetic clinician prescribes to incurable, moribund and suffering people. The study of the text reveals the significant use of the peritext, the strong connection between medical discourse and poetical devices, and the praise of an eloquent physician at the patient’s bedside. By correlating hope and eloquence, Caillau embodies and promotes the dual figure of the doctorpoet. This article thus explores the fruitful and sometimes challenging interplay between medicine and poetry during the early 19th century.

Often considered depressive, Michel Houellebecq’s writing seems to be at the antipodes of hope, even if fragile. In this article, we will attempt to explore the three levels of hope in the author’s work. Hope in Houellebecq’s writing is first presented in a derisory way as a variant of an illusion. It constitutes an evil associated with sexual desires in contemporary hyper-liberalist society. Then, the author stages a positivist utopia, that of immortal neo-humans. But hope does not exist in this post-human society. Finally, by freeing himself from all illusory hopes, the author intends to seek hope in the present, in the manner of Schopenhauerian contemplation. He uses an approach that is both clinical and pathetic and gives a new form to hope that hopes for the unhoped-for.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the topic of hope in Carmen Boustani’s La guerre m’a surprise à Beyrouth [The war surprised me in Beirut]. The narrative structure of Greimas shows that hope exists even in a catastrophic situation and pushes the characters to act. The ending is happy not only for the country but also for the various women who lived through the war. The narrator Yasmina and her friends show that hope can arise even in a destroyed space and that life is found even in the throes of death. The act of writing itself becomes a sign of hope which proves that from black, light is born.

Victoire, a student at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art, committed suicide when she was only twenty-four years old. This death, inspired by Greek tragedies, reveals a gesture that is both heroic and symptomatic of an era. In his play, Wajdi Mouawad questions the depth of the deadly gesture of suicide as well as fate of death. By analyzing the funeral rites evoked in the play, we will see how Victoire's friends engage in a process of idealizing death, making Victoire a modern heroine. The gesture of death transforms into that of a gesture of hope, leading them towards a surge of life itself.

The aim of this paper is to describe the beginnings, rather unknown, of the CRICOT theatre and to demonstrate the evolution which took place between the first show of CRICOT1 and the last piece performed in 1938. Focusing on the manners of treating the scenic object, the scenography, the costumes and the masks, the paper analyses the transformation of the amateur theatre: artistic, satirical, visual and comic into quasi-professional theatre, carrying an existential message. Message to be developed afterward by the world-famous collective, reformer of the European stages: Tadeusz Kantor’s CRICOT2.

This paper aims to highlight the exploitation of some expressionist motifs in two plays by the French playwright Armand Salacrou (1899-1989), L’Archipel Lenoir and Histoire de rire throughout the painting of a metaphysical anxiety. In those pieces we can see realisation of such expressionist concepts as the war of brains (bataille des cerveaux), irradiation of the author’s I which conditions an antinaturalistic and caricatured expression of anxiety in an axiologically misstructured world. We can also appreciate elaboration of the expressionist motif of psychological murder which is an illustration of empoisoned relations between man and woman who do seek to destruct and moulder each other.