"Mise en train. Première année de français" et le néo-goliardisme d’Eugène Ionesco
"Mise en train. Première année de français" and Eugène Ionesco’s neo-goliardism

Summary/Abstract: If, in 1934, Eugen Ionescu initiated, through "Nu (No)", a veritable neo-goliardic programme aimed at revolutionising and shaking up the Romanian official literary canon, in 1951, Ionescu (who had since 1950 become Ionesco), through "La Leçon", reiterated the same attitude towards school and its clichés, but this time in a theatrical manner. The synthesis of the two can be identified in "Mise en train. Première année de français", a series of thirty theatrical modules (sketches) written for a French textbook intended for American students. There, we find perhaps the most convincing pedagogical Ionesco, both in that he reconstructs a tradition of apparent denial of school as a tactic to rehabilitate it in the eyes of students (via a remarkable conceptual synthesis between Socrates’ "maieutics" and the later "gaia scientia"). Later, Ionesco saves these sketches in "Exercices de conversation et de diction françaises pour étudiants américains". Removed from their nature and stored in the culture of “complete works” without their context, these sketches become lifeless. In this sense, the transition from "Mise en train. Première année de français" to "Exercices de conversation et de diction françaises pour étudiants américains" cannot be perceived as the salvation of an occasional collaborative work, but rather as a lack of aesthetic calcium. A deficiency that confirms their very "nature" in the face of the pedagogically rehabilitated dramatic "function".

• Details
• Contents