The Tragicomic Philosophy of Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett’s interest in tragicomedy has been clear since he attached the subtitle A Tragicomedy in Two Acts to the English translation of Waiting for Godot. This article articulates what exactly Beckettian tragicomedy does. Godot, Beckett’s foremost tragicomedy, stages the interplay of his wide-ranging literary and philosophical influences. Drawing on figures such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Jean Racine, Henri Bergson, Arnold Geulincx, and Fritz Mauthner, the play bends toward tragedy but undercuts any sense of finality with its slow unrolling. More than a metaphysical statement, this temporal model of tragicomedy offers a Beckettian ethics insistent on both the resigned compassion of tragedy and comedy’s power to critique. In outlining Godot’s tragicomic philosophy, the essay charts Beckett’s deployment of the various figures who inspire his play but also shows how this tragicomic paradigm functions in the theater—and how it inspires future dramatists.

Early modern receptions of Iphigenia at Aulis

The sacrifice of Iphigenia, appearing influentially in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, assumes various forms in early modern translation, reading, and adaptation. Early modern receptions variously constrict, domesticate, Romanize, and Christianize the story. Publication in Latin, especially in Erasmus’ translation (1506) transposes Greek linguistic and cultural referents to later hermeneutics, rendering mysterious ancient elements into familiar Roman analogues — Stoic ideals, fortuna, prudentia, and the like. Caspar Stiblin’s Latin translation (1562) and Gabriel Harvey’s copious marginalia in his copy of Erasmus’ translation show that constriction and domestication often take the form of fragmentation of the text into sententiae, or wise sayings. The search for rhetorical figures, political maxims, or moral lessons generates many Christian applications and culminates in Buchanan’s biblical reworking of Iphigenia’s story in Jephthes, wherein Artemis gives way to the Judaeo-Christian god and Iphigenia, here Iphis, becomes a type of Christ. The Vernacular Adaptations of Jane Lumley, Jean Racine, and Abel Boyer continue to dismantle the heroic ethos of Euripides play and re-imagine the story: Achilles dwindles into a romantic lead, Agamemnon, into a vicious ruler and father, and Iphigenia becomes a pious and submissive daughter.

Piața de artă în Franța în sec. XVII-XVIII

Conçu comme une continuation de l’essaye „L’affaire de l’Art. Le Marché d’Art aux Pays Bas, au XVIIe siècle” (AMET 2018), cette étude suit la création artistique et le destinataire de l’œuvre d’art en France, aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. À la Cour du Roy Soleil, la possession d’un capital culturel (objets de luxe, tableaux, bijoux, calèches) était un moyen de montrer le rang, la vertu et la grandeur à travers la valeur associée à ces objets. Louis XIV a exercé un contrôle absolu de la production des œuvres d’art crées à Versailles, dans tous les domaines d’art : architecture, sculpture, peinture, théâtre, ballet, musique… Il y a réalisé un mouvement culturel et artistique et s’est entouré d’une pléiade d’artistes : Charles Le Brun, Nicolas Poussin et Pierre Mignard (premiers peintres du Roy), Molière (ses pièces étaient jouées à Versailles et dans les salons de Paris), Jean-Baptiste Lully (qui encourageait la passion du Roy pour la danse), Jean Racine (l’„historique officiel” du Roy), André le Nôtre (architecte du parc et des jardins de Versailles), Jean de la Fontaine, Charles Perrault etc. Parallèlement à la vie artistique de Versailles, pendant le XVIIIe siècle on assiste au développement du marché libre d’art à Paris ; dans le magasin appartenant à Edme-François Gersaint, Au Grand Monarque, les clients achetaient des tableaux, des gravures, des sculptures, des naturalia et d’autres objets de luxe. Gersaint a été le premier à Paris qui a réalisé des ventes aux enchères, suivant le modèle des Pays Bas. Ces enchères et les chroniques d’art de Denis Diderot ont beaucoup contribué à la „démocratisation” du public des arts plastique en France et dans tout le monde, à partir du XVIIIe siècle.

After Lavinia

The Renaissance jurist Alberico Gentili once quipped that, just like comedies, all wars end in a marriage. In medieval and early modern Europe, marriage treaties were a perennial feature of the diplomatic landscape. When one ruler decided to make peace with his enemy, the two parties often sealed their settlement with marriages between their respective families. This book traces the history of the practice, focusing on the unusually close relationship between diplomacy and literary production in Western Europe from antiquity through the seventeenth century, when marriage began to lose its effectiveness and prestige as a tool of diplomacy. The book begins with Virgil's foundational myth of the marriage between the Trojan hero Aeneas and the Latin princess, an account that formed the basis for numerous medieval and Renaissance celebrations of dynastic marriages by courtly poets and propagandists. It follows the slow decline of diplomatic marriage as both a tool of statecraft and a literary subject, exploring the skepticism and suspicion with which it was viewed in the works of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. The book argues that the plays of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine signal the passing of an international order that had once accorded women a place of unique dignity and respect.