Although Corneille drew fame from his tragedies, he launched his career by writing comedies. Considered for a long time as less worthy of attention, they have been reconsidered since the end of the nineteenth century and some of them like the Illusion comique have been regularly performed and praised as a good example of French baroque theatre.

In Corneille’s time, the success of a play was due to its freshness and modernity exploiting various themes favoured by the Age of Louis XIII. A play within a play was not entirely new, but mingling the intrigue of a tragedy within a more general one of a comedy was uncommon. Introducing the role of a magician, Alcandre, able to play with the dimensions of space and time when the three rules of unity began their magisterial reign, was an audacious expression of creative liberty. Besides, Corneille epitomized the baroque metaphorical vision of the world by insisting on the aspects of its instability, putting its personages in constant psychological and physical motion and metamorphosis, situations leading at times to uncertainty about moral values. But throughout the play, the theatre appears progressively as a metaphorical rationalisation of this instability through the adventurous life of the main hero, Clindor, allowing the author through Alcandre’s voice to advocate the cathartic power of comedy and assert the social importance and legitimate place of the theatre in the 17th century France. After the Illusion comique, the theatre could clearly be perceived as a school of humanism.

Key words: Corneille’s theatre, baroque, comedy, a play within a play.

The present study argues that the French first-person novel, which came into fashion in the Enlightenment period through the adoption of epistolary, diary or memoir forms, or through their admixture in texts, lends itself particularly well to “reading pacts”. The sociopolitical context of the period favored romantic fictions of intimate literature that were attuned to the events of the day. In this paratextual discourse, novelists relied on contemporary events to initiate readers into questions such as the status and the goals of novelistic writing, while attempting to legitimize and to valorize the
latter.

Key words: Epistolary novel, memoir-novel, Enlightenment period, reading pact.

The traditional fantastic literature of the nineteenth century is a genre par excellence codificated. The present study indicates how the new fantastic literature of the twentieth and the twenty-first century plays with these codes and with the customs of the traditional reader. This work discusses the literary games, very diversified, on the level of the content (the modifications of the traditional fantastic motives, for example the motif of a ghost or of a vampire) and on the level of the form (the new techniques of writing versus the traditional techniques of the literature referring to the supernatural). The present study analyses the short stories by writers writing in French, for example Rémi Karnauch, Jean-Pierre Andrevon, Stéphanie Benson, Pierre Pelot, Yves and Ada Rémy, and Jean-Pierre Bours.

Key worda: Tale of twilight, the supernatural, horror, fear, ghost, vampire, game.

One of the essential features of the twentieth century French uncanny tales is a play with literary conventions. According to the postmodern aesthetics, these short fictions give priority to all kinds of transgressions on the level of both the content and the form.
The aim of the study is to describe the play with the literary codes on the basis of short fictions of G. Apollinaire, M. Aymé, B. Vian, P. Gripari, J. Supervielle, M. Tournier, Ph. Dumas and B. Moissard, P. Fleutiaux. The authors invite the readers to take part in the ludic activity and let the perception of the uncanny tales depend on their familiarity with the related categories of the marvellous and the fantastic, and on their knowledge of intertextuality rules.

Key words: Short fiction, the uncanny, the fantastic, the marvellous, literary conventions, cultural code.

Maryse, a postmodern novel by Francine Noël, offers an ironic look at the baby boomers’ uncertain axiology. We focus on the multiple levels of irony inherent in the portrait of the characters of the novel. Our analysis of the ironic discourse has two interpretative components. First, we closely examine the dialogue between two characters, lovers, which reflects, as in a mise en abyme, the baby boomers’ generally accepted idea of the couple. Second, we study the ironic discourse of the couple from the social perspective, as seen through Maryse’s sentimental affair, whose personal and professional journey exemplifies the intertextual game found in other French classic novels (Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Quebecois novels (Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion).

Key words: The postmodern novel, the couple, intertextual game, the baby boom generation, the literary portrait of a protagonist, the ironic.

The output of dramatic works of Bernard-Marie Koltès in the 1970s and the 1980s shows remarkable richness of invention as far as the construction of the works is concerned. The fondness of research and experiment led the author of In the Solitude of Cotton Fields from the monologue or quasi-monologue, through sophisticated forms which resembled the eighteenth century philosophical Dialogue à la Diderot, up to the much more complex structures, such as those of Roberto Zucco. The choice of form was determined in a way, as the author maintained, by the play itself (“Chacune de mes pièces m’impose ses propres contraintes”). Interesting in that respect is the play Combat de nègre et de chiens, whose originality lies, paradoxically, in its evocation of a classical construction, with all the resulting consequences and limitations concerning the structure, time, place, the content of action, the number of characters etc. The tragedy with the classical construction became, however, a very modern play, and it was not only because of the date of its origin. It was so because of a few measures applied by Koltès. And it is the analysis of these measures, i.e. the “games” played by classical rules, which is going to be the subject matter of this article.

Key words: Form, tragedy, rules, modernity, games.

In Lo real (2001) by Belén Gopegui, a novel treating of relations between an individual and the capitalist society, a special character is revived, namely the chorus. While confronting the role it plays in the Spanish novel under analysis using the theories of the functions of the chorus as a constitutent of ancient tragedy, we answer the question whether the writer’s act of introducing this collective character to a comtemporary prose work should be treated as a parody or as playing with a commonly known literary convention, aimed to achieve specific objectives. The discussion touches on, for instance, the concept of the chorus as an interlude, a rightful participant in the plot, ethical authority, a literary “extension” of the author, an ideal reader etc.

Key words: Contemporary Spanish prose, Greek tragedy, chorus, Belén Gopegui.

In the present article, the author discusses literary games as exemplified by the novel La Maison Trestler ou le 8e jour d’Amérique by the Canadian writer Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska. The game that we are invited to play turns out to be complex because it occurs on many levels, particularly on the level of the narration. Ouellette-Michalska’s novel is based on a game played by multiple female identities, questioning the exclusively masculine point of view dominant in the historical discourse. Asking whether history is able to depict every aspect of an event truthfully, the novel allows the intrusion of memories and feelings into the presentation of the past. Suggesting “settling the score” between the male and female history, the writer reconsiders the question of historical truth. In her opinion, women’s memory partly escapes the male logic of space/time and facilitates the coming of the eighth day, the day of America.

Key words: History/Herstory, women’s memory, historical truth.

The interpretation of Vincenzo Consolo’s novels cannot be complete without taking into account the field of culture from which the writer derives his inspiration. The Sicilian writers’ heritage, e.g. Verga’s, Pirandello’s, Sciascia’s, can be found in almost each of Consolo’s narrations. In the sphere of references to epigones of Italian literature as well as of other contemporary literatures, Nottetempo, casa per casa is a clear example of intertextuality that includes elements of pastiche and parody. This interdependence is illustrated by means of more or less literal quotations and citations. Such a narration, interlaced with citations from D’Annunzio, Verga, Ariosto, Manzoni, Montale, and Shakespeare as well as the Bible, is only seemingly anachronistic. In fact, it evokes memory which is kept by the Author and then, as a consequence, by the Reader. Nottetempo, casa per casa is a novel which materializes the features of postmodernist novels which are based not only on citations but also on parody and the interlacing of different codes and symbols. The stylistic and rhethoric play presented is a result of Consolo’s ideas according to which modern literature should show how to withstand the continuous degradation of culture.

Key words: References, citations, intertextuality, parody, pastiche.

While trying to comment on Quemar las naves of Alejandro Cuevas, it is impossible not to notice the intricate net of tropes and means which makes it one of the most noteworthy examples of contemporary Spanish narratives. Written with great attention to details, structured with astonishing precision and based on multiple contrasts, the novel does not desist from surprising its reader. It seems, for example, paradoxical that a postmodernist story about the disintegration of a traditional poet’s life can be so perfectly coherent in its form, diligently organized, and divided into chapters and subchapters arranged alphabetically.
Furthermore, the novel falls outside any unequivocal interpretation due to the author’s incessant trifling with mythological allusions, the wittiness and sharpness of his obliquely slipped insights concerning today’s culture and the status of literature, the introduction of playful ambiguity, and the unspecified space-time textual frame. Apart from that, Quemar las naves constitutes a kind of genealogical guessing game, as it contains elements of various genres and, thus, it cannot be analysed only within the constricting traditional genre classifications. All in all, Quemar las naves may be perceived as a kind of never-ending toying with literary conventions and with the readers’ expectations.

Key words: Alejandro Cuevas, contemporary Spanish novel, 21st century Spanish narrative.

Paolo Volponi’s last novel, Le mosche del capitale, published in 1989, is considered by most critics to be the most important novel of the late eighties. It revisits the issues from the author’s earlier works, for example Memoriale (1962) and Corporale (1974), and transports the reader into a postindustrial factory world, dealing with the problems of human beings entangled in the complex and often cruel mechanisms of professional life in the contemporary world. Human characters are completely devoid of meaning and any humane dimension. In the pursuit of profit and power, they get so lost that they cease to be the driving force of narration.
In this dehumanised world the burden of diegesis is placed on personified objects, which not only talk about the human world from their “inanimate” perspective, but also keep their distance from that world, which is a prerequisite for a reasonably objective depiction of its problems. The narrative, told from the perspective of the main protagonist (engineer Bruto Saraccini), is supplemented by the allegorical characters’ (i.e. objects’ and environmental phenomena’s) utterances. Therefore, allegory in Volponi’s text becomes the basic carrier of meaning. It is thanks to allegory that the reader becomes aware of the void and meaninglessness of the reality in which objects are closer to humanism and humanity than people themselves. Allegory plays three functions in the novel:
1) interpretative-rhetorical, in which human beings’ traits (vices) are projected onto inanimate objects, as a result of which the characteristics of the human world become clearer and more marked;
2) axiological, which explicitly names and establishes the system of values, exposing human characters’ moral attitudes;
3) mimetic, whose aim is to supplement the description of the world depicted in a situation in which human characters are not able to provide such a description in a complete way (e.g. the use of allegorical objects as observers and “narrators” replaces the characters’ inner monologue).

Key words: Volponi, allegory, postindustrial factory.