Rhinocerism, Criticism of The Blind Conformity of The Masses or The Concept of Loneliness of Contemporary Human

Document Type : Original Article

Author

• Mohammad Mohammadi-Aghdash

Département de français Université de Tabriz-IRAN

10.22067/rltf.2025.91561.1135

Abstract

From a socio-political-cultural point of view, for the Ionescian reader, rhinoceros is meant to be heard in Rhinoceros as the other facet of the evil from which humans have suffered since Creation itself. It is interesting to say that the philosophical-literary origins of the term would be primitively recorded in a tragedy of Greek antiquity, that is Oedipus the King by Sophocles, and then in two key contemporary novelistic works, The Metamorphosis and The Plague, being associated respectively with F. Kafka (1915) and A. Camus (1947). Ionesco's contribution and initiative in this avant-garde theatre, mortally criticising the rise of fascism in the 1940s in the 20th century, is philosophically speaking to have animalised the human, following the violence and atrocities of the Second World War.
In this research, going through the terminology of the concept of the '' theater of the absurd '' from the point of view of the British critic, Martin Esslin (1971), we intend to take stock of the blind conformism of the contemporary man who feels alone on the stage of life. To do this, it would be necessary to reread, for a literary and discursive analysis, the crucial notions in this new dramaturgy of Ionescian, in particular in the said play, such as; the theater of violence, of derision and of incommunication.

Keywords

• Ionesco'
• Rhinoceros'
• Conformism'
• Loneliness'
• '
• Incommunication'

Main Subjects

• french literature

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