Word: ionesco
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Throughout his career Ionesco has held different views on the importance of literature...
...Ionesco: Listen, I have had several points of view about literature...
With this hopeful alternative of the new philosophers, Ionesco sees the end of bourgeois-leftist criticism. These intellectuals are the non-ideologues who, unable to concertedly voice their opinions for two and a half decades after World Ware Two, can now feel free to criticize the establishment. Moreover, they can serve to usher literature past politics and into the realm of metaphysics where it can become truly creative...
...Ionesco's central idea is a nihilistic one: now that the new philosophers are being heard, humanity will soon reach a stage where politics won't be necessary at all. How will this come about? Through the sheer force of the human spirit itself. No revolution will be necessary, according to Ionesco, because the metaphysical truths expressed by the new philosophers will rise above ideological dogma and be naturally understood by the masses. These ideas will supercede even such bourgeois inventions as language and literature themselves, which Ionesco in his plays shows to be filled with media-jargon and platitudes...
...beyond questions of culture, what most Americans undoubtedly will find hardest to swallow about Ionesco's outlook is its total lack of methodology. You might try to argue, for example, that his political views are extremely specious--but then, he really has no "politics" at all. Providing you can get by this, however, what really becomes most interesting about the present-day Ionesco is his increasing optimism in the last two years that this metaphysical world is imminent. Before this he spoke often of his own social isolation and of the leftist's need to "redeem their crimes with suffering...