Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Thirty years ago, the main global conversational topic was another mortal illness, AIDS. Through pandemics, people who contracted the virus, face death in solitude but “death” in these cases, when you look at the bigger picture, takes the shape of a “multitude” phenomenon notwithstanding its innermost lonely nature. Poetry and monologues in theatre are by far the best literary vehicles conveying messages of the fatal solitude. Especially, in theatre, this contrariness of the death’s nature in pandemics, manifests itself by the apparition of numerous monologues, at the cost of losing theatre’s essential element, the dialogue. Poetry, on the other hand, keeps his lonely character eternally. In this paper, I analyze the elements of “solitude” and facing death, comparatively in one American poem from the 21st century against COVID-19, and one French play confronting AIDS. The main study corpus here is the poem “What the Last Evening Will Be Like,” by New York city-based poet Edward Hirsch who treats his loss transcendentally, and the play, Juste la fin du monde (“It’s Only the End of the World”) written in 1990, by the French playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce, about a character named Louis who returns home to share with her family and friends the news of his terminal disease. The play has drawn attention for its numerous monologues within the main plot (if any!)