‘Follow Him! Follow Me!’: The Media in Eugene Ionesco’s The Leader

Literary world has been nodding its agreement with the wave of retrospective exploration of the disquieting trauma of fascist vogue during the years after the dissolution of the totalitarian governments by introducing luminaries like Eugene Ionesco who was quite successful in capturing the lion share of pushing back the frontiers of experiment in probing the modalities of political extremism. The present article aims to study the main fertilizer of the growth of such assertive partisanship that is the mass media. In The Leader, one of Ionesco’s short plays, the media is referred to as an apparatus to sweeten the bitter pill of political dogma and persuade the people that the safest way is to fit in through conforming to the majority. Therefore, although he is usually remembered by his revolutionary play, Rhinoceros, as a masterpiece in dealing with political fanaticism, an often neglected play like The Leader investigated the issue much more exhaustively in including the media

کلیدواژه ها:

Eugene Ionesco ، the media ، political extremism ، The Leader