STAGE PHRASE Grose, Thomas K
ASEE prism,
01/2020, Volume:
29, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Moliere is France's Shakespeare. The 17th-century playwright and poet is best known for his farces, including Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, and The Miser. But like Shakespeare, there has long been some ...doubt as to whether he was the true author. Moliere was also a famous actor, often on the road, who only began writing in his 40's. Because scholars have yet to find an original manuscript signed by Moliere, some suspect that the real author was his contemporary, Pierre Corneille, and that the two conspired to affix Moliere's name as a famous actor to promote the plays--a winwin for both men.
This study offers new and original insight into the behaviour of Médée, Clytemnestre and Phèdre in the works of Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine and Hilaire-Bernard de Longepierre by drawing on cutting ...edge methodologies from philosophy (ethics of care), psychoanalysis (transactional analysis) and performance theory.
Médée: From Motherhood to Womanhood Leclere-Gregory, Camille
Papers on French seventeenth century literature,
06/2021, Volume:
48, Issue:
94
Journal Article
Dans l'histoire théâtrale occidentale, Corneille se fait surtout remarquer par ses tragédies classiques. L'Illusion comique (1636), comme la dernière comédie de sa première période de création, ...souffre toujours d'un certain désintêret auprès des critiques cornéliens chinois. Elle jouera en fait un rôle important dans les conceptions dramatiques de Corneille et devrait se comprendre dans la perspective de son illustration de l'esthétique baroque du début du XVIIe siècle. Les innovations de Corneille tel le procédé du théåtre dans le théâtre feront s'établir un nouveau rapport scène-salle. Cela nous laisserait entrevoir ses réflexions sur l'esthétique baroque et ses intentions : construire la subjectivité humaine en exposant les liens entre le monde et soi-même.
Michał Bajer’s book offers an interesting approach to older translations. The author discusses Polish renderings of Corneille’s and Racine’s tragedies in the broadly defined Enlightenment ...(1740–1830). He looks at the translations from three perspectives: analysing changes at the level of rhetoric, at the level of poetics, and examining the paratextual influences, i.e., the critics’ statements with regard to both original texts and translations. The discourse is set in a historical, literary, and social context, in which the French playwrights appear as models of the classicist perfection of style, an object of imitation, which, however, undergoes constant negotiation on the part of the translators. The book proposes an interesting combination of literary, philological, and sociological tools to create a multi-layered picture of the Polish reception of the two authors.
My research examines the following questions: 1) Did Russian five-act verse comedy evolve similarly to French five-act verse comedy? 2) Were Romantic features present in the nineteenth-century ...Russian five-act verse comedy? 3) Was Russian four-act verse comedy distinct from the Russian five-act verse comedy in terms of its formal features, such as the number of dramatic characters, the mobility coefficient, the predominant type of dialogues/polylogues, etc.? I elaborated on Boris Iarkho’s quantitative features and methodology, which I modernized by automating data processing and calculations, replacing his transgression coefficient by statistical significance testing and his synthesis (i.e., the aggregated curve of the evolution of all features) with open-form scores that measure how experimental a tradition or a author is in terms of “openness” (high variability) vs. “closeness” (low variability) of their formal features. I discovered that, unlike French five-act verse comedy, Russian five-act verse comedy did not evolve in a wave-like manner with alternating closed and open forms. Instead, I found a quantitative basis for Iurii Tynianov’s and Mikhail Gasparov’s earlier claim that the closed and open styles co-existed and mixed in Russian literature (Tynianov 1969, 52-3; Gasparov 1997, 434-455). In Russian five-act verse comedy of the first half of the nineteenth century, Romanticism did not supersede Neoclassicism; instead, some comedies manifest Romantic features, whereas others remained faithful to Neoclassical style. The evolution of French five-act verse comedy corresponds to Heinrich Wölfflin’s model of alternating closed and open forms, which Boris Iarkho had also observed in the case of the French five-act tragedy. As regards four- vs. five-act verse comedies, Russian four-act verse comedy tended to be more experimental than the contemporaneous French and Russian five-act verse comedy.
In April 1652, the fledgling French settlement of Quebec saw a performance Pierre Corneille's famous tragicomedy Le Cid. Interpreting the play in light of the social and political context of this ...performance, this article argues that audience members must have found something very familiar about Corneille's drama of domestic politics in medieval Castile, set against the backdrop of a threat of surprise attack by an army of Moors lurking downriver from the city of Seville. At the very moment the play was staged in Quebec, the St. Lawrence River also seemed, to chroniclers of colonial life, to be teeming with aggressive cultural Others awaiting opportunities to launch surprise attacks on the vulnerable French: the Iroquois. This article examines three aspects of Castile's conflict with the Moors in Le Cid—the vulnerability associated with proximity to a river, the enemy's stealth, and the way Castilians meet the challenge—and argues that the play would have reflected to audience members both their own dangerous situation and their unique relationship to royal authority. Comparison of this analysis to existing scholarly interpretations of the play shows how accounting for colonial experiences of French literature may bring fresh perspective both to individual texts and to the relationship between France and its colonies more broadly.
