Divining Nature Cuille, Tili Boon
2021, 2020, 2020-12-15
eBook
Odprti dostop
The Enlightenment remains widely associated with the rise of scientific progress and the loss of religious faith, a dual tendency that is thought to have contributed to the disenchantment of the ...world. In her wide-ranging and richly illustrated book, Tili Boon Cuillé questions the accuracy of this narrative by investigating the fate of the marvelous in the age of reason. Exploring the affinities between the natural sciences and the fine arts, Cuillé examines the representation of natural phenomena—whether harmonious or discordant—in natural history, painting, opera, and the novel from Buffon and Rameau to Ossian and Staël. She demonstrates that philosophical, artistic, and emotional responses to the ""spectacle of nature"" in eighteenth-century France included wonder, enthusiasm, melancholy, and the ""sentiment of divinity."" These ""passions of the soul,"" traditionally associated with religion and considered antithetical to enlightenment, were linked to the faculties of reason, imagination, and memory that structured Diderot's Encyclopédie and to contemporary theorizations of the sublime. As Cuillé reveals, the marvelous was not eradicated but instead preserved through the establishment and reform of major French cultural institutions dedicated to science, art, religion, and folklore that were designed to inform, enchant, and persuade. This book has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
Likening southerners to aristocrats and northerners to French Revolutionaries, she identifies the melancholy poetry of the north as best suited to philosophy and freedom of spirit.9 In the chapter ...devoted to women of letters, however, Staël notes that while the goal of a republic should be to promote enlightenment: "depuis la Révolution, les hommes ont pensé qu'il était politiquement et moralement utile de réduire les femmes à la plus absurde médiocrité" since the Revolution, men have thought it politically and morally useful to reduce women to the most absurd mediocrity. In his General History of England (1747–55), Jacobite historian Thomas Carte differentiated between the "ancient Caledonians, ancestors of modern-day Highlanders" and the "ancestral peoples of Britain," for the Caledonians showed women respect on the battlefield and as judges in legal matters, public forums, and councils of war. The craggy terrain surrounding Mount Vesuvius bears a greater resemblance to barren northern landscapes than to lush southern climes and the melancholy tone of Corinne's improvisation appeals to the English rather than the Italians in her audience. By taking a second look at Girodet's painting, Ossian's poems, and Staël's prose, moving between image, text, and historical context as Mary Sheriff modeled and encouraged, we can posit another source of inspiration for Corinne between the iconography of the blind bard and the inspired sibyl that Mary explored.18 Bardic women, like improvisatrices, incarnate the role Staël envisioned for women in society, for as she declared in De l'éducation de l'âme par la vie: "Je me représente les femmes chantant en beaux vers sur la lyre les exploits des guerriers, interprètes de l'avenir, prêtresses de la gloire, et recevant plus immédiatement l'inspiration du ciel parce qu'elles ne sont point chargées des intérêts positifs de ce monde" I imagine women singing of warriors' exploits in beautiful verses on the lyre, interpreters of the future, priestesses of glory, receiving heaven's inspiration more directly for they are not burdened with this world's practical concerns.19 Tili Boon Cuillé Tili Boon Cuillé is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.
Charles Duclos based Acajou et Zirphile (1744) on ten drawings by François Boucher, originally designed to illustrate the Comte de Tessin’s Faunillane, ou l’Infante jaune (1741). Separated from their ...source and rearranged, these illustrations, which depict a woman’s head severed from her body then reas sembled, tell quite a different story. I consider the materiality of the illustra tions, placing them in the context of the various media in which Boucher worked and which his drawings and engravings inspired, includ ing painting, costume and set design, porcelain, and tapestry. I also explore the materi ality in the illustrations, demonstrating how Duclos, like Boucher, places char acters and objects on the same ontological level in both his tale and his moral treatise, Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle (1751), which share the same pedagogical preoccupations. Boucher’s illustrations mediate rela tion ships between the two tales, Duclos’s tale and his moral treatise, and Duclos’s tale and Charles-Simon Favart’s opéra-comique Acajou, affirming the status of book illustration as an intermedial cultural object.
The poems of Ossian were a product of the encounter of oral and written cultures, yet their immediate effect on the literary and visual culture of their time is better established than their ...far-reaching impact on musical culture. ...they frequently fostered formal innovation as composers cast about for suitable appellations for the unconventional operatic works, cantatas, scènes lyriques, and tone poems—characterized as “improvisatory” or “rhapsodic”—to which they gave rise. The temporal and geographical range of Porter’s study reveals that renewed interest in the poems of Ossian tended to coincide with moments of international strife, including the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, and World War II, as composers sensed the affinity between their own political circumstances and the explicit or implicit subject of the poems, namely the conflicts that opposed Caledonians to Scandinavians and Scottish Jacobites to British Redcoats at Ossian’s and Macpherson’s respective historical moments.
French authors in the eighteenth century traditionally used music to enhance literary love scenes. Jean-Jacques Rousseau considerably expanded contemporary notions of music?s expressive power, yet ...distinguished between the capacity of different nations and sexes to wield it. Rousseau?s controversial statements led his readers to interrogate the relationship between music, meaning, and morality. They depicted their resistance to his claims in musical tableaux, or musical performances staged for a beholder inscribed within the text. Tili Boon Cuillé?sNarrative Interludeschronicles the emergence of the musical tableau in French literature.
Spanning the latter half of the eighteenth century, Cuillé brings the cultural discourse on music and musicians to bear on the works of Diderot, Cazotte, Beaumarchais, Charrière, Cottin, Krüdener, and Staël. She turns attention from the representation of music to its moral repercussions, from aesthetic innovation to social resistance, and from national to gender politics. Juxtaposing pre-eminent and popular writers, Cuillé reads their fictional works in light of their treatises on art and society, exploring the significance of musical tableaux that have previously fallen outside the scope of literary analysis but that revolutionized the form and function of music in the text.
A review of Mark Darlow’s Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opéra, 1789–1794 (2012), the first cultural history of the Opéra’s administration and repertory to challenge ...critical assumptions that it served as an instrument of state propaganda during the Terror.
The articles featured in this special issue contribute to a contemporary réévaluation of the history of the passions: how they influence and arise from sensory perception, how they are embodied and ...performed. Since the very beginnings of French literary history, lyric and narrative texts have portrayed a dynamic interplay between sense impressions, emotional response, and action.1 In learned and popular accounts alike, medieval sources reveal elaborate sensory constructs bridging the inner and outer worlds, governing the formulation and expression of emotional states in often surprising ways. ...Lyons and Hogg investigate the somewhat anomalous cases of wonder and anger, which Descartes and Aquinas, respectively, identified as the passions that have no opposite.54 We therefore invite our readers to follow the suggestive interconnections between these articles to explore how the notions of passion, perception, and performance evolved in pre-modern France.
Cuille considers the relationship between machines and the marvelous, terms that were traditionally associated on the French operatic stage and that became interchangeable in the pages of Denis ...Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des metiers. He says that his reading of Gluck's Parisian reform operas in conjunction with eighteenth-century theory and criticism leads him to question the notion that composers and librettists gradually eliminated the marvelous, understood as both supernatural and spectacle, in order to make way for meaningful music. The term "merveilleux" traditionally referred to interventions of the supernatural in the everyday, which were common and to be expected in epics, fairy tales, and operas. In opera, however, the term also came to designate the stage machinery that rendered such interventions possible.
