This document examines Ernest Chausson’s Poème (1896) for violin and orchestra in its cultural context. It provides information about the French cultural environment at the end of the nineteenth ...century, including literature, art, and music. Ivan S. Turgenev’s story The Song of Triumphant Love, which inspired Chausson’s composition of Poème, is also investigated in detail. Supported by musical analysis, I propose how Poème is related to the story. In addition, nineteenth-century composers’ relationships with program music, symbolism, and impressionism are discussed, using as examples excerpts from Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Eugène Ysaÿe’s Poème élégiaque, Op. 12, Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. I contend that Poème is more an impressionist than a late Romantic work. It was greatly influenced by painting and literature during the late nineteenth century.
The purpose of the following study is to explore and examine three early plays authored by the iconic late-19th and 20th-century Irish poet-playwright W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) through the ...identification and conscious consideration of archetypes, or collective, archaic patterns present in the deepest levels of the human psyche. Although the concept of archetypes dates back to classical antiquity, it was in the pioneering work of the Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) that the idea of archetypes and archetypal image projection in myth and literature were first deeply and categorically surveyed. Although subsequent literary analysts and cultural anthropologists have expanded upon Jung's conception of archetypes, the work of these scholars remains firmly established upon a foundation first laid by Jung in his exploration of archetypes and archetypal content. Therefore, this essay limits itself to Jung's propositions regarding archetypal material. This work asserts that, while archetypal images are present in all works of art and literature (including those of the theatre), comprehension of their influence is of particular significance to the critical examination of drama written by Symbolist playwrights such as W. B. Yeats. Chapter I of this essay is devoted to a general exploration of Jung's theorem of archetypes and to a discussion of those recurrent, primordial images which Jung believed to be of greatest importance with regard to human phenomenology. Chapter II examines the presence of archetypal images in Yeats's first published drama, The Countess Cathleen, specifically with regard to that work's representation of the Maiden, the Mother, the Anima, and the Trickster. Chapter III centers upon the first of Yeats's dramas to be professionally produced, The Land of Heart's Desire, and focuses on the significance that images of the Maiden, the Wise Old Man, the Child, and the Trickster hold in that work. Chapter IV revolves around two versions of Yeats's play The Hour-Glass, and upon the manner in which two archetypal images of the Wise Old Man underpin the dramatic action and character presented within that drama.
Dans Du Spirituel dans l'art, Wassily Kandinsky, un des fondateurs de l'art abstrait, se tourne vers le dramaturge symboliste Maurice Maeterlinck afin de concevoir un nouveau langage esthetique. Le ...dramaturge et le peintre, en rompant avec la tradition naturaliste, cherchent a delivrer la forme et le contenu du signe langagier et pictural de leur fonction referentielle. En particulier, l'attention du peintre est portee au traitement du mot dans l'oeuvre de Maeterlinck: il constate que les composantes du signe, c'est-a-dire l'image acoustique comme l'image psychique, concues et percues par la subjectivite de l'etre, s'associent arbitrairement, valent pour elles-memes et, par la meme, ne servent plus d.indices evoquant une realite exterieure. Le peintre et le dramaturge preconisent une renaissance du langage esthetique: ce travail s'effectue grace a l'epuration radicale du signe sonore et de la forme picturale, dissolvant ces derniers dans le silence et l'espace. Cependant, ceux-ci ne correspondent pas au «neant», mais a un «plan originel», a partir duquel se regenere la forme sonore et visuelle: desormais, elle sert a canaliser une essence pure, eprouvee intuitivement dans la realite interieure de l'être.
Between 1880 and 1930, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with the subject of the baroque. Among the first, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that the baroque style ...recurs throughout western history, tending in every artistic medium toward the theatricality of strong emotions and exciting gestures. His writings reflect a larger trend during this period, imagining the baroque as a spectral presence of sorts, a force both haunted by theater and haunting western history repeatedly. “Traditions of the Baroque” takes up these various hauntings, pursuing two simultaneous claims. It argues that the memory of the baroque stages of seventeenth-century Europe helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, it also argues that modern theater has played a key role in the baroque’s development into a modern philosophical concept, both for the analysis of art, and for a self-reflexive inquiry into the nature of philosophical discourse itself. These two reciprocal developments amount to a “modernist baroque” paradigm in theory and theater alike: a pattern of having to look back to the past in order to pursue the new. Tracing this pattern, “Traditions of the Baroque” focuses on avant-gardists whose thought and writing takes place between theory and performance: philosophical theater-makers and theatrical philosophers from Nietzsche and Stéphane Mallarmé to Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein. Moving between the page and the stage, it tracks citations of seventeenth-century theater through modernist aesthetic theory across an array of otherwise disparate materials: Nietzsche’s writings on Wagnerian opera; Mallarmé’s hermetic and unstageable theatricals; Benjamin’s analyses of Expressionism and Epic Theater; and Stein’s saintly miracle plays. At each step, it uncovers a notion of historical unfolding based not on narrative progress, but on the citability and iterability of the past, making clear that the idea of the baroque spurred modernist thinkers to reimagine both western history and modernity altogether. Far from perpetuating age-old anti-theatrical prejudices based in transcendental metaphysics, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Benjamin, and Stein all adopt baroque forms of theatricality precisely to subvert the ideological regimes of the past. The baroque becomes, for these authors, a means to disrupt norms of representation across a wide array of registers: aesthetic, economic, sexual, historiographic, and metaphysical. These modernists take up the baroque vision of the world as a grand theater organized around a divine center, and radically transform it to suit a modern awareness of performance’s pervasiveness in everyday life. Their modernist baroque functions not as an official style of hegemonic power— such as the absolutist state or counterreformation church—but as a deconstructive force, one that extends the baroque’s afterlife into the contemporary theater and theory of our present time.
This dissertation makes an argument for the significance of ancient and modern tragedy in the work of Russian (“first-generation”) Symbolist poets and religious thinkers associated with the Russian ...religious renaissance. Main authors studied are Konstantin Bal'mont, Nikolai Berdiaev, Valerii Briusov, Sergei Bulgakov, Viacheslav Ivanov, Maurice Maeterlinck, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, and Nikolai Minskii. While interest in tragedy may be traced to the popularity of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in turn-of-the-century Russia, I argue that poets and thinkers gravitated to “tragic thinking” for not only aesthetic, but predominantly religious reasons. A particular mode of mythopoesis, tragic plots and characters offered narratives for poets and thinkers to examine the modern individual’s spiritual search. This inner search for spiritual transcendence is characterized by a focus on inner struggle (exemplified in modern tragedy), rather than externally imposed threats to the individual hero (ancient tragedy). I claim that this inner spiritual struggle, being connected to the ascetic tradition of Russian religious culture, calls for greater scholarly attention to the Symbolist reception of Nietzsche’s “Apollonian principle”. Chapter One deals with Nikolai Minskii, his philosophy of meonism, the relevance of Russian Symbolist reception of Maeterlinck in the context of Minskii’s changing conception of tragedy, and his modern tragic drama, Al'ma. Chapter Two examines Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s tragic philosophy of love in the context of his literary work and essays on world literature. His translations of Greek tragedy reflect his formulation of a non-sexual erotic love. Chapter Three is devoted to Valerii Briusov’s dystopian tragedy Zemlia (Earth). Through analysis of previously unknown Mesoamerican and spiritualist subtexts of Zemlia, I read Briusov’s drama as an ironic response to early Symbolist Christian interpretations of tragedy. In the conclusion, I focus on the special case of the Moscow Art Theater’s stage adaptation of Dostoevskii’s Besy (Devils). The religious-philosophical response to this production is presented as the final chapter in the Symbolist reception of tragedy: the “novel-tragedy” and the drawbacks of tragedy as theater.
This dissertation examines the relationship between the state, children, theater, and education in modern France. Children appeared in popular boulevard théâtres d'enfants in Paris in the 1780s. The ...immoral legacy of théâtres d'enfants created negative associations between theater and child performers. Yet, the theater reform debate in eighteenth-century France firmly established the view that theater served an educative function. The théâtre d'éducation emerged as a private solution to the potential immoral impact of public theater on children. It was significant for the eventual development of commercial children's theater in twentieth-century France because it established the notion that theater tailored to the tastes and intellectual abilities of children had the greatest impact on the child actor and the child spectator. This dissertation also examines representations of child performers in the French press. Child performers went from being viewed as miniature adults in the eighteenth century to "charming" children or "horrible" prodigies in the nineteenth century. Perceptions of child performers shifted as conceptions of childhood changed in modern France. By the end of the nineteenth century, observers rejected the notion of acting troupes made up of children but were still taken by child stars, because they perceived them as the natural embodiment of "childish charms." Child performers became a subject of concern to French legislators in the late nineteenth century. This dissertation examines parliamentary debates on legislation in 1874 and 1892 regarding child performers and ways in which legislators and the theater world tried to find a balance between maintaining the educative function of theater while protecting child performers. The 1892 law established a system of regulation for the employ of child performers. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of theater requests for permission to employ children under thirteen between 1901 and 1930 shows the 1892 law was rarely enforced. Government officials, I argue, were willing to allow the law to go unenforced because of the primacy of theater in French culture and the unique relationship between theater and the state in France.
Es mi intención analizar en esta tesis la manera en que la traducción puede ocupar un lugar central en un sistema literario. El modernismo, en general, y la Revista Moderna, en particular, se ofrecen ...como un objeto de estudio idóneo para este propósito. Por cuestiones metodológicas, me concentraré en el trabajo de un solo traductor, uno de los más importantes de ese momento. Al hacer esto, también pretendo contribuir al estudio de la historia de la traducción en México.Varias hipótesis han guiado mi investigación. En primer lugar, que durante el Porfiriato se dieron las condiciones económicas y culturales en México para que tuviera cabida un proyecto como la RM, dentro del cual la inclusión de numerosos textos de origen francés fue central. En segundo lugar, que, dado que el modernismo fomentó la apertura a influencias literarias no hispánicas en la transición del XIX al XX, la traducción fue clave para su desarrollo. En tercer lugar, que la vida de letrado diplomático de Balbino Dávalos facilitó su conocimiento de otras lenguas y cercanía con culturas distintas, lo cual repercutió en su interés por la traducción y la ampliación del repertorio de textos a los que tuvo acceso para traducir. En cuarto lugar, que el vínculo que Dávalos mantuvo con los escritores que fundaron la RM fue crucial en su labor traductora. En quinto lugar, que, si bien en la RM se advierte el claro interés de sus fundadores por adherirse a la sensibilidad ‘moderna’ que los parnasianos y simbolistas franceses representaban, gradualmente se van incorporando, mediante la traducción, textos de distintas tradiciones nacionales. Por último, que la importancia de la contribución de Dávalos mediante traducciones se hizo patente a través de una serie de estrategias de visibilización de su labor de traductor.
Heretofore associated with theatre, and movie stars such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Method acting was also a principal player in the history of American live television drama. ...In the post-World War II Cold War battle for cultural prestige between the United States and the Soviet Union, Method acting rose to prominence as a vanguard of American nationalism. The Method was not simply a new style of acting, it changed the aesthetic and commercial matrices in which American actors worked and participated in American culture. Developed from the theories and practice of Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, and under the leadership of Lee Strasberg, Method acting metamorphosed into the contentious position of the first 'indigenous' American acting style—a style that foregrounded middlebrow tastes and values as an expression of American national identity and culture. Grounded in the spirit of experimentation and innovation, television industry professionals sought to define an aesthetic of, and for, television beginning in the early years of the medium's existence. Connections between live television anthology drama and the Method were central to the formation of a distinct live television production aesthetic, termed 'televisual performance,' that became synonymous with a 'Golden Age' of American television. Although specific in its aesthetic to the ontology of television, the iconology of 'televisual performance' contains strong links to, and between, the traditions of absorptive painting and the narrative strategies of art cinema. An examination of these traditions and strategies reveals their enmeshment in the iconology of Method acting, as well as in reconceptions of the time, place, and labor of acting in the American postwar period. These changes are visible in the aesthetics of live television through the actor/performance driven temporality of the live anthology television drama. The relationship of the actor in and as performance sets televisual performance apart from other mediums, making it specific to live television. Moreover, this relationship contributes forcefully to the medium specificity of live television anthology drama, its aesthetic importance, its narrative goals, and its cultural purpose during the 1950's 'Golden Age' of television.
This dissertation examines the ways in which the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck and August Strindberg radically transformed the theatrical landscape through their emphasis on the sensory experience of ...the spectator. I argue that their plays signal a reorganization of the capacities of European and North American theater that finds a useful analog in the development of phenomenology and use phenomenology as a lens through which to consider their work and a subsequent tradition of plays that highlight the sensory experience of the spectator, including those of William Butler Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and Richard Foreman. In particular, I mobilize the discourse surrounding the concept of the uncanny that originates in Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” to consider both thematic elements and the way in which the spectator’s sensory experience is emphasized and manipulated. I contend that in conceptually unifying the spectacle onstage with the perceptual experience of the spectator, this “phenomenological” theatrical tradition attempts to overcome the divide between the stage and the audience by siting the performance in the mind of the spectator, thus converting the philosophical metaphor of consciousness-as-theater to a model in which theater is an extension of consciousness. Placing the work within a historical and cultural context, this dissertation employs the philosopher Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of regimes of art to reconsider the role that Maeterlinck and Strindberg’s groundbreaking drama played in establishing theater as a particular “distribution of the sensible” and interrogates the politics of the formal strategies that attempt to manipulate the sensory experience of the spectator. In its conclusion, it examines the possibility that some of the ways in which the capacities and limits of theater as a discipline are currently defined in Europe and North America—derived largely from the innovations of playwrights like Maeterlinck and Strindberg—are historically contingent and open to reorganization, not only through contemporary practice that eschews the dramatic text, but also through a consideration of the possibilities that a radically revised and expanded textual practice might offer.
This dissertation examines the works created jointly by dramatists and composers for the French theatre in the interwar period. During this period, writers as different as they were prolific ...collaborated with composers to create a new genre out of a combination of music and theatre, which I call "music-theatre." These collaborations collectively constitute a unique genre for historical, aesthetic and genetic reasons. The study is centered on a discussion of five representative works of this genre: Histoire du soldat by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz and Igor Stravinsky, L'Enfant et les sortilèges by Colette and Maurice Ravel, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel by Jean Cocteau and the Groupe des Six, Perséphone by André Gide and Stravinsky, and Le Livre de Christophe Colomb by Paul Claudel and Darius Milhaud. The focus of this study is on the dramatic innovation that resulted from these collaborations. I discuss the defining characteristics of the genre demonstrated in the play's themes, aesthetics, and treatment of character. Rejecting the tenets of realist and naturalist theatre, these dramatists sought new ways to represent the fantastic, supernatural and surreal on the stage; they experimented with dialogue, choreography and time schemes to evoke a world of emotional, spiritual or philosophical uncertainty. Writers also collaborated with composers for reasons relating to the cultural climate of the period. The presence of the Ballets Russes in France, the radical innovations in music pioneered by Stravinsky and Les Six, and the close friendships which developed between writers and composers, also contributed to the rise of the genre at this moment in history. These collaborations occupy an important place in the oeuvre of major writers, and yet histories of 20th century French theatre do not account for them. Through a discussion of these five plays, this study contributes a new perspective on the interwar theatre in France.
