Acting and Ontology in Molière
Though counts the of actors French and seventeenth acting, a consistent century has feature left a is number their theoretiof accounts of actors and acting, a consistent feature is their theoretical underdevelopment. This underdevelopment may seem perplexing since a signal achievement of so-called classical France was the invention of theory itself in a specifically modern sense. We meet the self-consciously professional discipline Rene Descartes brought to the scientific "search for truth," imposing order on the rational pursuit of knowledge through close logical analysis of the conditions of possibility of rational thought as such. We get the systematic lessons in statecraft laid down in Cardinal Richelieu's posthumous Testament politique ( Political Testament) (1688) or Gabriel Naude's Considerations politiques sur les Coups d'Etat ( Political Reflections on Coups d'Etat) (1639), reducing government to a rigorous science grounded in unblinking scrutiny of the material interests that drive political agents. Boileau's L'Art poetique (The Art of Poetry) (1674) presents a synoptic system of literary forms based on the principle of rational self-possession that, for all the aweinspiring sublimity of its most telling effects, enables poets to say just and only what they mean to say as a function of the critical "idea" that governs poetic utterance. And we have the equally critical goal Pierre Corneille sets himself in the three discourses on dramatic art framing his collected Theâtre of 1660, deriving practical rules from
The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France
The concept of obscenity is an ancient one. But as Joan DeJean suggests, its modern form, the same version that today's politicians decry and savvy artists exploit, was invented in seventeenth-century France. The Reinvention of Obscenity casts a fresh light on the mythical link between sexual impropriety and things French. Exploring the complicity between censorship, print culture, and obscenity, DeJean argues that mass market printing and the first modern censorial machinery came into being at the very moment that obscenity was being reinvented - that is, transformed from a minor literary phenomenon into a threat to society. DeJean's principal case in this study is the career of Moliere, who cannily exploited the new link between indecency and female genitalia to found his career as a print author; the enormous scandal which followed his play L'ecole des femmes made him the first modern writer to have his sex life disected in the press. Keenly alert to parallels with the currency of obscenity in contemporary America, The Reinvention of Obscenity will concern not only scholars of French history, but anyone interested in the intertwined histories of sex, publishing, and censorship.
The Cardinal and the Queen: Sexual and Political Disorders in the Mazarinades
When Louis XIII died in 1643, he left his realm in the hands of his five-year-old son, the future Sun King, his Spanish wife, Anne of Austria, and his Italian minister, Cardinal Jules Mazarin. During the minority of Louis XIV, against the background of costly involvement in the Thirty Years' War, resistance to the fiscal exactions of the crown and the progress of royal absolutism precipitated the rebellion known as the Fronde.' This disruptive civil war lasted from the constitutional confrontation between the monarchy and the Parlement of Paris in January of 1648 until the military pacification of Guyenne in July of 1653. In various stages and in various combinations, magistrates, populace, nobles, capital, and provinces joined in opposition to the regency government. In denouncing the detested