RLFR 208 Fatal Passions and Happy Fools: French Theater in the Age of Louis XIV (Same as Comparative Literature 208) (Not offered 2008-2009; to be offered 2009-2010)
The plays of the three great French dramatists of the seventeenth century-Corneille, Molière, Racine-are mirrors through which a rich tapestry of moral and intellectual issues, notions about art and aesthetics, social norms and aberrations, and meditations on the human condition are finely woven and exhaustively reflected. In an age emblematized by the solar absolutism of the "Sun King", comedy and tragedy engage critical minds in searching questions on what constitutes heroism, duty, fatality, hypocrisy, social conformity and marginality. No area of literature engages, perhaps, in more sustained interrogation, even subversion, of the stifling authority of Versailles and the Court than do the genres of tragedy and comedy. They are texts that interpret not only the tragic vision of the individual acting out his or her part in a universe where the gods remain silent spectators, but also the comic vision of salons inhabited by a typology of misfits, puffers and fops, the happy fools of gilt and glitter. This course will examine these issues through some of the masterpieces of dramatic literature from this period, including Corneille's Le Cid and Horace, Molière's Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, and Les Précieuses ridicules, and Racine's Phèdre and Andromaque. These plays will be studied and discussed in the context of French society, art, and the theological, intellectual, and political thought of seventeenth-century France. The performance of certain plays will be observed directly through cinematic productions. Conducted in French.
Format: seminar. Requirements: class participation, two shorter papers, one longer paper, and an oral presentation.
Prerequisite: French 109, 110, 111, or permission of instructor.Enrollment limit: 15 (expected: 15 ). Preference will be given to French majors and those with compelling justification for admission.
NORTON