Teaching French Neoclassical Tragedy
- Editors: Hélène E. Bilis, Ellen McClure
- Pages: 376
- Published: 2021
- ISBN: 9781603295307 (Hardcover)
- ISBN: 9781603295314 (Paperback)
“An invaluable resource for teachers bringing French neoclassical theater to the classroom, this book contains excellent, concrete suggestions for activities that encourage student engagement and communication.”
—Roland Racevskis, University of Iowa
Tragedy has been reborn many times since antiquity. Seventeenth-century French playwrights composed tragedies marked by neoclassical aesthetics and the divine-right absolutism of the Grand Siècle. But their works also speak to the modern imagination, inspiring reactions from Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault; adaptations and reworkings by Césaire and Kushner; and new productions by francophone and anglophone directors.
This volume addresses both the history of French neoclassical tragedy—its audiences, performance practice, and development as a genre—and the ideas these works raise, such as necessity, free will, desire, power, and moral behavior in the face of limited choices. Essays demonstrate ways to teach the plays through a variety of lenses, such as performance, spectatorship, aesthetics, rhetoric, and affect. The book also explores postcolonial engagement, by writers and directors both in and outside France, with these works.
Acknowledgments (ix)
Introduction: Teaching Neoclassical Tragedy outside France (1)
Part I: Reframing Tragic Poetics
Racine among the Phaedras (29)
Fate, Freedom, and the Tragic World (43)
Place and Space in Neoclassical Tragedy (56)
Accounting for Taste: Corneille and the Power of the Female Spectator (70)
Tragic Aesthetics: Humanist Uncertainty vs. Neoclassical Inevitability (85)
The Microdrama of Vivid Description: Hypotyposis as a Pedagogical Tool (96)
Part II: The Performance of Tragedy: On Stage and in the Classroom
Performing Neoclassical Tragedy: Between Text and Image (117)
A Comparative Approach to Teaching Neoclassical Tragedy (132)
To Speak or Not to Speak: Racine’s Lessons on Communicative Strategies (146)
Teaching la Tragédie en Musique across the Curriculum (157)
Turning to Seventeenth-Century Machine Theater to Teach Tragedy (172)
Part III: The Performance of Tragedy: New Geographies, New Temporalities
Neoclassical Theater in the Colonial Context: The Public Theater of Saint-Domingue (189)
Ancient Stories, Modern Audiences: Neoclassical Tragedy in Multicultural France (201)
Staging the Neoclassical Canon as Intercultural Repertoire: Faustin Linyekula’s Bérénice Diptych (215)
Part IV: Tragic Politics: Between the Ancien Régime and the Present
Reflections on Free Will and (Self-)Governance in Racine and Contemporary Politics (243)
Exploring Early Modern Globalization through Seventeenth-Century French Tragedy (254)
Racine’s Britannicus and the Absolutist Court of Louis XIV (267)
Of Tragedy and Kings in Corneille and Césaire (284)
Part V: Explorations in Theory and Technology
A Queer Eye on Racine and Corneille (299)
An Affective Approach to Teaching Neoclassical Tragedy (315)
Corneille versus the Académie Française: Teaching Le Cid through Courtroom Drama (327)
Neoclassical Tragedy, Distant Reading, and the Digital Sphere (340)
Notes on Contributors (359)
