Readings:

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Course Description:

Theater was France’s pre-eminent art form from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Theater was also a public, collective social experience as well as a cultural institution often in contention with other institutions—religious and political.

We will study some major plays of the 17th and 18th centuries (Corneille, Racine, Molière, Marivaux, Voltaire, Beaumarchais).  We will seek to understand some of the important literary and aesthetic stakes of these works, as well as to investigate the social and political history of the theater (organization of theater troupes, audiences and their social composition, censorship practices, etc.). We will think about the role and the effects of genre (tragedy vs. comedy; the rise of “drame”).  We will study contemporary debates about the theater and trace theater’s importance as a crucible for the formation and expression of public opinion.

Section times and locations in the Schedule of Classes