Readings/Films:

Readings include plays by Corneille, Racine, Molière, Marivaux, Beaumarchais, Anouilh, Beckett.

Course Description:

Theater differs from all other forms of literature.  It emerges from words scratched on paper, but it exists as living speech, as bodily presence, as material spectacle, and as a shared sensorial and emotional experience.  In this class, we will study French theater from its founding by the neo-classical dramatists Corneille, Molière, and Racine throughout the great eighteenth-century comic dramatists, and finish with plays from the 1930s and the post-war period that took up the existential crises posed by fascism and war.

In addition to reading plays, we will study theaters as physical, built structures that create relations among actors and audience members.  We will consider modes of acting as well as the status of actors and of theater troupes.  We will ponder the nature of dramatic authorship: are plays necessarily understood as collaborative, or should we focus on the individual creation of the dramatic author?  Themes will include relations among the family, power, and the state; gender, sexuality and the stage; the representable and the unrepresentable — can violence, can religion, be represented on the French stage?

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional information:

Satisfies 1 “Literature/Genre” or one “Elective” requirement in the French major.  Satisfies course requirement in French Minor.   This course also satisfies 1 Historical Period Requirement in the French major.

Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature or International Studies.

Section times and locations in the Schedule of Classes