Member News Briefs

Please join me in congratulating Theresa Kennedy on the publication of her new book,

Women's Deliberation: The Heroine in Early Modern French Women's Theater.

Women’s Deliberation: The Heroine in Early Modern French Women’s Theater (1650–1750) argues that women playwrights question traditional views on women through their heroines. Denied the powers of cleverness, the authority of deliberation, and the right to speak, heroines were often excluded from central roles in plays by leading male playwrights from this period. Women playwrights, on the other hand, embraced the ideas necessary to expand the boundaries of female heroism. Heroines in plays from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries reflect a shift in mentalities toward rationality and female agency. I argue that the "deliberative heroine," emerging at the dawn of the eighteenth century, is the most fully developed, exuding all the characteristics of the modern-day heroine. Although she embodies many of the qualities of her heroine counterparts, she also responds to them. Only the deliberative heroine, based on Enlightenment ideals—such as women’s ability to rationalize and the complex interplay between reason and sentiment—truly liberates female characters from a history of traditional roles. Whereas other heroines act in accordance with social construct or on impulse, the "deliberative heroine" realizes the ideals of the seventeenth-century salons that petitioned for women to have "greater control over their own bodies" (DeJean 21). She is active, and her determination to follow through with her own line of reasoning—that involves both mind and heart—enables her to determine the outcome of events. In the end, this new generation of heroines ushered in an era where women playwrights could make their own contribution to dramatic works at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment.

Further details about the book are available through the following link:

https://www.routledge.com/Womens-Deliberation-The-Heroine-in-Early-Moder...

Congratulations are in order for Jeffrey Peters, whose new book The Written World has just been published with Northwestern UP. Further details are included below:

Jeffrey N. Peters, The Written World. Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France (Northwestern, 2018).

 

From the publisher:

In The Written World, Jeffrey N. Peters argues that geographic space may be understood as a foundational, originating principle of literary creation. By way of an innovative reading of chora, a concept developed by Plato in the Timaeus and often construed by philosophical tradition as “space,” Peters shows that canonical literary works of the French seventeenth century are guided by what he calls a “chorological” approach to artistic invention. In analyses of well-known authors such as Boileau, Corneille, Molière, Racine, d’Urfé, and Lafayette, he demonstrates that the apparent absence of physical space in seventeenth-century literary depiction indicates a subtle engagement with, rather than a rejection of, evolving principles of cosmological understanding. Space is not absent in these works so much as transformed in keeping with contemporaneous developments in early modern natural philosophy.

 

Full description and more:

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/written-world

Félicitations à Jennifer Tamas pour la parution de son nouveau livre, Le silence trahi, Racine ou la déclaration tragique:

Racine ou la déclaration tragique

L’éclatante beauté des vers raciniens a exercé une telle fascination sur les critiques, qu’ils ont longtemps négligé cette part de non-dit qu’elle laissait tapie dans l’ombre. La dramaturgie racinienne tire pourtant toute sa force du silence logé en son cœur. Qu’il résulte d’un calcul délibéré ou d’une impuissance à dire, le silence relève aussi bien des ambitions politiques, des codes de civilité, des bienséances théâtrales que des pratiques religieuses. Il représente ainsi la trahison d’une intention que les personnages cherchent à percer et qui maintient en suspens l’intérêt du spectateur. Cette étude se propose de montrer que les tragédies raciniennes s’articulent toutes autour de la profération d’un insupportable aveu. Longtemps caché, retenu, étouffé, il a des effets dévastateurs une fois qu’il est prononcé. En faisant du contrepoint entre silence et déclaration le fondement de sa dramaturgie, Racine sape le bel édifice de la poétique aristotélicienne et impose sa nouvelle vision du tragique. Ce n’est plus la parole qui gouverne l’avancée de l’action, mais les silences qui, loin de la suspendre, la ravivent et la compliquent. Nul besoin de pythie ou de dieux tout-puissants pour condamner l’homme, qui reste libre de se confesser ou de se taire.

https://www.droz.org/world/fr/6607-9782600058704.html

Please join me in congratulating Francis Assaf on two new critical editions and two recent articles - a very active retirement, indeed!

Critical editions:

Lesage, Alain-René. Lettres galantes d’Aristénète (1695). Œuvres complètes d’Alain-René Lesage, Vol. 12. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2017 (Sources classiques 128). P. 15-80.

Lesage, Alain-René. La Valise trouvée (1740). Œuvres complètes d’Alain-René Lesage, Vol. 12. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2017 (Sources classiques 128). P. 163-291.

Articles:

« L’entretien dans l’histoire comique. Moteur dialogique du discours libertin » L’Entretien au XVII e siècle, p. 239-253. Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2018.

« Errances, vagabondages, marginalisations picaresques au Grand Siècle : l’avatar français… car il y en a bien un. » Les Lettres Romanes, Tome 71 n°3-4 (2017) : 379-396.

Many congratulations to Faith Beasley, whose book

Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de la Sablière, and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France

has just been published with the University of Toronto Press.

Félicitations !

Please find more details here and below: https://utorontopress.com/us/versailles-meets-the-taj-mahal-1

Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France’s "Great Century" and the early Enlightenment. Focusing on the salon of Marguerite de La Sablière and its encounter with the traveler and philosopher François Bernier, this book resurrects the conversations about India inspired by Bernier’s travels and inscribed in his influential texts produced in collaboration with La Sablière’s salon. The literary works, correspondences, and philosophical texts produced by the members of this eclectic salon bear the traces of this engagement with India.

Faith E. Beasley’s analysis of these conversations reveals France’s unique engagement with India during this period and challenges prevailing images derived from a nineteenth-century "orientalism" imbued with colonialism. The India encountered in La Sablière’s salon through Francois Bernier and others is not the colonized India that has come to dominate any image of the Orient. Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal adds a new chapter to literary and cultural history by adopting a new approach to the study of salon culture, exploring how texts, cultural artifacts, and patterns of thought were shaped by the collective reading and by the conversations emanating from these practices. Beasley’s analysis highlights the unique role of French salon culture in the evolution of western thought during the early modern period.