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Articles 91 - 120 of 129
Full-Text Articles in Modern Languages
Appropriation And Gender: The Case Of Catherine Bernard And Bernard De Fontenelle, Nina Ekstein
Appropriation And Gender: The Case Of Catherine Bernard And Bernard De Fontenelle, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
In 1757, Bernard de Bavier de Fontenelle, the well-known popularizer of scientific thinking, homme de lettres, and secretary of the Académie des Sciences, died just months shy of his hundredth birthday. In 1758, Volume 10 of Fontenelle's Oeuvres appeared, edited by Fontenelle's chosen literary executor, the abbé Trublet. Along with a number of other works, Volume 10 contains a tragedy dating from 1690 entitled Brutus. This play has had a complex and curious history. The year 1758 marks the first time that Brutus appears under Fontenelle's name, but hardly the last. In 1690, when the play was first …
The Second Woman In The Theater Of Villedieu, Nina Ekstein
The Second Woman In The Theater Of Villedieu, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Best known for her prose fiction, Marie-Catherine Desjardins de Villedieu was also a successful playwright. Her three tragi-comedies (Manlius, Nitétis, and Le Favori), while significantly dissimilar in many respects, share an unusual feature. All three plays foreground the figure of the second woman, second because her role is clearly less central to the play's action than that of another woman character. In each case, the relationships between this second woman and the other characters of the play defy the traditional categories of the seventeenth-century stage. Furthermore, the second woman is not an object of desire. The …
Sainthood And Psychoanalysis: Tirso's Santa Juana, Matthew D. Stroud
Sainthood And Psychoanalysis: Tirso's Santa Juana, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
In his seminar of February 20,1973, entitled "God and the Jouissance of Woman," Lacan provocatively implies a connection between feminine sexuality and sainthood, using as examples two Spanish mystics, San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Avila. He does not here discuss sainthood per se, but rather mysticism, with its emphasis on unity of the soul with God, noting that mystics are most often women or "highly gifted people like Saint John of the Cross," that is, men who have enrolled themselves on the feminine side of sexuality, in the "not-all" (Lacan 1982, 146-47). In the next seminar, …
The Demand For Love And The Mediation Of Desire In La Traición En La Amistad, Matthew D. Stroud
The Demand For Love And The Mediation Of Desire In La Traición En La Amistad, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
María de Zayas's comedia, La traición en la amistad [Friendship betrayed], presents us with a truly stunning demonstration of intrigue and deception in the service of love. Based on the relationships among nine people, we have women who deceive men, men who deceive women, women who betray each others' friendships, servants who are quick to comment on the absurdity of all these machinations, and a final scene in which most of the principals get married. What distinguishes this play is the presence of the ninth character, Fenisa, who acts and reacts just as the other women do before the …
A Woman's Tragedy: Catherine Bernard's 'Brutus', Nina Ekstein
A Woman's Tragedy: Catherine Bernard's 'Brutus', Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The theater has traditionally been a male domain. The ranks of authors, directors, and even actors have long been overwhelmingly dominated by men. In Western drama, no women playwrights have gained admittance to the literary canon. While never absolute, the relative exclusion of women from dramatic authorship is even greater when the type of theater in question is tragedy. Carol Gelderman asks bluntly: "Why is it that no woman has ever written a great tragedy?". A number of explanations have been put forward that suggest deep-seated links between men and tragedy: Susan Gilbert and Susan Gubar find that "the structure …
Les Contextes Du Portrait Chez Bussy-Rabutin: Fiction Et Réalité, Nina Ekstein
Les Contextes Du Portrait Chez Bussy-Rabutin: Fiction Et Réalité, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
L' Histoire amoureuse des Gaules est un de ces romans curieux qui résistent aux catégories conventionnelles. Il trouve difficilement une place dans les courants narratifs du dix-septième siècle. Très court, il a délaissé les normes du roman héroïque, mais sa brièveté n'a rien de classique. L' Histoire amoureuse des Gaules est aussi éloignée que possible de la clarté et de la netteté de La Princesse de Cleèves. Quoiqu'on puisse attribuer au roman de Bussy une source d'inspiration (le Satiricon de Pétrone), on n'arrive pas à Iui trouver de parenté solide chez ses contemporains ni de suite dans …
Rivalry And Violence In Lope's El Castigo Sin Verganza, Matthew D. Stroud
Rivalry And Violence In Lope's El Castigo Sin Verganza, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Cesáreo Bandera published Mimesis conflictiva in 1975, at least a decade ahead of its time in terms of its reception by the comediantes. Using the ideas of René Girard, Bandera focuses primarily on Don Quixote, but a significant section of the monograph is devoted to a discussion of La vida es sueño. His discussion is wide ranging, dealing with the relationship between subject and object; the nature of, and processes surrounding, the sacrificial victim; the necessary relationship between truth, violence, civilization, reason, and illusion; the role of desire and (in)differentiation in rivalry; and the all-pervasive influence of …
The Electronic Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
The Electronic Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The rapid transmission of data in machine readable formats has for many years now been a staple of the business world. Now, in a number of fields, the same technology is being applied to scholarly subjects, including French and English literatures. The availability of primary texts ready to be read by one's own computer is almost as great a revolution in textual dissemination as the invention of the printing press. Other disciplines, in which scholars can exchange texts either on diskette or by uploading and downloading to a network, are far ahead of Spanish literature, but there is both a …
The Destabilization Of The Future In Racine's Iphigénie, Nina Ekstein
The Destabilization Of The Future In Racine's Iphigénie, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The action of Racine's Iphigénie is only a prelude, a pretext, to a much greater future event. The Trojan War looms large before the entire dramatic universe, drawing the characters inexorably forward. The force of the future in this play has long been evident: Georges Poulet discussed it in relation to the weight of the past in Andromaque: "[o]uvrant ou fermant un récit, le moment de l'action perd donc presque entièrement sa valeur propre, sa qualité de seul moment 'présent.' . . . Sa 'réalité' n'est pas assez riche en soi pour triompher d'un passé ou d'un futur. Le …
The Desiring Subject And The Promise Of Salvation: A Lacanian Study Of Sor Juana's El Divino Narciso, Matthew D. Stroud
The Desiring Subject And The Promise Of Salvation: A Lacanian Study Of Sor Juana's El Divino Narciso, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Both Sor Juana's El divino Narciso and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic writings deal with the nature of humankind and the nature of God. This article examines the play and its religious philosophy in light of Lacan's imaginary, symbolic, and real registers, as well as Lacan's important concepts of the Other, the divided subject, jouissance, and the death drive. Ultimately, both Lacan and Sor Juana arrive at the same conclusion, that the basis of the religious experience is grounded in the "lack" in both the subject and God, and that only death can bring the promised state of purity.
The Weight Of The Future In Racine's Theater, Nina Ekstein
The Weight Of The Future In Racine's Theater, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The future has a curious status in the theater. Like the past, it cannot be represented on stage, but is limited to the field of discourse. The future can be spoken, but not literally pre-figured. Purely textual, lacking any referent, concretized or otherwise, the future appears essentially alien to the theater. For Anne Ubersfeld, "le problème fondamental du temps au théâtre est qu'il se situe par rapport à un icimaintenant ... le théâtre est ce qui par nature nie la présence du passé et du futur. L’écriture théâtrale est une écriture au présent." Yet the future constitutes an important …
Genre And Lack In The Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
Genre And Lack In The Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The history of genre studies is almost a textbook case of critical self-deconstruction. Beginning with Aristotle himself, we are faced with irreconcilable differences between description and prescription, literary cause and psychological effect, the written Poetics and the promised but lacking sequel on comedy. The temptation to compromise on a definition (or multiple definitions) of a genre has been met with startlingly rigid manifestos for limiting our use of a word such as "tragedy" only to those plays that fulfill the particular narrowly- conceived requirements of one critic or another. Given Jacques Lacan's penchant for jumping into the middle of thorny …
Language, Power, And Gender In Tristan’S La Marianne And La Mort De Sénèque, Nina Ekstein
Language, Power, And Gender In Tristan’S La Marianne And La Mort De Sénèque, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Power is a central issue in both Tristan L'Hermite's Marianne (1636) and La Mort de Sénèque (1644). I propose to examine the articulations of power in Tristan's theater and the power struggles at the heart of both plays. On the most basic level, Tristan illustrates the power of tyranny. Furetière defines a tyrant as an "usurpateur d'un Etat, oppresseur de la liberté publique, qui s'est emparé par violence ou par adresse de la souveraine puissance"; tyran "se dit aussi d'un Prince qui abuse de son pouvoir, qui ne gouverne pas selon les lois, qui use de violence et de cruauté …
Women's Images Effaced: The Literary Portrait In Seventeenth-Century France, Nina Ekstein
Women's Images Effaced: The Literary Portrait In Seventeenth-Century France, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The literary portrait was extremely popular in France for a number of years during the mid-seventeenth century. With roots in salon society, the portrait became a genre in its own right during this period and was eventually incorporated in numerous other genres such as novels, memoirs, theater, and sermons. In this study, I will consider the close association between the initial vogue of portraiture and women, and examine the advantages and problems posed by the genre for women authors. I will trace the evolution of the literary portrait during the seventeenth century, in particular, the manner in which women were …
Reference And Resemblance In The Seventeenth-Century Literary Portrait, Nina Ekstein
Reference And Resemblance In The Seventeenth-Century Literary Portrait, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The history of portraiture, in both literature and the graphic arts, reaches back to antiquity. This art was perhaps most highly developed in seventeenth-century France, where the form branched out in numerous directions. In the social sphere, verbal portraiture became the basis of a fashionable salon game. Diplomatic portraits were widely employed in political dealings. The popularity of painted portraits was widespread, and gave rise to such trends as the portrait-miniature and the depiction of individuals as mythological figures. In the domain of literature, the development of portrait forms was especially rich. The use of the portrait in the novel …
"¿Y Sois Hombre O Sois Mujer?": Sex And Gender In Tirso’S Don Gil De Las Calzas Verdes, Matthew D. Stroud
"¿Y Sois Hombre O Sois Mujer?": Sex And Gender In Tirso’S Don Gil De Las Calzas Verdes, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
When Henry Sullivan opened the question of the insight that the writings of Jacques Lacan could bring to the comedia, he came somewhat early on to Tirso's magisterial comedia de enredo [comedy of intrigue and deception], Don Gil de las calzas verdes. As with most things Lacanian, his paper, "The Sexual Ambiguities of Tirso de Molina's Don Gil de las calzas verdes," is not easily accessible, having been published in the Proceedings of the Third Annual Golden Age Drama Symposium in El Paso, Texas. It is an important contribution to Tirsian studies, however, and he identifies three …
Clotaldo's Daughter, Matthew D. Stroud
Clotaldo's Daughter, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
With respect to the fictional father, Robert Con Davis (3) has noted (1) that the question of the father in fiction, in whatever guise, is essentially one of father absence; (2) that each manifestation of the father in a text is a refinding of an absent father; (3) and that the father's origin is to be found in the trace of his absence. Calderón's masterpiece, Life Is a Dream, is the parallel story of two people's searches for their fathers and the consequences both of not knowing who they are at the beginning and of their finding them before …
Pyrame And Thisbé: Lost In A "Minimalist" World, Nina Ekstein
Pyrame And Thisbé: Lost In A "Minimalist" World, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Discussions of Les Amours tragiques de Pyrame et Thisbé generally center on the eponymous couple. Young star-crossed lovers, opposed by all who surround them, doomed to death, Pyrame and Thisbé belong to a long tradition in Western literature. What I believe merits greater attention is the dramatic world in which the lovers' tragedy unfolds. The young couple occupies the center of the play, but Thisbé and Pyrame seem curiously out of place in, and at odds with, their environment in all its particulars, from characters to objects to scenic space. The two characters are lost in the dramatic universe of …
The Portrait On Stage In Molière's Theater, Nina Ekstein
The Portrait On Stage In Molière's Theater, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Literary portraits, while common in a wide variety of genres, are not often thought of in connection with the stage. Discussions of dramaturgy make little mention of portraits, which is perhaps not surprising when one considers that theater is the domain of action, movement, and conflict; the portrait, on the contrary, is primarily descriptive. Verbal portraiture would not seem to be terribly effective in a theatrical context: it is unlikely to advance the action of the play, nor would it lend itself readily to gesture and movement. Theater requires the physical presence of its object, portraiture depends on a certain …
Symbols, Referents, And Theatrical Semantics: The Use Of Hands In The Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
Symbols, Referents, And Theatrical Semantics: The Use Of Hands In The Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
One of the most important products of the application of New Criticism to the comedia was the discovery of the functions of clusters of images to the dramatic and theatrical themes within a play. Among the most pervasive and subtle images and symbols are those involving hands and, by extension, arms, rings, gloves, and daggers. A quick, impressionistic overview of the connotations of hands reveals a number of different and often contradictory meanings: trust and treachery, power and submission, salvation and damnation, to mention only a few. So ubiquitous are hands, and so necessary are they to the plot complications …
Le Misanthrope And Tartuffe: Two Critiques Of Verbal Portraiture, Nina Ekstein
Le Misanthrope And Tartuffe: Two Critiques Of Verbal Portraiture, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Portraiture is a deeply rooted and characteristics feature of seventeenth-century France. Verbal portraits abound in the literature of the period. By the time Molière wrote Le Misanthrope and Tartuffe (1664-1669), the «gallant» portrait had already known a great vogue, first with Mlle de Scudéry's Grand Cyrus (1649-53) and Clélie (1654-61), and then in the salons of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, as reflected in the Divers Portraits (1659) and the Recueil de Portraits et Eloges (1659). Adaptations of the verbal portrait would later appear in memoirs, letters, sermons, novels, and «caractères», remaining an important force in literature to the end …
The Comedia As Playscript, Matthew D. Stroud
The Comedia As Playscript, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The relationship between literary text and theatrical performance is the subject of intense discussion and occasional animosity between those who believe that performance is only the faithful translation of the text from one medium to another and those for whom a playscript is only a starting point or a secondary element to performance. We do know, however, that the comedias were written to be performed, that there are performance signs imbedded in the texts themselves, and that if we ignore performance altogether we end up teaching the literary texts as though they were novels or poems. The problem that this …
Noise And (In)Coherence In Le Roman Comique, Nina Ekstein
Noise And (In)Coherence In Le Roman Comique, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Noises play an unusually large role in Paul Scarron's Le Roman Comique (1651, 1657): there are over three hundred explicit references in the novel to some form of noise. Although noise is not commonly assigned a significant role in prose fiction, its substantial presence suggests that it may indeed have functions in Le Roman Comique beyond simply being a realistic or comic feature. I intend to show how noise is part of the narrative structure, and, furthermore, how it exemplifies and reinforces the tension between coherence and incoherence in the novel.
Further Considerations Of History And Law In The Wife-Murder "Comedias", Matthew D. Stroud
Further Considerations Of History And Law In The Wife-Murder "Comedias", Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Those who, like Américo Castro and Arnold Reichenberger, assume a great similarity between historical fact and dramatic action, use literary texts to posit speculations about historical fact and historical fact to assert the realism of literary situations. Despite the potential tautology inherent in such arguments, these scholars have attempted to prove their cases by bringing to bear the following evidence: 1) real wife murders documented in Spanish history; 2) laws regarding the punishment of an adulterous wife 3) Spanish social history and the formation of a national Spanish personality; 4) contemporary concepts of honor, some fictional and some didactic, that …
La Literatura Y La Mujer En El Barroco: Valor, Agravio Y Mujer, De Ana Caro, Matthew D. Stroud
La Literatura Y La Mujer En El Barroco: Valor, Agravio Y Mujer, De Ana Caro, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Existen hoy varios estudios que tratan de investigar el feminismo en Ia comedia del Siglo de Oro. Algunos se enfocan en aquellas mujeres que se llaman a veces mujeres varoniles —Ia amazona, Ia desdeñosa, Ia pundonorosa, Ia vengadora de las mujeres, por ejemplo. En general, estos estudios terminan por concluir que, a pesar de Ia grandeza de estas mujeres, las soluciones a los conflictos dramáticos restablecen Ia superioridad del hombre sobre Ia mujer. Sin embargo, casi todas las obras estudiadas fueron escritas por hombres, —Lope, Tirso, Vélez y Calderón, por ejemplo. Afortunadamente, tenemos a nuestra disposición las obras teatrales de …
Love, Friendship, And Deceit In La Traición En La Amistad By María De Zayas, Matthew D. Stroud
Love, Friendship, And Deceit In La Traición En La Amistad By María De Zayas, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
María de Zayas' play, La traición en la amistad is, like her novellas, a tale of amorous intrigue and conflict between sexes. The plot is based on several triangles made up of three galanes (Gerardo, Juan, and Liseo), four damas (Fenisa, Marcia, Belisa, and Laura), and a pair of servants (Lucía and León). For the most part their relationships are guided by the traditional treatment of love in the comedia. At the outset only Marcia and Liseo love each other, but their love is complicated by other characters. Gerardo also loves Marcia, and he spends a great deal of the …
Martyrs, Martyrdom, And The Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
Martyrs, Martyrdom, And The Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Plays about martyrs form a curious subgenre within the comedia. In a direct contradiction of the values normally associated with the comedia, we are asked to accept that dishonor is glorious, that submission is courageous, and that death is a reward because it brings eternal life. The martyrs themselves, however, as presented in the comedia, are not of a single type; the way each comes to his or her final apotheosis is a function of the comedia setting in which the martyr acts. Too, because martyr plays almost always use external source material, a study of the …
The Comic Récit: Les Plaideurs, Nina Ekstein
The Comic Récit: Les Plaideurs, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Récits are a standard feature of the French classical theater. While normally associated with tragedy (e.g. the famous "récit de Théramène"), seventeenth-century comedy adopted the use of dramatic narrative and adapted it for its own ends. In an examination of the comic récit, two questions arise immediately: how is the récit in comedy different from, first the tragic récit, and second other segments of a comedy?
Narrative Reliability And Spatial Limitations In Bajazet, Nina Ekstein
Narrative Reliability And Spatial Limitations In Bajazet, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Récits are a standard feature in the classical theater, commonly used to bring information to an onstage universe which is limited by the unities of time and place. Action which occurs before the opening of the play finds its natural expression, given the convention of beginning the play in medias res, in narrative form. These are the récits of exposition. Bajazet is unusually rich in such récits: Acomat recounts Amurat's actions, Bajazet's youth, Acomat's own past, and how Roxane came to be able to see Bajazet (I, i, ll. 115-42, 145-56); and Atalide explains how she and Bajazet …
Some Practical Thoughts On Producing Calderón’S Court Plays, Matthew D. Stroud
Some Practical Thoughts On Producing Calderón’S Court Plays, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Calderón's comedias de tramoyas present special problems to a modern producer attempting an authentic stage presentation. This article discusses possible answers to questions relating to staging (the theater itself, sets, the length of the performance, funding, etc.), direction, special effects, costumes, hairstyles, and text (cuts, versions, the use of loas and entremeses, etc.). In addition, court plays also require decisions about the music—tessitura, pitch, instrumentation, and orchestration—most of which must rely on conjecture rather than on concrete knowledge of the original. For each problem, it quickly becomes apparent that absolute authenticity is quite impossible. Stated generally, one must simply …