The emergence of a theatrical science of man in France, 1660-1740
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Bibliographic Information
The emergence of a theatrical science of man in France, 1660-1740
（Oxford University studies in the Enlightenment, 2020:01）
Liverpool University Press on behalf of Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, c2020
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Note
Bibliography: p. 267-279
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The emergence of a theatrical science of man in France, 1660-1740 highlights a radical departure from discussions of dramatic literature and its undergirding rules to a new, relational discourse on the emotional power of theater. Through a diverse cast of religious theaterphobes, government officials, playwrights, art theorists and proto-philosophes, Connors shows the concerted effort in early Enlightenment France to use texts about theater to establish broader theories on emotion, on the enduring psychological and social ramifications of affective moments, and more generally, on human interaction, motivation, and social behavior.
This fundamentally anthropological assessment of theater emerged in the works of anti-theatrical religious writers, who argued that emotional response was theater's raison d'etre and that it was an efficient venue to learn more about the depravity of human nature. A new generation of pro-theatrical writers shared the anti-theatricalists' intense focus on the emotions of theater, but unlike religious theaterphobes, they did not view emotion as a conduit of sin or as a dangerous, uncontrollable process; but rather, as cognitive-affective moments of feeling and learning.
Connors' study explores this reassessment of the theatrical experience which empowered writers to use plays, critiques, and other cultural materials about the stage to establish a theatrical science of man-an early Enlightenment project with aims to study and 'improve' the emotional, social, and political 'health' of eighteenth-century France.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: theater, emotions, science of man
Diderot's relational drama
From religious theaterphobia to theatrical innovation
Affect, intentionality, and the history of emotions
Chapter 1: Theaterphobia and the transformational power of performance
Anti-theatrical
criticism: goals and strategies
Corneille, Nicole, and the reality of emotions
Learning dangerously from the passions: Pierre Nicole's Traite de la comedie
Debating theatrical emotions in the wake of Nicole's Traite
Chapter 2: "Que sur la superficie de notre coeur": Jean-Baptiste Dubos's theatrical emotions
Emotional debates: past and present
A different path to aesthetic appreciation
The political case for pleasure
Dubos's cognitive-affective
sequences
Chapter 3: Beyond affect: from Dubos's "passions superficielles" to Houdar de La Motte's "sentiments raisonnables"
La Motte, the Querelle, and the Regency
La Motte's "sentiments raisonnables"
The dramaturgical power of interet
Chapter 4: From the page to the stage: La Motte's theatrical inquiry into the emotions
Context and emotion in Les Macchabees (1721)
Intentionality and suspense in Romulus (1722)
Ines de Castro (1723) and the emotional politics of interet
Chapter 5: Strategic passions: Marivaux's Moderne subjectivities
Marivaux's trajectory from Moderne to bel esprit to scientist of man
Learning from the "organs": Marivaux's intuitive ethics
Sentimental strategies: Marivaux's theories of emotion in Le Triomphe de l'amour (1732)
Chapter 6: Learning through multiplicite:
emotion and distance in the comedie larmoyante
The decline and rebirth of Nivelle de La Chaussee's emotional poetics
Meaning-making
through the romanesque
The piece-cadre:
emotion, multiplicite, and spectatorship in La Fausse Antipathie (1733)
Conclusion: avant-gardes, emotion, and Enlightenment
Works cited
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
