Author: Vivien ThweattPublisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600035767
Category : French literature
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
La Rochefoucauld and the Seventeenth-century Concept of the Self
Author: Vivien ThweattPublisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600035767
Category : French literature
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth-century France
Author: Henry C. ClarkPublisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600000543
Category : Civilization, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
Power and Image in Early Modern Europe
Author: Jessica GoethalsPublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443812161
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 205
Book Description
Are images and spectacles fundamental mediators of power relationships in the West? This book draws upon the language of cultural studies to investigate a contemporary hypothesis in the shifting ideological landscape of early modern Europe. Apparently aesthetic choices by artists may also have been the means to consolidate and subvert institutionalized or non-institutionalized bodies of power. Meanwhile, communities in Europe reacted to the intrinsic power of the image in literature and letters, commenting upon both its use and abuse. Both diachronic and geographic connections are made among disparate but important moments of image making in the twelfth through seventeenth centuries. The influence of Descartes is traced from La Rochefoucauld and the communal spectacles of the Ancien Régime salon, to the Netherlands and Rembrandt’s sketch, Death of the Virgin. Shakespeare bears similar anxieties about Joan of Arc’s transgression of gender boundaries in Henry VI, as does Castiglione’s Courtier when serving the Renaissance Prince. Spenser’s dilemma about the (non)difference between fiction and history resolves itself in the same way as does the Byzantine rejection of iconoclasm. Other articles in the collection examine anomie in Vatican frescoes by Giorgio Vasari, corporeal decay and the supernatural as spectacle on the early modern English stage, and affective self-perception and subjectivity in the scoring of Italian opera. ""[..] not as "just" a conference volume, but [as] an organic group of essays on early modernity. The essays span an impressive number of cultures – from "Byzantium" to England, Italy and Spain to the Netherlands – and theorize the image from a number of disciplinary vantage points. Not surprisingly, art history and theatre are well-represented, but so are music history and literary studies. Most of the essays are short, but sufficiently developed to allow for thoughtful arguments on the status of the visual in early modern culture: on the stage, on the page, and as artistic and musical representation. […] "they [do] deliver fine close readings and leave me sufficiently intrigued to want to return to, or familiarize myself with, the original "texts." I come away from this collection encouraged about the state of graduate studies in Europe and North America." —Jane Tylus, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, New York University "The essays are interdisciplinary and touch upon many themes that lie outside my own field of specialization. I was therefore surprised and pleased to find them not only original and instructive, but also inviting and accessible to the non-specialist. Although they range far with respect to chronology and theoretical suppositions, they are coherently united in their concern for the functioning of the image in the conservation, revision or critique of socio-political power in their respective cultural contexts. I will mention three essays, representing three different fields, as striking examples of disparate images used to consolidate, reconstruct or overthrow the dominant powers of their times. Kathryn Falzareno's essay, "Mother's Milk and Deborah's Sword," is a close reading of Shakespeare's portrayal of Joan of Arc in Henry VI. It is a close analysis of the paradoxical status of Joan, Saint of the French, strumpet for the English, Christian warrior maiden, contrasting with Deborah in the Ancient Testament. The dominant and totally unexpected image which brings together the contradictions embodied by Joan are the breasts, the source of nurture in the figure of Mary, but an encumbrance for the mythological amazons who removed one breast to facilitate their use of the bow. Ljubica Ilic's "Echo and Narcissus: Labyrinths of the Self," is an elegant reading of "echo music," the apparently impossible "translation" of the Ovidian story into music and opera. Ovid's story represents the nymph Echo as the auditory equivalent of Narcissus' reflection -- echoing sound as reflecting light. Ovid's echo myth undoubtedly influenced opera by Jacopo Peri (during the time of the Medici) and then, Monteverdi in the musical setting of "Orfeo." Finally, Elissa Auerbach's "Taking Mary's Pulse: Cartesianism and Modernity in Rembrandt's 'Death of the Virgin' " is a brilliant commentary on the Dutch painter's rendering of an ancient theme, the "dormition" of the Virgin, but at the center of the painting is the figure of a physician taking the pulse of her limp hand. The intrusion of this "scientific" element in the ancient iconography of the event of Mary's death is the unmistakeable sign of the wave of modernity that swept over the Netherlands with the popularity of Cartesian philosophy and science." —John Freccero, Professor of Italian and Comp. Lit., NYU
The Early Modern Subject
Author: Udo ThielPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191617334
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
The Early Modern Subject explores the understanding of self-consciousness and personal identity—two fundamental features of human subjectivity—as it developed in early modern philosophy. Udo Thiel presents a critical evaluation of these features as they were conceived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He explains the arguments of thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume, as well as their early critics, followers, and other philosophical contemporaries, and situates them within their historical contexts. Interest in the issues of self-consciousness and personal identity is in many ways characteristic and even central to early modern thought, but Thiel argues here that this is an interest that continues to this day, in a form still strongly influenced by the conceptual frameworks of early modern thought. In this book he attempts to broaden the scope of the treatment of these issues considerably, covering more than a hundred years of philosophical debate in France, Britain, and Germany while remaining attentive to the details of the arguments under scrutiny and discussing alternative interpretations in many cases.
Putting On Virtue
Author: Jennifer A. HerdtPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226327191
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 467
Book Description
This work reveals how a distrust of learned and habituated virtue shaped both early modern Christian moral reflection and secular forms of ethical thought. The author's broad historical sweep takes in the Aristotelian tradition as taken up by Thomas Aquinas and has chapters on Luther, Bunyan, the Jansenists, Hume, and others.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Author: François duc de La RochefoucauldPublisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 133
Book Description
This book is an English translation of the ideas of Francois Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, a noted French moralist and author of maxims and memoirs. He is part of the literary movement of classicism and is best known for his maxims, presented here in the translation by Willis Bund and Hain Friswell.
Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves
Author: Michael MoriartyPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199291039
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
"Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves is an investigation of psychological and ethical thought in seventeenth-century France, emphasizing both continuities and discontinuities with ancient and medieval thought. Michael Moriarty's examination discusses most of the period's major authors, some well-known, others less so: the abstract and general analyses of philosophers and theologians (Descartes, Jansenius, Malebranche) are juxtaposed with the less systematic and more concrete investigations of writers like Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, not to mention the theatre of Corneille, Moliere, and Racine. This study will be of interest to all researchers working in early modern French literature and in the history of ideas."--BOOK JACKET.
Fortune and Fatality
Author: Desmond HosfordPublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144381492X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205
Book Description
As an aesthetic notion and dramatic genre, tragedy has enjoyed a privileged place in French culture, particularly during the early modern period when debates over its nature and philosophy reflected fascination with a style whose fundamental principles were drawn from ancient Greek sources. Through the works of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, routinely cited for an alleged regularity of form and content exemplifying the academic notion of French Classicism, tragedy has grounded the French literary canon. Because of its place at the heart of canonical French literary studies, tragedy’s traditionally prescribed boundaries and interpretations have rarely been questioned. Fortune and Fatality: Performing the Tragic in Early Modern France challenges conventional notions of the nature and function of tragedy and the ends to which philosophical, theatrical, and performative aspects of the tragic were appropriated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The scope of material explored in this volume will be of interest not only to scholars and students of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, but to those working in areas such as theater, gender studies, aesthetics, history, religion, philosophy, classics, and cultural studies.
Female Intimacies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature
Author: Marianne LegaultPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317136020
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Examining literary discourses on female friendship and intimacy in seventeenth-century France, this study takes as its premise the view that, unlike men, women have been denied for centuries the possibility of same sex friendship. The author explores the effect of this homosocial and homopriviledged heritage on the deployment and constructions of female friendship and homoerotic relationships as thematic narratives in works by male and female writers in seventeenth-century France. The book consists of three parts: the first surveys the history of male thinkers' denial of female friendship, concluding with a synopsis of the cultural representations of female same-sex practices. The second analyzes female intimacy and homoerotism as imagined, appropriated and finally repudiated by Honoré d'Urfé's pastoral novel, L'Astrée, and Isaac de Benserade's seemingly lesbian-friendly comedy, Iphis et Iante. The third turns to unprecedented depictions of female intimate and homoerotic bonds in Madeleine de Scudéry's novel Mathilde and Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force's fairy tale Plus Belle que Fée. This study reveals a female literary genealogy of intimacies between women in seventeenth-century France, and adds to the research in lesbian and queer studies, fields in which pre-eighteenth-century French literary texts are rare.
Author: Vivien Thweatt