Spectacle:Early Modern France

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are often described as "the golden age of spectacle"; this course will offer an introduction to a wide variety of genres (comedy and tragedy, commedia dell'arte, court festivals, opera, fairground shows) and focus on performance as well as on the literary aspect of texts, including questions of acting, staging, and use of machines. We will also examine issues pertaining to spectacle in social, religious, and political terms. Class materials will consist of scripts and librettos, illustrations, music and films about the period, as well as theoretical essays from the seventeenth century to the present. This course fulfills the upper-division pre-1800 literature requirement for the French major.