Molière Embodied

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course will use Molière-the most famous French classical playwright and the most studied one outside of France-as testing grounds for some of the most exciting theoretical frameworks focusing on embodiment that have emerged in literary studies and cultural studies over the last few decades. What happens when we start thinking through the aversion to physicians and the distrust of medicine for which Molière's comedies are known with the help of Disability studies and Medical Humanities? What becomes visible about Molière's participation in the invention of racial whiteness in seventeenth-century Europe when we read his plays of conversion to Islam and enslavement in the Mediterranean through the lens of Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS)? How can the concerns and tenets of Queer studies enrich and complicate the more established feminist accounts of Molière's place in "la querelle des femmes," his ideas about gender and sexuality, and his embrace of the normative violence of comedic laughter? What new dimensions does Molière's keen interest in transformation and transcendence in the latter half of his career take on when we rethink it in light of Trans studies' epistemological tools? By applying the theoretical frameworks of Disability studies, Critical Race studies, Queer studies, and Trans studies to Molière's plays, and by comparing those plays to the source texts from which Molière was drawing to compose them, we will ask new questions.