Hardback

eBook

Add to GoodReads

Acting Up

Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France

Jeffrey M. Leichman

Acting concentrated both the aspirations and anxieties of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where theater was a defining element of urban sociability. In Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France, Jeffrey M. Leichman argues for a new understanding of the relationship between performance and self. Innovative interpretations of La Chaussée, Rousseau, Diderot, Rétif, Beaumarchais, and others demonstrate how the figure of the actor threatened ancien régime moral hierarchies by decoupling affect from emotion. As acting came to be understood as an embodied practice of individual freedom, attempts to alternately perfect and repress it proliferated. Across religious diatribes and sentimental comedies, technical manuals and epistolary novels, Leichman traces the development of early modern acting theories that define the aesthetics, philosophy, and politics of the performed subject. Acting Up weaves together cultural studies, literary analysis, theater history, and performance studies to establish acting as a key conceptual model for the subject, for the Enlightenment, and for our own time.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 304 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61148-724-4 • Hardback • December 2015 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-61148-725-1 • eBook • December 2015 • $105.50 • (£82.00)

Series: Scènes Francophones

Subjects: Performing Arts / Theater / History & Criticism, Literary Criticism / Drama, Literary Criticism / European / French

Acting Up

Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Acting concentrated both the aspirations and anxieties of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where theater was a defining element of urban sociability. In Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France, Jeffrey M. Leichman argues for a new understanding of the relationship between performance and self. Innovative interpretations of La Chaussée, Rousseau, Diderot, Rétif, Beaumarchais, and others demonstrate how the figure of the actor threatened ancien régime moral hierarchies by decoupling affect from emotion. As acting came to be understood as an embodied practice of individual freedom, attempts to alternately perfect and repress it proliferated. Across religious diatribes and sentimental comedies, technical manuals and epistolary novels, Leichman traces the development of early modern acting theories that define the aesthetics, philosophy, and politics of the performed subject. Acting Up weaves together cultural studies, literary analysis, theater history, and performance studies to establish acting as a key conceptual model for the subject, for the Enlightenment, and for our own time.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 304 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61148-724-4 • Hardback • December 2015 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-61148-725-1 • eBook • December 2015 • $105.50 • (£82.00)

Series: Scènes Francophones

Subjects: Performing Arts / Theater / History & Criticism, Literary Criticism / Drama, Literary Criticism / European / French

Author

Jeffrey M. Leichman is assistant professor in the Department of French Studies at Louisiana State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1: From Virtue to Virtuosity
Chapter 2: Good Acting, Acting Good
Chapter 3: The Paradox of the Republican
Chapter 4: Sovereign Actors
Chapter 5: Of Citizens and Slaves
Chapter 6: Overthrowing Acting
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author

Acting Up

Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France

Jeffrey M. Leichman

Acting Up

Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France

ALSO AVAILABLE