French 343 - CULTURAL WARS AT THE THEATER

What effects does theater have on its audience and society at large? Does it corrupt the public and society, as J.-J. Rousseau argued, or on the contrary, can it morally reform its audience and society, as Diderot believed? The debate about the moral and political uses and misuses of theater animated the public, the philosophes and their critics, as well as the state, from the mid-seventeenth century until the Revolution, and on to today. We will study the way authors, critics and the theater itself responded to the debate, from the classical drama of Racine and Moliere, to the street theater of the Paris fairs and the influence of the Comedie italienne, from the new genres of the drame bourgeois to the liberation of the theater during the Revolution, and in the 20th- and 21st-centuries from the uses of theatre to resist the German occupation during WWII to the recent debate about the censoring of a new staging of Voltaire's Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete, and the contemporary theatre of Ariane Mnouchkine which aims to raise the political consciousness of an audience to the crisis of global migration today. There will be a number of film screenings.