Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment
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Description
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 Chauss e, Rousseau, Diderot, R tif, Beaumarchais, and others demonstrate how the figure of the actor threatened ancien r gime 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.
Link to Catalog
LOC Call Number
PN2633 .L35 2016
ISBN
9781611487244
Publication Date
2016
Department
Department of French Studies
Publisher
Bucknell University Press
City
Lewisburg
Recommended Citation
Leichman, Jeffrey M., "Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment" (2016).