The Birth of Modern Theatre in Early Modern France (1630-1730)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jörn Steigerwald
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 397779942

The aim of this project is to elaborate the productivity of the two heuristic models of house comedy and family tragedy within the framework of the 'theatre of tenderness' between 1630 and 1730. Both, house comedy and family tragedy, are exemplarily analysed and outlined on the basis of the dramas of Corneille and Molière. Their productivity is firstly characterized by the connection of literary and current historical research on family, marriage and household, especially focussing on the transformation of the 'traditional household' from closed to open during this period, including the problematisation and following repositioning of the housefather. A second area of interest is the productivity of the two models competing with others, e.g. the tense relationship of family and marriage tragedy between Pierre Corneille and Georges de Scudéry around 1640, but also the opportunity to react reflexively on altered sociocultural conditions by means of transformation and/or internal differentiation, e.g. split of the house comedy in problematisations of economical housekeeping and family politics (Dancourt, Dufresny, Regnard; around 1700). A third aspect of the productivity is the theater's international character - on a theory formation level as well as in theatre practice - beyond the borders of intertextuality. These references are made within the scope of cultural transfers which (according to Peter Burke) form the basis of the fabrication of own cultural models. Fourthly the superposition of the deployment of alliance by the deployment of sexuality before the discursivization of sexuality from the middle of the 18th century on is examined based on family tragedy and house comedy, where research has been done only rudimentarily so far. Our hypothesis is that tenderness, 'la tendresse', forms a concept that permits to act out questions of love and sexuality without transgressing the limits of the ‘bienséance’ due to the polysemantic status of the term which allows to integrate opposite concepts like sexual seduction, divine love or paternal love. Thus, the varying stagings of this concept enable to reconstruct the historically different paradigms of tenderness, i.e. tender paternal love around 1640, tender friendship between the sexes, ideal of gallantry of the Premier Versailles or tender love between the married couple around 1700.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants