Un grand enterrement

Cette chronique de 1920 prolonge la réflexion pédagogique de Roorda en remettant en question l’utilité de certaines connaissances encyclopédiques transmises par l’école. À travers des exemples ciblés, le texte dénonce l’absurdité des éléments d’érudition retenus dans le domaine de l’histoire, en particulier sur son versant littéraire. Keywords : Henri Roorda, pédagogie, postérité, histoire, histoire littéraire, René Duguay-Trouin, Chosoclès, Isaac de Benserade, Louis Bourdaloue, Montaigne, Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille.

The Mingling of Opera Genres

This chapter analyzes in depth the operas performed in the late nineteenth century in Rouen. The repertory that was produced from 1882 in the new Théâtre des Arts illustrates how a provincial theater would differ significantly, in terms of the genres presented, from the Opéra or the Opéra-Comique in Paris. Like all regional theaters, the one in Rouen adapted itself to the constraints of a national system shaped by Parisian production, but it was also expected to defer to local tastes and performing conditions. The public thus saw a much greater variety of genres than was presented in the capital city. The new works produced there were often objects of local pride; for example, since Pierre Corneille had been born locally, the theater produced Jules Massenet’s setting of Le Cid. This chapter is paired with Patrick Taïeb and Sabine Teulon Lardic’s “The evolution of French opera repertories in provincial theaters: Three epochs, 1770–1900.”

The Confusion of Diverse Voices: Musical and Social Polyphony in Seventeenth-Century French Opera

This essay explores how two early modern French writers considered choral music in opera as a figure for society. Pierre Corneille, in his musical tragedy “Andromède,” and scientist and critic Claude Perrault, in several texts about music and acoustics, made subtle apologies for the polyphonic choral song condemned by many contemporaries as unintelligible. Beyond defending the aesthetic value of choral music, Corneille and Perrault associated multi-part song with collective vocalizations offstage, in the real world. Their instructions on how to appreciate choral interludes in opera also served, therefore, to train listeners to attend to the polyphony of society.

Que faire de (la mort de) Pompée ? Analyse poétique et politique d’une tragédie double

This article proposes a double analysis, poetic and political, of the tragedy La mort de Pompée (The Death of Pompey, 1644) by Pierre Corneille. It shows the bold construction of Corneille who crosses two intrigues: an Egyptian one (what to do with the arrival of Pompey?) and a Roman one (what to do with the death of Pompey?). The French poet lends to Caesar, faced with the head of Pompey, a double reaction, worked by the tension between the joy of the defeat of his adversary and the magnanimity that he must manifest to hope to restore civil peace. By inventing a confrontation, absent from the historical sources, between Caesar and Cornelia, he introduces the question of the conditions of the end of the civil war. It thus appears that the poetics of the play unfolds a political thought. Corneille highlights the threat that imperial conquest outside Rome poses for civil peace.

Why Molière most likely did write his plays

As for Shakespeare, a hard-fought debate has emerged about Molière, a supposedly uneducated actor who, according to some, could not have written the masterpieces attributed to him. In the past decades, the century-old thesis according to which Pierre Corneille would be their actual author has become popular, mostly because of new works in computational linguistics. These results are reassessed here through state-of-the-art attribution methods. We study a corpus of comedies in verse by major authors of Molière and Corneille’s time. Analysis of lexicon, rhymes, word forms, affixes, morphosyntactic sequences, and function words do not give any clue that another author among the major playwrights of the time would have written the plays signed under the name Molière.

Cartesian Générosité and Its Antecedents

The chapter contains an exposition of Descartes’s ethics, the keystone of which is the concept of générosité. This incorporates both a cognitive state (the knowledge that nothing belongs to us but the use of our free will, and that nothing but the good or bad use of our free will is worthy of praise or blame) and a disposition of will, a determination always to act in accordance with our judgement of what is best. The concept is discussed in relation both to Aristotle’s conception of magnanimity and to the Stoic ethics of Epictetus, but also in relation to the use of the term in literary texts of the time, the plays of Pierre Corneille, and the stories of Jean-Pierre Camus.

Descartes's Fictions

Descartes’s Fictions traces common movements in early modern philosophy and literary method. This volume reassesses the significance of Descartes’s writing by bringing his philosophical output into contact with the literary treatises, exempla, and debates of his age. Arguing that humanist theorizing about the art of poetry represents a vital intellectual context for Descartes’s work, the volume offers readings of the controversies to which this poetic theory gives rise, with particular reference to the genre of tragicomedy, the question of verisimilitude, and the figures of Guez de Balzac and Pierre Corneille. Drawing on what Descartes says about, and to, his many contemporaries and correspondents embedded in the early modern republic of letters, this volume shows that poetics provides a repository of themes and images to which he returns repeatedly: fortune, method, error, providence, passion, and imagination, amongst others. Like the poets and theorists of the early modern period, Descartes is also drawn to the forms of attention that people may bring to his work. This interest finds expression in the mature Cartesian metaphysics of the Meditations, as well as, later, in the moral philosophy of his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia or the Passions of the Soul. Some of the tropes of modern secondary criticism—a comparison of Descartes and Corneille, or the portrayal of Descartes as a ‘tragic’ figure—are also re-evaluated. This volume thus bridges the gap between Cartesian criticism and late-humanist literary culture in France.