Translating and publishing French theatre in China

This article examines transformations in the literary translation environment in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) specifically in relation to French-language theatre. After an initial survey of literary translation in the PRC from its foundation to the present, the article studies how French-language plays have been translated and adapted for publication. In particular, it considers how French theatre has occupied a favoured position in the Chinese translation literary system over the past four decades. It then focuses on three emblematic cases, those of Molière, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett. Regarding the latter, two Chinese translations of En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot will be examined to determine how contextual factors affected translation choices. In this way, the article seeks both to contribute to current discussions on ‘translatability’ and to consider the reception of canonical French-language writers in the Chinese literary system.

We Will Remember That We Came Together in Protest and Mutual Aid

The year of COVID-19 social distancing is a reminder that people can and will gather in person in mass acts of resistance and community care, even in a pandemic. This year highlights how theatres, theatre skills, and theatrical techniques can be a key part of community building and dissent. The examples of the Twin Cities in summer 2020; Portland, Oregon, in 2020–1; and France in spring-summer 2021 showcase the potential for theatre artists to use their skills and spaces to support protest work. I highlight these three examples due to my personal connections (I am from the Twin Cities; live in Portland and serve as a legal observer during the Protests; and, in my scholarship, specialize in French theatre and protest), due to the scale of these actions, and in order to amplify the pandemic protest and performance work happening in these places. Together, the efforts of Twin Cities, Portland, and French activists and artists showcase how, against a backdrop of mourning and anxiety, the pandemic has been a time of invigoration in mass protest, mutual aid, and coming together to try to build better worlds.

Gluck in Performance

Although Gluck’s works for the French theatre were absent from the stage after 1830, Gluck’s music was widely known through various forms of concert: the concert historique, the concert series and freely-promoted concerts. Of great importance were the initiatives of François Delsarte who not only programmed large amounts of Gluck but who also developed a realistic mode of delivery which was to spill over eventually into the theatre.

Corpus and Models for Lemmatisation and POS-tagging of Classical French Theatre

This paper describes the process of building an annotated corpus and training models for classical French literature, with a focus on theatre, and particularly comedies in verse. It was originally developed as a preliminary step to the stylometric analyses presented in Cafiero and Camps [2019]. The use of a recent lemmatiser based on neural networks and a CRF tagger allows to achieve accuracies beyond the current state-of-the art on the in-domain test, and proves to be robust during out-of-domain tests, i.e.up to 20th c.novels.

Grand Guignol and new French extremity: horror, history and cultural context

This thesis will investigate and examine the French theatre The Grand-Guignol (1897-1962) and the film movement New French Extremity (1990s-roughly 2008). The theatre and the film movement will be examined in terms of their origins, evolutions and eventual declines. These will be related to French society and culture at the times as well as their historical contexts, for instance the long history of violence on French soil and the rise of the far-right in the 1980s/90s leading to the rise of New French Extremity. There will be an interrogation of the theatre and film movement’s use of ‘othering’, examining how they both alternately exploit the trope and subvert it, allying themselves with the so-called ‘other’. There will also be an examination of the term ‘Grand-Guignol violence’, often used colloquially to describe gruesome violence in entertainment. The term will be examined in relation to the stage violence inflicted during Grand-Guignol plays on stars like Paula Maxa and compared with the violence inflicted upon women in the mainly-female-led New French Extremity films. The escapist, entertaining violence of the theatre will also be contrasted with the nihilistic violence of New French Extremity, which often seeks to reinforce social commentary from the creative teams. The theatre and the film movement are both positioned as key moments in French horror history. This thesis will examine the ways that they are similar and the ways that they fundamentally differ, beyond their obvious stage/film barriers.

The establishment of literary canon of French dramaturgy of the XVI century

This article reviews gradual development of the literary canon of French theater of the Renaissance Era, which in many ways predetermined the emergence and further evolution of classicistic dramaturgy. The subject of this research is the principles of dramaturgical art formulated by the poets and theoreticians of the XVI century within the framework of poetic texts and treatises. The goal consists in description of the stages in establishment of the theatrical canon in France of the Renaissance Era, juxtapose its principles to the medieval theater, determine to which stage is attributed the emergence of representations on the classical theater, and highlight the factors that influenced its development. The novelty of this research lies in the attempt of comprehensive analysis of the poetic texts and treatises that allow reconstructing the processes unfolded in the XVI century in French theater, as well as comparing them to medieval tradition, as well as to gradually forming classicism. The relevance is substantiated by the need that occurred in literary studies to understand the formation of classical principles of French dramaturgy based on the materials of poetic works of the Renaissance Era. The author delineates three staged in the process of formation of the canon of French theatre of the Renaissance Era. The first is associated with the publication of Joachim du Bellay's manifesto, which indicates the “gap” in French literature in the area of drama and appeals to fill it. For realization of the second stage, pivotal becomes the figure of Étienne Jodelle, the author of tragedy “Cléopâtre Captive”, which epitomized an attempt to revive of antique tragedy, and comedy “Eugène”.. So in France of the XVI century. This led to the emergence of French national theatrical tradition that can be considered a literary canon. The third stage of its formation became the recognition of Jodelle's achievements in the theory of poetry. In 1555, Jacques Peletier in “Art Poétique” cited both compositions as the examples of tragedy and comedy, which contributed to consolidation of the canon.

Introduction: Coming after Violence in Literature

The introduction contextualizes the role of Medea through history of violence in performances today and in the history of French theatre of the seventeenth century. It shows how and why violence was never banished from the stage, contrary to prevailing scholarship. It then outlines the concept of the “Medean principle” of violence as a means to consider how tragedy rehearses questions of violence and suggests why Corneille’s 1634 Médée occupies an exceptional place in theatre history. It offers an overview of how the Medean presence functions as a disruptive but persistent force—by disrupting temporal structures upon which premodern theatre is based.