Theatre and Drama

The purpose of this research is to examine theatre and drama as forces that attempt to present, explain, or comment by means of artistic forms on human experience in historical and cultural context. The plan of the research will be to show how this force has functioned as dramatic art, as symbolic form and as material for and of aesthetic and social commentary, from the classical to the modern period, with a view toward understanding how the operations of drama and theatre interpenetrate and/or affect the shape of shared belief and experience.

Undoubtedly, the Poetics is the first great and systematic articulation of dramatic theory, so important to subsequent dramatic theory that it is almost a given or a postulate whence virtually all succeeding Western aesthetics proceeds. Or to paraphrase what Whitehead famously says of Plato, one could say that all Western dramatic criticism is a series of footnotes to Aristotle. But it seems also important to recognize that Aristotle himself is engaged in a project of footnoting Greek society as he finds it. In the Poetics, this takes the form of a serious axiological engagement with found society and culture. Aristotle uses the early chapters of the Poetics to describe the evolution of poetry from humanity's "instinct for imitation" and natural aptitude for rhythm and dance, through its progression through organized phallic songs, and toward the emergence of the "grandeur of tragedy" as features of refinements or embellishments of poe

have intended about the cultural priorities of neoclassical France. In the long view of history, Chapelain's tract is less notable for its content than for the fact that it established an aesthetic authority for the Academy that defined both adherence and rebellion on the continent for the next hundred or so years. Equally, the fact of the quarrel is evidence of serious axiological engagement on the part of the recipients and transmitters of culture. How the quarrel would be resolved had something to do with how the French perceived themselves as participants in the civil society. The text of Le Cid reveals that observation about its handling of the unities was accurate, it also seems fair to suggest that the play might have been spared controversy over Aristotelian unities in a different cultural context. Over the long term, particularly as the shape of European culture changed and irrespective of the content and deficiencies of The Cid, the formalist victory of the Academy in 1636 translated into substantive defeat of not only the specific content of the Academy's attack on Corneille but also formalist axiological authority more generally. In his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature and Comparison entre la Phedre de Racine

Category: Literature - T