Claude Vignon: Cléopâtre se donnant la mort (17e siècle).

Call for Papers

Fortune and Fatality: Performing the Tragic in Early Modern France (1553-1715)
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
20 October 2006

The Interdisciplinary Group for Seventeenth-Century French Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York invites paper proposals for its annual student conference. This year’s conference will be held on Friday 20 October 2006. Papers should be 15-20 minutes in length.

Distinguished Professor of French, Domna C. Stanton will be our keynote speaker, and events will include a performance of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French music on period instruments.

As an aesthetic notion and literary genre, tragedy has enjoyed a privileged place in French culture, particularly during the early modern period. According to Jean Rohou: “Tragic is the misery inherent in being, constitutive of the human condition and personality, insurmountable outside of a transformation that is impossible at first sight.” The tragic manifests not only in tragedy, but in funeral orations, novels, theoretical arguments, poetry, music, visual art, and even comedy. But why tragedy? What fundamental elements of the tragic reflect the inherent instability of the human condition, and to what end were the philosophical, theatrical, and performative aspects of the tragic appropriated in early modern France?

Proposals for papers from all disciplines are welcome. Papers may be either in French or in English. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Tragic/doomed women
• Women writing tragedy (theater, correspondence, memoirs, etc.)
• Gender and tragedy
• “Fureur” and disordered passion
• Bossuet and the oraison funèbre
• Death and mourning
• Gisants and the theatrical tomb
• Staging and performance (theater, funerals and religious ceremonies)
• Tragédie en musique
• Visual art
• Conflict, free will, and morality
• Tragedy and tragicomedy
• Medicine and tragedy (mélancolie, folie, déraison, etc.)
• The poetics of tragedy
• Theories of/on early modern theater and theatricality

The deadline for submissions is 14 July 2006. Please send proposals to Desmond Hosford (dhosford@gc.cuny.edu) and Charles Wrightington (cwrightington@gc.cuny.edu)