Rousseau on Stage: Playwright, Musician, Spectator ed. by Maria Gullstam, and Michael O'Dea (review)

Starting with the paradoxical idea of "Rousseau's happy relationship with theater" (7), the essays succeed in debunking our common assumption that Rousseau was thoroughly anti-theater, based on new readings of Rousseau's seminal Lettre sur les spectacles, careful analyses of less...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The French Review 2019-03, Vol.92 (3), p.212-213
Main Author: Fourny, Diane
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Autobiographies
Course Descriptions
Essays
Historiography
Mediation
Musical Composition
Opera
Performance art
Theater
Theaters
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Summary:Starting with the paradoxical idea of "Rousseau's happy relationship with theater" (7), the essays succeed in debunking our common assumption that Rousseau was thoroughly anti-theater, based on new readings of Rousseau's seminal Lettre sur les spectacles, careful analyses of less-studied theatrical works and musical compositions, and a reassessment of Rousseau's posterity to theater from Romanticism to Wagner and beyond (Artaud's "alternative theatricality"). Baker suggests reading Rousseau not as a reactionary but a radical using an anthropological argument against d'Alembert whereby Genevan artisan cercles and the public festival become models of collective, indigenous performance art threatened by the tired and immoral representational theater of Parisian high culture—a "colonial invasion" of sorts that anticipates today's condemnation of the "entertainment society" (42). Primavesi evaluates the Lettre's dramaturgy as rhetorical performance art: a demonstration of public spectacle as a means to elide the mediation of traditional theater through representation in favor of an "immediate self-encounter of the people" (285).
ISSN:0016-111X
2329-7131
2329-7131
DOI:10.1353/tfr.2019.0209