Metatheater in the French Baroque: The Boundaries of Cognition, the Power of Spectacle, and the Horror of Violence

Metatheater in the French Baroque argues that the device of metatheater offers opportunities to investigate the play’s understanding of itself and its boundaries, or lack thereof. Each chapter focuses on a different play that both embodies and defies characteristics of the French Baroque, as well as rules imposed upon the theater at the time: Jean Racine’s Andromaque, Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint Genest, and Monsieur de Monléon’s Le Thyeste. This thesis takes up metatheatrical moments to examine the form of the play as indicative of its beyond—beyond the experience of the cogito as a mode of being, beyond modes of spectatorship that would support absolute power, and beyond modes of relating to the play as an object that causes a predictable effect on the body. Using more recent understandings of the relations between mind and brain in cognitive science, this project explores how this expansion of the play beyond itself includes the human organism. In analyzing metatheater with Early Modern thought, neurophenomenology, cognitive linguistics, enactive theories of mind, and also theories of formalism, politics, aesthetics and violence, this thesis brings together literary studies and cognitive science in a way that inquires not only into the mind but also other issues important to the Baroque, while rethinking the place of the body-mind in literary analysis.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D., Romance Studies

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctor of Philosophy

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Romance Studies

Grantor

Cornell University

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Rosenstock-Murav, Penelope

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Greenberg, Mitchell
• Christiansen, Morten

• Cognitive Science
• Comparative Literature
• French literature
• Literature
• Philosophy of Mind
• Romance Literature

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

http://doi.org/10.7298/pmqz-vh43

Dc Identifier Other

ProQuest Submission ID: 14107
ProQuest Publication ID: 30813709

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ecommons.cornell.edu:1813/115741