«The Bourgeois Gentleman», or the Aestheticisation of Social Frustration and Its Transhistorical Applications (1670–2022)
Michał Bajer
michal.bajer@usz.edu.plUniversity of Szczecin (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2880-8189
Abstract
This article concerns Molière’s 1670 comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman) and selected aspects of its scholarly and artistic reception. The argument is organised around two problems: the possibility of interpreting the social meanings of the work and the challenges that comédie-ballet poetics poses to translators and theater-makers. The author presents an overview of research on the image of impossible class advancement as thematized in The Bourgeois Gentleman and indicates a new interpretive direction, referring to categories drawn from the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu. He also discusses how the structural elements of comédie-ballet characteristic of Molière’s play have been approached in its Polish adaptations, translations, and stagings (18th-century court theater, Jerzy Gruza, Jerzy Stuhr, Benjamin Lazar). He argues that taken from a transhistorical perspective, both the interpretative work and stage practices concerning The Bourgeois Gentleman illustrate the same phenomenon: the play’s relevance is discovered not through modernization or revealing new meanings, but rather thanks to a reflection on the historical conditions of culture in Molière’s time.
Keywords:
Molière, «Le Bourgeois gentilhomme», habitus, comédie-ballet, grotesque, Pierre Bourdieu, court theater, reception of MolièreReferences
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Authors
Michał Bajermichal.bajer@usz.edu.pl
University of Szczecin Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2880-8189
Michal Bajer - Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Szczecin, playwright, translator. Editor of Old Polish literary texts. His research focuses on eighteenth-century literary translations and poetics of classicism. He has recently published Klasycyzm, przekład, prestiż: Oświeceniowe spolszczenia tragedii Corneille’a i Racine’a (1740-1830) w perspektywie historycznoliterackiej (Warszawa, 2020).
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