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Katherine Ibbett |
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Areas
Seventeenth-century French Literature, Political Thought, Early Modern Studies Interests and Current Work My first book, The Style of The State in French Theater, 1630-1660: Neoclassicism and Government (forthcoming March 2009, Ashgate) addresses the political significance of various formal changes in the 17thc theater, such as the development of a language of suspense, and the clearing of violent action from the stage, asking how neoclassical theater appropriates and adapts political theories. I'm interested in how neoclassicism came to be understood as a production of pure French style, and in reading against that to show how the formal strategies of various writers central to a traditional French canon - like Pierre Corneille - are in fact engaged in importing foreign political concepts into France. I’m now working on a new book project tentatively entitled Compassion and Commonality: Forms of Fellow-Feeling in Early Modern France, for which I received fellowship support for 2007-2008 from Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities. In this project I look at the genealogy of modern narratives of compassion and toleration and the uneasy relation between them, reading texts from the period following France’s violent religious wars and asking what role the discourse of compassion plays in the imagined community of the nation seeking to overcome sectarian rifts. Compassion is first theorized in France as a response to tragedy on stage, and I argue that this aesthetic dimension is critically important to the evolution of a politically mobilized language of community. It’s not an optimistic project: I’m interested chiefly in the ways the texts of seventeenth-century compassion offer a hope of shared space only to see it stutter and flail, suggesting that feeling for another leads not to communal concerns but all too often to paralysis, misreading, and isolation. The texts I take in along the way include writing about tragedy, the memoirs of statesmen, religious writing on care and charity in New France, and novels dealing with marital sympathy. Recent and Selected Publications The Style of The State in French Theater, 1630-1660: Neoclassicism and Government (Ashgate, expected March 2009) “Heroes and History’s Remainders: The Restes of Pierre Corneille.” “Who Makes the Statue Speak? Louis XIV and the plainte des statues.” Word & Image (forthcoming 2008) “Productive Perfection: The Trope of the River in Political Writing.” “Pity, Compassion, Commiseration: Theories of Theatrical Relatedness.” Seventeenth-Century French Studies (December 2008) “The politics of conservation in Corneille’s Théodore: dramatic action and reason of state.” Romance Studies 25 : 3 (July 2007) : Recent graduate courses taught: Repetition Lying and Literature in Seventeenth-Century France Forms of Feeling in Early Modern France Recent undergraduate courses taught: Theater and Theatricality in Early Modern France On Ignorance Cultural Exchange in the Renaissance (co-taught with Alison Cornish, French and Italian
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