ethics and theory of comedy in france

Ethics and the Theory of Comedy in France and Britain, 1660 to 1800

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Atlanta, Georgia,

March 22-25, 2007

Three 20-minute papers are sought for a panel on the place of ethics

in British and French theories of comedy during the long

eighteenth-century. While earlier interpretations of Aristotle's

Poetics provided a basis for the period's discussions of tragedy's

moral force, critics interested in the ethical value of comedy could

appeal to no equivalent tradition or founding text. Thus, from the

prefaces of Moli�re and Shadwell, through the polemics of Bossuet and

Collier, to the essays of Diderot, Beaumarchais, and Goldsmith, comedy

was variously depicted as a corrupter of morality, as an ethically

neutral diversion, or as a corrective of ethically questionable

behavior. Papers on these critical debates, on individual theoretical

positions, or on related theatrical practices are welcome, as are

treatments of French, British, and comparative topics.

Please e-mail proposals and brief CVs to Robert Dimit at

robert.dimit@nyu.edu no later than September 15. Please include your

telephone and fax numbers, and let me know if you will need any

audio-visual equipment.

The Society's rules permit members to present only one paper at the

meeting. Members may, in addition to presenting a paper, serve as a

session chair, a respondent, or a panel discussant, but they may not

present a paper in those sessions they also chair. All participants

must be members in good standing of ASECS or a constituent society of

ISECS. Membership must be current as of December 1 in order to receive

pre-registration materials. Those members of constituent societies of

ISECS MUST furnish a snail mail address to asecs@wfu.edu to receive

pre-registration materials. For more information, please see