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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries
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Seeing Speech - illusion and the transformation of dramatic writing in Diderot and Lessing (Paperback)
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Seeing Speech - illusion and the transformation of dramatic writing in Diderot and Lessing (Paperback)
Series: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2005:09
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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This book explores the relationship between Diderot's dramatic
theory and plays of the late 1750s and the dramatic practice of G.
E. Lessing. It proposes a new way of looking at how Diderot's
theatrical writings influenced other dramatists by situating his
theory in the context of the contemporary discourse concerning
painting (with its emphasis on the creation of illusion as the goal
of visual art) and of the debates about prose drama (one
manifestation of the transposition of the arguments about painting
into the realm of writing). Diderot's dramatic theory is shown to
transform neoclassical ways of thinking about how plays communicate
with their audience by urging the exploitation of artistic signs
that are, in terms of eighteenth-century semiotics, natural. This
approach has profound implications for the form taken by dramatic
language which, in Diderot's view, must create an illusion for the
ear of the beholder, just as the visual signs should create one for
the eye. The changes that characterise Lessing's mature dramatic
style are a striking illustration of how the move to the use of
natural theatrical signs can transform the writing of plays. In
particular, the evolution that occurs in Lessing's capacity to
create effective dramatic dialogue before and after 1760 (the year
when his translation of Diderot's theatrical writings was first
published) provides a fascinating case study of how the new
thinking about illusion as an effect resulting from the deployment
of natural artistic signs generated a radically different kind of
dramatic speech. This study also shows how this seismic shift in
aesthetic values brought about a reorientation of the creative
stance of the dramatic writer. Playwrights cease to think of
themselves as rhetoricians and poets addressing an audience and
begin to align themselves instead with the painter positioned
before his subject and his canvas.
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