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Sade's Theatre: Pleasure, Vision, Masochism (Paperback)
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Sade's Theatre: Pleasure, Vision, Masochism (Paperback)
Series: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2007:02
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Sade's rehabilitation as a major Enlightenment writer has hitherto
not extended to a re-evaluation of his dramatic works. With a
theoretical framework inspired by psychoanalysis and dramatic
theory, and attentive to eighteenth-century theoretical debates,
Thomas Wynn demonstrates the value of these neglected works. This
is the first study to consider the nature and implications of
Sade's dramatic aesthetic, and to define the erotic quality of
spectatorship in his experimental plays. Challenging the assumption
that the gaze is sadistic, the author uses insights from film
theory to argue that Sade adapts contemporary theatrical texts and
practice to create an aesthetic distinct from that of his novels.
Rather than replicate the style of such works as Les Cent vingt
journees de Sodome, Sade's drama anticipates a masochistic model,
as theorised by Theodor Reik and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis of
Sadean spectatorship takes a thematic rather than chronological or
text-by-text approach. The author argues that Sade, as an atheist
materialist, focuses on the structural elements of theatre to
produce visual pleasure rather than moral improvement, and that he
elaborates an insistently visual dramatic aesthetic, a mode
analogous to the linguistic saturation of the novels' tout dire.
With reference to eighteenth-century obscene drama, theatre
architecture and the history of visuality, the author explores the
paradox that Sade's theatre is meant not for the stage, but for the
private imagination. His visionary theatre is an example of the
late eighteenth-century sublime, an aesthetic of the ineffable and
the unrepresentable which, in its emphasis on the survival of the
demeaned individual, structurally resembles masochism. Without
deforming his technique or strategy, the author shows that Sade's
voluptuous theatre - like his fiction - addresses an individual
whose sovereignty in a godless world is intimately linked to the
independent imagination. This book will be of interest to all those
working in eighteenth-century drama and theory of spectatorship.
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