5 Sept – Moliére, Genre & Fictocriticism – Toni Jordan

On Wednesday 5 September, PhD candidate Toni Jordan will present a seminar on Moliére and parodic fictocriticism. Toni’s seminar will run from 12-1pm, directly before Dr Helen Young’s seminar on race and video-games. All welcome, but please RSVP to Sue Chen: [email protected]

When: Wednesday 5 September, 12-1pm

Where: Deakin University’s Burwood campus, room C2.05; Geelong campus, room IC1.108

The Hidden Romantic: Re-Evaluating the Genre Participation of Moliére Using Parodic Fictocriticism

The French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-1673), known as Molière, wrote scores of plays featuring romance conventions. The established critical view is that the romances in Molière’s work are non-core and included only to mock the conventions of the traditional romantic comedy. An alternative perspective is that the high cultural prestige of Molière’s work prevents a more nuanced genre classification.

Parody is a particularly appropriate creative and critical methodology for exploring the work of Molière in relation to romantic comedy, given that genre involves self-reflexive repetition of conventions. My own work frequently uses parody to revise romantic-comedy conventions (as seen in Addition (2008), Fall Girl (2010), and Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (2016)). The new “scholarly play”, The Denier, employs characteristic Molière subject matter, tone of voice, humour, plotting and characterization, and draws on my own work as a writer of romantic fiction to explore the ways his work participates in the romance genre.

Photo credit (image of Toni in green dress): James Penlidis