courtesan. n. a prostitute, especially one with wealthy or upper class clients (Oxford Concise Dictionary). n. a woman of the town [courtisane. Fr.] Shakespeare (Johnson’s Dictionary) Also: from traviare. v. to be lost, wandering, travail, travel, astray (Concise Cambridge Italian Dictionary) Nightmare parody as dreamt, seen, experienced by Alfredo Dear friends and readers, I’ve been [...]
Archive for the ‘French culture’ Category
Willy Dekker’s La Traviata; or, The Courtesan. A cross between Jane Campion & Samuel Beckett
Posted in 19th century novels, 20th century culture, Costume drama, Film adaptations, film studies, French culture, French novels, Italian culture, Met HDOperas, Movies, Music, mystery-suspense, opera, prostitution: how treated, Uncategorized, women's ilves, tagged HD opera, heroine's text, natalie dessay, oxford concise dictionary, the Met on April 14, 2012 | 15 Comments »
An enhanced humane Gounod’s Faust: Another HD opera
Posted in 20th century culture, feminism, French culture, Met HDOperas, Music, opera, politics, sexual experience, Theater, tagged Faust, Gounod, Jenufa, Marina Poplavskaya on December 13, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Valentin (Russell Braun) is murdered in a duel he insisted on having with Faust; he curses his sister, Marguerite (Marina Poplavskaya) as he lays dying Dear friends and readers. Score yet another triumph for the Met this season: an enhanced humane Gounod’s Faust. I had read that the reviews of this new production were unfavorable, [...]
Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women: seeing what was there but I never saw before
Posted in 18th century, 18th century novels, Austen, Autobiographical, biography, feminism, French culture, later 17th century, novels of sensibility, women's art, tagged heroine's text, tipping the velvet on October 12, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Miss Eleanor Lavish (Sinead Cusack) from Forster’s Room with a View (Davies’s film) Dear friends, This is probably my third blog on Donoghue’s Passions between Women, maybe the fourth in which I’ve mentioned the book. I wrote about it to suggest that Jane Austen, her sister, Martha Lloyd, and Anne Sharp all show a pattern [...]
A la francaise: Sarah’s Key, The Names of Love, & The Hedgehog
Posted in 20th century culture, Film adaptations, film studies, French culture, French novels, women's novels, women's art, womens' films, tagged heroine's texts on September 4, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Renee (Josiane Balasko) and Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic) hug tightly (The Hedgehog) Dear friends and readers, Izzy and I continue our unplanned French Indian summer: sparkling, moving films. Just now French films seem the finest, most intelligent, unexpectedly telling movies in our neck of the world’s woods. We began with Sarah’s Key (Elle s’appelait Sarah [...]
Wolf Trap, Castleton: Sweeney Todd, 7 Deadly Sins, L’enfant et les sortileges
Posted in 20th century culture, French culture, Music, opera, Plays, Theater, tagged castleton, L'enfant sortileges, Mazel, Otto Dix, Ravel, Seven Deadly Sins, wolf trap on July 23, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Otto Dix, The Seven Deadly Sins (done in the same year that Weill wrote his Seven Deadly Sins) Dear friends and readers, How hot was it? Hitherto I’ve reserved “super-hot” for temperatures of say 100 to 105; yesterday we were told the heat index hit an astonishing 125F. I know the temperature was a mere [...]
Massenet’s Manon from the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, or Roman noir as HD opera
Posted in 18th century, 18th century novels, Costume drama, Film adaptations, film studies, French culture, French novels, novels of sensibility, political novels/films, romance, Theater, tagged HD opera, Manon Lescaut, Massenet, Prevost, roman noit, West End cinema on June 20, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Natalie Dessay and Rolando Villazon sang & acted Manon and her Chevalier with great aplomb Dear friends and readers, Tonight we went for the second time to the West End Cinema in Georgetown, DC, to see and to hear another HD opera from Europe, this time Massenet’s Manon out of one of my favorite eighteenth-century [...]
Foremother Poet: Kathleen Raine (1908-2003)
Posted in 20th century culture, feminism, Foremother Poetry, French culture, women's poetry, women's art, tagged Ana Mendieta, George Sand, Kathleen Raine, virginia woolf on April 30, 2011 | 8 Comments »
Kathleen Raine Dear friends and readers, Last week we had Rosamond Marriot Watson (fin-de-siecle and Hardyesque poet, 1860-1911). My choice for this week’s foremother poet is Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), whose poems I found among the modern Scots and Anglo-Scots poets in Catherine Kerrigan’s An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets and in Ann Stanford‘s The Women [...]
Foremother poet: A. Mary F. Robinson Darmesterer Duclaux (1857-1944)
Posted in 19th century poetry, feminism, Foremother Poetry, French culture, Italian culture, women's memoirs, women's poetry, women's art, tagged Helen Allingham, poetesses on April 16, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Sunset near Naples (c 1785), Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) [serves as cover illustration for Anne Radcliffe's Sicilian Romance] Dear friends and readers, A. Mary F. Robinson Darmester Duclaux, lyricist, ballad-writer, translator, sybil, wrote of Italy in a Vernon Lee sort of vein during one part of her long career, lived in France, her prose [...]
Nadine Trintignant’s Ma fille, Marie
Posted in 18th century, 20th century culture, feminism, French culture, French novels, women's memoirs, women's art, womens' films, tagged jean-louis trintignant, male violence, marie trintignant, Mary Trouille, nadine trintignant, wife abuse on February 20, 2011 | 11 Comments »
Marie Trintignant Dear friends and readers, I’ve just spent some two months carefully reading and reviewing a somber telling history of wife abuse in France in the 18th century by Marie Trouille: her sources are court cases, memoirs, documents, novels and statistics. Trouille’s is a book whose importance goes well beyond that of the 18th [...]
Emilie de Varmont, ou le divorce necessaire by Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray
Posted in 18th century, 18th century novels, 20th century culture, feminism, French culture, French novels, political novels/films, politics, tagged French revolution, illegitimacy, natural daughter, rape on February 10, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
An 18th century French wedding announcement: celebrating the new civil secular companionate egalitarian marriage ideal Dear friends and readers, As part of my project (reading around) a review of Mary Trouille’s Wife Abuse in 18th Century France, I’m reading through (half-skimming) Suzanne Desasn’s important The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. Dezan’s is yet another [...]
