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Rainer Zaiser

Rainer Zaiser

                   Prof. Dr. Rainer Zaiser

                          (Kiel University)

 Herr Zaiser Workshop    


Dangerous Passions: Emotions as Social Threat in Early Modern French Literature

The purpuse of this essay is to show that the meaning of love in literature refers in most cases to social, religious, philosophical, epistemological or moral issues and that outbursts of emotional love are even able to jeopardize the maintenance of the social and ideological orders at issue. So Niklas Luhmann points out in his book on Love as Passion that in mid-seventeenth-century treatises and fictional works love is no longer codified as a socially ritualized play whose parts had been inherited from the medieval tradition of courtly love, but as a passion, this means as a strong and irrational emotion tempted to break with social rules and moral norms. The foremost examples are The Princess of Clèves, written by Madame de Lafayette and published anonymously in 1678, and The Portuguese Letters, one of the first French epistolary novels anonymously published, too, in 1669. Both of the characters’ love could be described in terms of a passion which becomes dangerous to social and moral orders. As far as it concerns the topic of social threat, it is worth noting that strong emotions seem to have the potential to resist laws, moral codes or other behavioural conventions. This potential is grounded in the individual and what makes it dangerous is the fact that the individual is not able to master it. So the outbursts of passionate love always latently claim the abolishment of such norms, for better or for worse.

Biography

Rainer Zaiser is Professor of French and Italian Literatures in the Department of Romance Languages of the University of Kiel. He has published on the seventeenth-century French novel, the French classical theatre, Medieval and Early Modern Italian Literature. He is the editor of the journals Œuvres et Critiques and Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, and of the book series Biblio 17 and Études littéraries françaises.

rainer.zaiser@romanistik.uni-kiel.de

Literature

“Gefährliche Leidenschaften: Vom Wandel der ‘amour galant’ zur ‘amour passion’ im Roman der französischen Klassik: La Princesse de Clèves und Les Lettres portugaises”, in Kirsten Dickhaut, Dietmar Rieger (ed.), Liebe und Emergenz. Neue Modelle des Affekt­begreifens im französischen Kulturgedächtnis um 1700. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006, pp. 183-195.