The year 2022 will mark the 400th anniversary of Molière, the star actor, famous author, and icon of French and Western culture. Organized by Christophe Schuwey (Yale), Sylvaine Guyot (NYU) and Benoît Bolduc (NYU), the Decentering Molière conference will bring new perspectives on the French Shakespeare. Instead of focusing only on Molière, what story can we tell if we adopt the perspective of his contemporaries—publishers, authors, actors, choreographers, composers, and visual artists, or journalists? What might we understand if we broaden our geographical and cultural scope—Molière in the Francophone, or in the Arab World? What can we discover if we study him through non-literary perspectives such as economics, religion, women’s rights, propaganda, historiography, theater business, or stage design? How do musicology, art history, history of the book, performance studies, or sociology challenge our understanding of Molière and his work? Decentering Molière will bring together new critical points of view and foster an interdisciplinary conversation between world-class specialists to challenge assumptions, deconstruct the myth and better understand a crucial figure and what he means for French and Western culture. The event will take place from April 14 to 16, the first two days at Yale and the last day in New York.
The event is made possible through the generous support of The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, the Yale Department of French, the French Embassy Center of Excellence, the Yale Department of Frenchthe Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Faculty of Arts and Science at NYU and the NYU Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture.