Online Archive of University of Virginia Scholarship
Comic disjunctions in Goldoni's Il teatro comico503 views
Author
Kristensen, Amalie, Italian - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia
Advisors
Ward, Adrienne, Department for Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, University of Virginia
Annunziato, Sarah, Department for Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, University of Virginia
Abstract
This thesis offers a close reading of the comic mechanisms in Il teatro comico (1750) by the eighteen-century Venetian playwright Carlo Emilio Goldoni. I argue that Goldoni’s rules about theater reform are not just articulated through the meta form of Il teatro comico, but that Goldoni’s ideas also seem to manifest themselves in the wordplays, stylistics and other comic elements on another level of the text itself. Consulting the Lacanian inspired philosopher Alenka Zupančič and her critical theory about disjunctions and subversive comedy, I show how Goldoni’s play has a playfulness to it, which adds a poetic quality that earlier critics said was missing; and that this playfulness is subversive in its form and makes Il teatro comico truly comic in Zupančič’s radical understanding of the term.
Degree
MA (Master of Arts)
Keywords
Il teatro comico; disjunction; Goldoni; Zupančič; subversion; comedy
Language
English
Rights
All rights reserved (no additional license for public reuse)
Kristensen, Amalie. Comic disjunctions in Goldoni's Il teatro comico. University of Virginia, Italian - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, MA (Master of Arts), 2014-04-29, https://doi.org/10.18130/V3DW9D.
