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    The Role of Séméiotique in François Delsarte's Aesthetics

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    Fischer_2017_Semiotica.pdf (2.433Mb)
    Issue Date
    2017
    Author
    Fischer, Iris Smith
    Publisher
    De Gruyter
    Type
    Article
    Article Version
    Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
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    Abstract
    This article introduces the aesthetic theory of François Delsarte (1811–1870) and his conception of semiotics. Delsarte created his “applied aesthetics” as a modern scientific method for artists, particularly performers, to investigate the nature of human being. Delsarte’s approach to performance involved the actor in observing human behavior, interpreting it through categories of voice, gesture, and language, and rendering it in an expansive display of types. Delsarte’s applied aesthetics involves the performer’s attention to signs and sign action, a study he called séméiotique. We see Delsarte’s program for inquiry into truth in what I call the actor’s task, which develops his or her human being through observation, analysis, and creation. This was Delsarte’s “orthopedic machine for correcting crippled intellects” – the crippled intellects being those intellectuals and conservatory teachers whose ideas on aesthetics he found to be neither systematic nor attuned to God’s reason. While it is well known in theatre and dance scholarship that Delsarte’s ideas and methods advanced the training of actors, dancers, and orators, particularly in the United States, my paper instead introduces him as a voice in nineteenth-century thinking on signs and semiosis. Delsarte’s aesthetics are firmly based in Thomist assumptions about a triune god whose nature is reflected imperfectly in man. Yet it is striking that Delsarte characterizes the sign relation as mediated in a modern sense, prior to Charles Peirce’s development of his own triadic sign relation, and semiotics as a modern method of scientific inquiry.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1808/24851
    DOI
    https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2015-0153
    Collections
    • English Scholarly Works [308]
    Citation
    Fischer, Iris Smith. "The Role of Séméiotique in François Delsarte's Aesthetics." Semiotica. 2017.

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    Contact KU ScholarWorks
    785-864-8983
    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    785-864-8983

    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    Image Credits
     

     

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