''Vraisemblance'' (
French
French may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France
** French people, a nation and ethnic group
** French cuisine, cooking traditions and practices
Arts and media
* The French (band), ...
, "likelihood") is a principle developed in the
theatrical
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communic ...
literature of
Classicism
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. In its purest form, classicism is an aesthe ...
in France.
It demands that the actions and events in a play should be believable. The principle was sometimes used to criticize
soliloquy
A soliloquy (, from Latin 'alone' and 'to speak', ) is a speech in drama in which a character speaks their thoughts aloud, typically while alone on stage. It serves to reveal the character's inner feelings, motivations, or plans directly to ...
(speaking to the audience), and in late classical plays characters are almost invariably supplied with confidants (valets, friends, nurses) to whom they reveal their emotions.
In literature, vraisemblance refers to ways 'in which a text may be brought into contact with and defined in relation to another text which helps make it intelligible' (Culler, pp. 140).
Jonathan Culler suggests five different levels of vraisemblance in literature:
#A socially given text taken as the 'real world'
#A general cultural text in which a shared knowledge is recognizable
#Texts of genre conventions
#Self-referential texts that cite and expose genre conventions
#Intertextual texts where 'one work takes another as its basis or point of departure and must be assimilated in relation to it' (Culler, pp. 140)
See also
*
Theatre of France: 17th century Classicism
*
French literature of the 17th century
17th-century French literature was written throughout the '' Grand Siècle'' of France, spanning the reigns of Henry IV of France, the Regency of Marie de' Medici, Louis XIII of France, the Regency of Anne of Austria (and the civil war called th ...
References
*
Theatre of France
French literature
Early modern literature
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