Zola, France, Realism, and Naturalism: Crash Course Theater #31

This week, we're back in Europe to learn about Realism and Naturalism. In the 19th Century, playwrights like Eugene Scribe, Alexandre de Dumas Fils, and Emile Zola remade the French theater, first with Realism, and later with Naturalism. What are those things? Watch and learn.

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[dedoubecool]

I highly recommend Zola's short stories for anyone intimitated by the idea of reading french literature 😂 they're very easy to read and yes sometimes they are kind of depressing but in a very entertaining way if that makes sense.
Btw when you add an -e to a word that ends with a consonant to make it feminine it changes the pronunciation.
So i's Académie française (rhymes with Thérèse) and pièce bien faite (rhymes with pet) :)

[choosyapplepickerproductio]

I am taking a college drama history class and this series has been so helpful to study to prepare for my first exam. Thank you guys for putting out such awesome, and entertaining content!

[thebeatisdead]

My favorite lesson from the video: being rebellious but within reason. Thanks for that Hugo, although, I still haven't read or seen Les Miserable. I'm told the music is great.

[angeltmh]

The timing of this video is just PERFECT for me! I have an MA Drama course exam tomorrow, which includes a Naturalistic play which is Miss Julie. So, thank YOU! 🌺

[KieranGarland]

Absolutely superb series. Thanks for all the hard work, folks.

[End-Result]

This was so informative. I’ve been looking for a video like this for ages, thanks for making it!

[megancerys]

Erm thank you? This is my uni reading this week ❤️💕

[lounafezoui]

There is a Korean Vampire film adaptation of the Emile Zola play that is really really great! (It’s called Thirst) I will now have to check out the original source material :) Thanks Crash Course!

[lilasky]

This is amazing. Whish I had found you half a year ago. Thanks!

[twish]

Yall always come thru for me when I have tests and haven't studied!

[Luboman]

At 1:25. I've been studying the French impressionists starting with the first ones--Pissarro, Monet and Renoir. This bit here sounds like the start of impressionistic painting. "Everyone knows that color and light are lost in a simple reflection." That's the thing the impressionists were trying to get away from--the established, shiny, realistic artifice of the Salon paintings, which they found too, well, weakly reflective. "...must be a concentrating mirror, which, instead of weakening, concentrates and condenses the colored rays, which makes of a mere gleam a light, and of a light a flame." This is what impressionists started to do, with Monet and Renoir in the late 1860s painting marvelous revolutionary prisms of color that "concentrated and condensed the colored rays" at la Grenouillère on the Seine River. Fascinating that maybe Monet, Renoir or Pissarro had read this preface from Victor Hugo written decades before and decided to put it in action with paintings.

[khrisnakhristian]

i truly adore this dude please let us see him in the future episode

[Darwaxion]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make a series "History of Literature", not book by book as you do, but period by period or movement by movement, like this.

[mr]

French lit student here...
1) I’ve read half of Zola’s novels, so I am a fan. But he had a tendency to melancholy and melodrama.
Thérèse Raquin is too over the top for me, but it does symbolize the time. Until Feydeau, melodrama was popular. And don’t forget that many plays were adaptations of novels. Successful novels were both serialized and adapted to the theatre.
2) jp15151: since I speak with a Québécois accent, my pronunciation of Raquin would make a Parisian hurt too. So no worries! 😉

[redahawk]

I recommend Zola's novel "Germinal".

[radagastwiz]

Theater AND History of Science got to Darwin in the same week! Excellent timing, Crash Course.

[esmerhoanne]

I don’t know if you have done this yet, but I would love to see a series on art history!

[kramermariav]

Love this series. Keep up the good work!

[vincentemond]

I don't think one can really describe naturalism as being "more real" than realism. You say yourself that Zola see naturalism as a laboratory of hypothesis, but hypothesis are rooted in imagination (derived from truth); it's not what you know would happen, it's what you THINK would happen. Deleuze described Zola and naturalism as taking real places, real world, but spinning them out until they become original, reaching passions and pulsions inside real people. "Study temperaments and not characters."

Like a colleague once said, if you can think of anything of note about the 18th century, there's Zola novel about it.

[ms.rstake_]

I was scared it wouldn't show today.