Racine

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 6
• Convenor and tutor: to be confirmed
• Prerequisite: French 4
• Assessment: a 2500-word essay (60%) and an in-class exercise (40%)

Jean Racine is a seventeenth-century playwright whose five-act tragedies, in alexandrines, are renowned for the beauty of their language and form. He affords the reader or audience insights into the human condition and into emotions such as jealousy.

He shows men and women in the grip of passions they cannot control or bowing down to circumstances beyond their understanding. He explores ways in which the powerful can be crushed. Even as they are destroyed, his characters show supreme lucidity.

Teaching is in French. Assignments may be completed in French or English.

TEXTS

• Andromaque
• Athalie
• Bajazet
• Bérénice
• Britannicus
• Phèdre