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Talk - The Human and the Nonhuman in the Tragedies of Jean RacineAbout this Event
This talk examines how Racine’s plays engage with early modernunderstandings of the natural world. Focusing on representations of natural
phenomena in the plays, it explores how Racine’s language makes audible the often-overlooked entanglement of human speech, emotion, and
agency with the nonhuman forces which both sustain and unsettle them. The analysis situates the plays within the broader climatic volatility
of the seventeenth century, revealing how motifs of ruined landscapes, fragile ecologies, and collapsing
temporalities resonate with contemporaneous accounts of environmental devastation. By placing Racine’s drama in this material and historical
context, the talk challenges long-standing
views of French neoclassicism as an abstract, anti-materialist tradition concerned primarily with psychological interiority. Ultimately, it
argues that Racine’s tragedies model a world in which
human action is inextricable from a precarious, interdependent environment, a vision which speaks powerfully to our own era of ecological
uncertainty.
Carrie Heusinkveld is a third-year PhD student in French literature at the University of Cambridge. Her research
examines representations of the natural world in early modern French theatre and poetry, with a particular focus on the dramas of Jean
Racine. She has presented her research at the Society for French Studies, the Society for Early Modern French Studies, and The Society for
Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies. She is also a contributor to Racine's Late Greek Tragedies: Essays on
'Iphigénie' and 'Phèdre',
which will be published by Brill in April 2026.'
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1 Red Cross Lane CB2 0QU Cambridge Free car park (Bell Foundation), 1 Red Cross Lane CB2 0QU Cambridge Free car park (Bell Foundation), Cambridge, United Kingdom
Tickets
GBP 0.00
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