A Dazzling Spectacle: French Classical Tragedy of the Seventeenth Century

Catalog description

The tragic genre of the seventeenth century is a collection of dazzling spectacles that blind, confound, but ultimately reveal the condition of the spectator. The audience ends up both seduced and troubled by the staging of a gripping fiction. Why does tragedy, a genre that deals with great figures and great passions in history and mythology, evoke so much emotion across the ages? This course begins with a interrogation of accepted notions such as the "classical," the "tragic," or even the "modern", before moving on to representations of key socio-political developments in the seventeenth century such as state sovereignty and women in power. We end our course with reflections on the importance of a literary corpus that has exerted a strong influence on the visual arts since its inception until the present day.