The human and the nonhuman in the tragedies of Jean Racine

This talk examines how Racine’s plays engage with early modern understandings 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.'