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Not offered during 2022-23 academic year.

This course will provide a detailed introduction to the three great French dramatists of the seventeenth century, rightly known as the golden age of French theatre. Reading several canonical works by each of these three playwrights-Corneille, Racine, and Molière-students will closely examine the thematic concerns (the relationship between love and duty, the individual and the state, free will and divine providence; the problems of hypocrisy, dishonesty, sexual jealousy, and avarice; the nature of kingship and the extent or the limits of royal control; the differences between prescribed gender roles for men and for women; the recourse to and reworking of mythological and Biblical sources) the plays set forth, and the rhetorical strategies they employ (from classical, Greco-Roman devices such as metaphor, apostrophe, irony, preterition, prosopopoeia, and anagnorisis to the specifically French metrical pattern of the alexandrin). FREN BC1204: French Intermediate II or the equivalent level is required.