Roland Barthes about Racine (criticism and evaluation)

Abstract

The article presents and analyzes Roland Barthes's 1963 critical essay on Racine "Sur Racine", which offers a completely new perspective on the criticism of classicism and Racine as a playwright from the perspective of structuralist theories . Barthes analyzes the manner of Racine's writing not from a traditional literary critical point of view, but from a new way, which is called the "New Criticism" of the 20th century in France, which later spread throughout Europe. The article discusses that Barthes, based on his modernist theories, made a completely different topological classification of the dramaturgical masterpieces of the great classicist writer. Despite Barthes's criticism of Racine's classical language, he offered us a kind of understanding of the "metalanguage" in literature, an example of which he found in Jean Racine, which, according to Barthes, made Racine's dramaturgy an object of eternal practical research.