SOURCE: "The Structure of Racine's Tragedies," in Racine, translated by Alastair Hamilton, Rivers Press, 1972, pp. 3-22.

In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1956, Goldmann narrowly defines dramatic tragedy and then discusses how Racine structured his dramas as tragedies.

The Concept of Tragedy and the "science" of Literature

If we denote any attempt to understand reality as science or theoretical thought we must admit that a considerable discrepancy has appeared between what are normally known as the "exact sciences"—mathematics, physics, chemistry—and the "human sciences". This discrepancy can be seen not only in the contrast in the scope and precision of the findings achieved in each of these domains, but also as far as the terminology is concerned. The terms habitually employed in the human sciences lack both precision and functional capacity, two essential properties if investigators are to agree, if not about their theories...