Electra's Notebook.
Fata Morgana| N° d'inventaire | 23607 |
| Format | 12 x 17 |
| Détails | 48 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Saint-Clement-de-Rivière, 2017 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782851949882 |
Electra's Notebook had a single publication in the Théâtre de France magazine. On the occasion of the 1954 Paris premiere of her play Electra or the Fall of the Masks - a production that Yourcenar would later disavow following a disagreement over the cast - she compared her conception of tragedy and Greek myths with those of some of her contemporaries (Cocteau, Gide, Sartre, Giraudoux, Anouilh), who, like her, had made a "return to myth" during the interwar period. As Yourcenar asserted in 1954 in Electra's Notebook, if Greek masks still offer the modern poet the maximum convenience and prestige, it is precisely because they have ceased to be of any time, even ancient times. Everyone wears them as they please; everyone manages to pour as much of themselves as possible into these eternal molds.
Slightly different from the text published in 1954, this unpublished version, published on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), includes some corrections or modifications noted in her hand in a copy of Théâtre de France that she kept in her archives.
It is not known when and why Yourcenar made these few corrections to an already published article. Perhaps she was thinking of reprinting in one of her essay collections from the 1980s, as she did for many articles published in journals, this text which synthesizes her vision of ancient Greek drama and what she attempted to do by writing Electra or the Fall of the Masks during the summer of 1943, then abandoned this project or forgot about it. More simply, her perfectionism when it comes to the smallest of her productions made her correct the small errors that she had allowed to slip through the first publication of her text.
Electra's Notebook had a single publication in the Théâtre de France magazine. On the occasion of the 1954 Paris premiere of her play Electra or the Fall of the Masks - a production that Yourcenar would later disavow following a disagreement over the cast - she compared her conception of tragedy and Greek myths with those of some of her contemporaries (Cocteau, Gide, Sartre, Giraudoux, Anouilh), who, like her, had made a "return to myth" during the interwar period. As Yourcenar asserted in 1954 in Electra's Notebook, if Greek masks still offer the modern poet the maximum convenience and prestige, it is precisely because they have ceased to be of any time, even ancient times. Everyone wears them as they please; everyone manages to pour as much of themselves as possible into these eternal molds.
Slightly different from the text published in 1954, this unpublished version, published on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), includes some corrections or modifications noted in her hand in a copy of Théâtre de France that she kept in her archives.
It is not known when and why Yourcenar made these few corrections to an already published article. Perhaps she was thinking of reprinting in one of her essay collections from the 1980s, as she did for many articles published in journals, this text which synthesizes her vision of ancient Greek drama and what she attempted to do by writing Electra or the Fall of the Masks during the summer of 1943, then abandoned this project or forgot about it. More simply, her perfectionism when it comes to the smallest of her productions made her correct the small errors that she had allowed to slip through the first publication of her text.