Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General editor's preface
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Mythifying matrix: Corneille's Médée and the birth of tragedy
- 2 Le Cid: Father/Time
- 3 Horace, Classicism and female trouble
- 4 Cinna: empty mirrors
- 5 Polyeucte: seeing is believing
- 6 Nicomède, Rodogune, Suréna: monsters, melancholy and the end of the ancien régime
- Notes
- Index
1 - Mythifying matrix: Corneille's Médée and the birth of tragedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General editor's preface
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Mythifying matrix: Corneille's Médée and the birth of tragedy
- 2 Le Cid: Father/Time
- 3 Horace, Classicism and female trouble
- 4 Cinna: empty mirrors
- 5 Polyeucte: seeing is believing
- 6 Nicomède, Rodogune, Suréna: monsters, melancholy and the end of the ancien régime
- Notes
- Index
Summary
‘… que peut faire une femme?’
Corneille enters the tragic universe through the door of myth. By choosing to stage, as his first tragedy, Medea's infanticide, Corneille both affirms a belief in (literary) genealogy, of his own place in progression (Euripides, Seneca, Corneille), and plunges back into a universe that pre-exists history. C. Lévi-Strauss has taught us that one of the essential attributes of myth is its ‘eternal’ quality, a quality which negates ‘time’ and ignores ‘progress’:
Un mythe se rapporte toujours à des événements passés: ‘avant la création du monde’, ou pendant les premiers âges, en tout cas, ‘il y a longtemps’. Mais la valeur intrinseque attribute au mythe provient de ce que les evenements censés se dérouler à un moment du temps forment aussi une structure permanente. Celle-ci se rapporte au passé, au présent, au futur.
(‘Structure du mythe’, p. 231)Situated at an eternal moment of conflict before the imposition of the Law, before the radical separation of the universe into the domains of nature and culture, and co-terminous with the scission of the sexes, myth traces the shifting parameters of these undefined borders. At its most extreme the mythic universe defies all order and seeks refuge in the illogical mode of the magical and the sacred. It is a world whose outlines come into focus in brief flashes of narration only to be engulfed, once again, in the vast expanses of the unrepresentable.
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- Corneille, Classicism and the Ruses of Symmetry , pp. 16 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986