«Elle retourne au pays des sources» Ecopoetics of revolt in some contemporary Antigone(s)

Abstract

While the idea of revolt fills, if not dominates, the narrative space of these more or less faithful rewritings of the Antigone myth, the landscape, despite being the setting and backdrop, seems to vanish. The elements that evoke the landscape in these texts are few and far between, but they are always strongly connoted and symbolically charged. If the landscape is an image of the country, in other words of the setting, the context, what does the literary picture of a revolt with an elusive landscape tell us? This paper proposes to analyse, through the prism of ecopoetics, the literary representations - and non-representations - of landscape in four rewritings of Antigone’s revolt: Jean Cocteau’s (1928), Marguerite Yourcenar’s short story ‘Antigone ou le choix’ (1936), Jean Anouilh’s famous dramatic rewriting (1944) and Sophie Deraspe’s movie : Antigone (2019).