1,721,164 research outputs found
The Monstrous Mother : Unexpected Evil in Myth, Literature, and Popular Culture
No full textThis edited volume delves into the unexpected, intriguing depictions of monstrous mothers in different cultures, literatures, and the arts. This wide-ranging topic is explored through a variety of methodological approaches, spanning disciplines from sociology to film studies, and from comparative literature to cultural studies.
The scope of this collection is global, highlighting the presence of maternal monstrosity not only in Western cultures but also in a number of other cultural contexts worldwide. The book’s international and interdisciplinary perspective makes it relevant to a broad and diverse readership focusing on literary criticism, as well as cultural and gender studies
Inganni d’autore. Due studi sulle funzioni del protagonista nel teatro di Aristofane
No full textThis monograph deals with some hitherto overlooked dramatic features of Aristophanic comedy, focusing in particular on Acharnians and Clouds. The study is divided into two parts, whose specific issues are strongly connected by the general issues of cheating and deceit, as well as by the common methodological framework.
Both parts aim to elucidate some of the complex interaction devices which link the intratextual audience of the protagonist’s schemes and the audience of the play, and which can be outlined by a thorough examination of the main semiotical clues to the audience’s empathy toward the comic hero. This is achieved in a psycho-analytical perspective by a close reading of jokes and forms of abuse, whose dynamical patterns entail a structural complicity between the abuser and the witness to the abuse.
One main result of the study is that Aristophanes’ deeper semiotic strategies can be recognised in the peculiar shifts in the identification connecting the implied audience of the play and the Chorus. The main point of this research is to show how cheating and deceit operate in Aristophanes’ dramas not only as a main thematic issue, but as an essential feature of the author-audience relationship
Aristofane. Gli uccelli
No full textThis volume presents the Greek text of Aristophanes’ Birds, based on a critical revision of Nan Dunbar’s text (Oxford 1995), my Italian translation of the play, a comprehensive introduction to both author and play (pp. 115-163) and a general interpretive essay on Birds (pp. 7-114).
The Greek differs in fifteen places from Dunbar’s text. In most cases, my critical choices reject some conjectural emendations which do not appear to be convincingly supported by evidence or argument. I argue, for example (pp. 139-140), that in v. 586 Dunbar’s correction (se; Krovnon, se; Zh'na, se; Gh'n instead of se; bivon, se; de; gh'n, se; Krovnon unanimously witnessed by mss.) is most unnecessary, as the paradosis is formally and linguistically sound whereas the conjecture deeply alters the semantic structure of the passage, which receives on the contrary strong support by the text’s consistent use of the thematic isotopy of birds as food. This is one of the several places in which I try to show how a sophisticated and painstaking literary-critic evaluation can lead to a deeper philological understanding of textual problems, whenever formal and linguistic factors in themselves do not prompt for doubtless intervention.
The introductory essay centres on the protagonist Pisetairos and, more specifically, on the nature of the relationship between individual and society as they are conceptualized in the play. The essay is divided into three parts: in the first Pisetairos is characterized as a comic hero; the various paragraph explore his main distinctive features on which such a characterization can be based, starting from the most fundamental ones: the frustration of libidic impulses and the consequent creative comeback; comic heorism is ultimately based on the strength of desire, which allies itself with imagination to create a solution to its problems. Further, this first part focuses on the interchangeability of individuals and groups as subjects of dialectic struggles: even though the reality principle would prohibit this, in comedy a single subject like the comic hero can acquire the status of a plural, superindividual I thanks to the opposition to a collectivity which is itself reduced to an individual, as happens in the struggle of the protagonist with Athens, whose collective reality is flattened, in its characterization through comic language, to that of an individual figure.
The second part of the essay explores the possibility of using an economic metaphor as a key to the interpretation of the play. The struggle between the hero and its adversaries can be modeled as a situation of permanent economic transaction where the values of good and evil are not intrinsic but depend on the direction of the flow of goods. The various paragraphs show that Pisetairos’ role as a comic hero is fulfilled by his manipulation of his existential balance in such a way as to achieve the greatest possible reduction of losses while at the same time increasing, lawfully or unlawfully, his gains. The most significant example of the numerous strategies employed to this end is the one by which the hero manages to reproduce, in his relationship with the chorus of birds, an inverted and revengeful version of same situation of which he felt himself to be a victim in his struggle with the city: just as the city demands of its citizens vital and concrete resources in return for abstract acknowledgements and honour, Pisetairos manages his own transformation from loser-citizen to winner-hero after having imposed on the birds the same dynamic, with himself in the exploitative position: the birds are asked to provide concrete and material resources and are paid back with an impalpable timhv.
The third part of the essay is entirely devoted to an analysis of the chorus, in order to highlight a number of features which had gone virtually unnoticed in the previous literature on the play. The central idea is the symbolic identification of the Birds with the most of common conceptualizations of time (time as the yearly run of the seasons; time as the gift of prophecy or of all-round control over the future; time as the bird’s living roots in the unattainable past of cosmogony; time as speed and simultaneity); the main point of my analysis is to show that their ‘magical’ charm and their dramatic relevance in the play are ultimately based upon a complex semiotization of birds as a vivid symbolic equivalent of life as fulfilled expectation, as a magically effective means of perpetuous reward and satisfaction
Il mito di Pigmalione e il suo contrario: ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ di William S. Gilbert vs. ‘Adonis’ di William B. Gill
No full textQuesto studio propone un’interpretazione gender-oriented di due drammi ottocenteschi, la mythological comedy Pygmalion and Galatea di William S. Gilbert (1871) e la sua parodia americana di pochi anni successiva, Adonis di William B. Gill (1884). L’analisi comparativa dei due testi, unita a una considerazione storico-culturale dei due miti coinvolti, permette di apprezzare aspetti di permanenza nella costruzione sociale dei ruoli di genere. Il dramma di Gill è costruito come una transexuation dell’ipotesto (trasformazione dei personaggi maschili in femminili e viceversa); tuttavia il suo discorso carnevalizzante, che sembrerebbe dover affiancare all’inversione di genere anche quella dei ruoli, lascia totalmente inalterate le dinamiche del desiderio amoroso: i vincoli che uniscono i generi maschile e femminile alle posizioni, rispettivamente, di soggetto e oggetto del desiderio emergono dalle variazioni della trama come un presupposto irriducibile, a tal punto ‘naturale’ da sfuggire anche allo sguardo dissacrante del parodista
Aristofane e la commedia politica: in margine a una traduzione delle Nuvole
No full textAristophanes and the topicality of the political comedy. In Notes in the margin of a translation of Clouds. Alessandro Grilli states that Aristophanes’ comedies are political texts even when their political focus, as in Clouds, is not self-evident. Translating such comedies should lead the audience to take on a more active role in the production of meanings. Therefore, domesticated translations through overtly extrinsic features are to be avoided
«Recensione» di R.M. Harriott, Aristophanes, Poet and Dramatist, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986
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