Melodrama / Realism: two conflicting approaches between literature, visual arts, theatre, movies, music (from Euripide to TV series) (Ordinario)

Melodrama / Realism: two conflicting approaches between literature, visual arts, theatre, movies, music (from Euripide to TV series)

The course addresses the aesthetics of melodrama, masterfully outlined by Peter Brooks, who exemplified it in the novels of Balzac and Henry James, in its continuous conflict/interaction with a completely opposite attitude, realism, a concept as crucial as it is inevitably elusive. On the one hand, therefore, we have pathos taken to the extreme; on the other, the search for a ‘naturalness’ as close as possible to the everyday world. The comparative journey will cross different arts and media, focusing on some particularly significant periods: classical antiquity, with on the one hand the character of Phaedra and her melodramatic pathos, and on the other the disruptive and innovative program of Petronius' “Satyricon,” which often parodically overturns the pathos of the sentimental novel; the seventeenth century, which saw the birth of opera as a revival of the total work of art that had been Greek tragedy; and the development of a realistic novel such as the picaresque, while in painting the naturalism of Caravaggio confronted the melodramatic sumptuousness of Guido Reni (in addition to the restrained melodrama of an isolated genius such as Cagnacci); A fundamental moment will be the 19th century, with Balzac's realism so steeped in melodrama, the Gothic imagination of Emily Brontë, the revolution of Verdi's La Traviata, which combines melodramatic pathos with a new realist impulse, and the turning point in painting brought about by Courbet. Finally, ample space will be given to the two approaches in cinema (especially in Visconti, Douglas Sirk, and Almodóvar) and in TV series (This is Us, Pause, Adolescence).