Variations on the Myth II. Variations on the Myth of Adonis (PhD)

Variations on the Myth II. Variations on the Myth of Adonis 

The myth of Adonis has enjoyed a long-lasting fortune that from Antiquity (where it lives as a text and a rite), proceeding from the Middle Ages, arrives, within the European literary, figurative, choreographic, theatrical and musical tradition, up to the twentieth century. Passing from Titian to Shakespeare, from Marino to Handel, from Shelley to Stravinsky, the story is remodeled from time to time in terms of content and form. Perhaps because of its structural simplicity, the myth in question has in fact been the object over the centuries of a real process of semantic stratification that, level after level, testifies not only to the variety of inflections of the fable but also to its willingness to give shape, and voice, to fundamental themes of Western culture: the relationship between man and nature, the tragic dialectic between passion and reason, the nature of relations between the sexes, the continuous cycle of birth and death that characterizes the natural world, contact with the divine (Christian and pagan), the problematic status of the hero, the affective and power dynamics active in the parental context, etc. However, not all the declinations of the myth, deriving from the stratified origins, are active simultaneously and with the same energy. We can in fact note that from one century to another, from one artistic tradition to another, from one expressive form to another, the character Adonis changes his skin, gradually donning the clothes of a fragile adolescent, an epic hero, a fiery lover, a virtuous sovereign, an Arcadian shepherd; and in this transforming vortex he also overwhelms his complementary double, that Venus who sometimes presents herself to us in the role of a caring and grieving mother, sometimes in that of a fiery and cruel femme fatale, or in that of a regal celestial dignity. The course will propose the analysis of some relevant sixteenth-seventeenth century testimonies of this long-lasting cultural history. The final part of the course will be dedicated to an extensive reading of Giambattista Marino’s Adone (1623), a “great poem” of an epic of peace, which was the crossroads of a season of taste, a parable of a politics of writing, an invention of an ethic of wonder and amazement. A cumbersome center, in short, but not devoid of irony, on the enduring axis of the tradition of the modern. Now recognized and loved by many, more often detested as long ignored, Marino’s poem will constitute in a certain sense the litmus test of the critical path of the entire course, in its positioning as a repository and relaunch of the constellations of texts widely reported and restored here.