SIGNIFICATO E VALORE DEL RECUPERO DEL MITO CLASSICO GRECO NELLA CULTURA DI '800-'900
di Alessandra Gobbi (3°A - a. s. 1998/1999 - Liceo Classico "U. Foscolo")
Breve presentazione del percorso:
(English translation)
"... the basic models of myth are so meaningful, so valid, so mandatory, so exciting - in any sense - that they are always conwncing, they look like the most convenient material available when we seek the fundamental data of human life. ... how to explain the excepitonal event that at the dawn of our history of literature there are those icons, which were able to survive incredibly up to now ?".
In the reported sentence, Blumenberg powerfully summerizes the indisputable glamour cast by the Greek myth over the westem culture for ahnost throe thousand years. For a long time, nearly all fields of human life were inspired and affected by myth, which often represented an unconscious cultural background. Myth was also blamefully charged with being a produce of human irrationality, although mathematics itself adopted the mythical character of "fast running" Achilles in the well known Zenon's paradox. Nevertheless the Greek myth pervades a relevant portion of today's world, from literature to cinema and cartoons and commercials.
It is natural to ask the reasons for the enviable success of such a powerful mass medium. I tried to understand the essence of the Greek myth, at least at first sight, and to discover the "immortality formula", by looking at the recurrent efforts of retrieving its meaning in the history of literature, arts and thought. More specifically, I considered two different time penods where myth seemed to me to play a very remarkable role: not just a sterile inventory of images and models, but an expression means of human personality.
At the end of the XVIII century, I found particularly important the relations with the past developed by Hegel in his "Phenomenology of Spirit", by Foscolo in the unfinished poem "Le Grazie", by Canova in the entirety of his sculpture production. One hundred years later, the Greek myth is reproposed with new emphasis in the work by Nietzsche, Pascoli, and definitely in the XIX century, by Joyce.
