The paper analyses the disintegration of identity and fragmentation of the narrative voice in the novel Alla cieca (Blindly, 2005) by Claudio Magris. Through the metaphor of sailing, the Trieste ...writer explores various aspects of narration, focusing on the autobiographical narrative; furthermore, he reflects on the multiple identity of the modern ego and on the destructive force of History, whose oppression has been perpetuated in the recent periods as well. The many issues addressed by the novel are connected by the continuous presence of the Argonaut myth, evoked by numerous intertextual references to the Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius and to the Argonautica Orphica - a title which is, in contrast to that of the Hellenistic poem, not explicitly cited in the text.
The paper examines how the classical myth of Actaeon was adopted in the post-Renaissance period by two anti-Classicist authors, Bruno and Marino, whose approaches to the myth differ despite their ...common rejection of the Classicist aesthetic paradigm. In one of the sonnets making up Giordano Bruno’s dialogue De gli eroici furori (1585), the Actaeon myth is invested with a new, philosophical meaning, and used to represent a new gnoseological concept. An idyll, on the other hand, included in Giovan Battista Marino’s La Sampogna collection (1620), displays a tendency to hyperliterariness and a taste for surprise effects, proposing a version of the myth which admits a metatextual interpretation. The present study compares each author’s writing practice to their respective poetological positions and analyses it in the light of intertextual references.
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