Lo sguardo di Orfeo. Studio sulle varianti del mito

Usual terminology in the current debate on contemporary mythologizing writings enligtens – with the reiteration of the prefix meaning lowering, deviation, subtraction – the intentions of modern mythographers: deconstruction, demythicizing, demystification. Moving from invariants persistence, a complex of recompositions emerges, tending to reduce, through the disassembly of the premises, the assumed epic or heroic or allegorical potential of the particular mythical episode or character. Four different rewritings of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice are here analysed, by Cesare Pavese, Alberto Savinio, Italo Calvino and Salman Rushdie – whose “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” shows a texture of intertextual relations with Calvino's “Cosmicomiche”. Works so different, in genre and style, share an ironical interpretation of Vergil's “vulgata”, and the same effort toward the creation of an apocryphal text dismissing the “official” version with its literary paradigm.