Cover Sirens

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Formato:  Kindle , ePub
series "Intersezioni"
pp. 216, Brossura, 978-88-15-28414-3
publication year 2019

If the apple is the symbol of temptation, sirens are signs of seduction. For at least three thousand years these enchantresses have reigned supreme on the popular imagination. From the wine-coloured sea of the Homeric tale, sirens have travelled – leaping like dolphins from one genre to another – from story to story, experiencing representational transformations, from orality to writing, from poetry to painting, from cinema to television, from the analogue to the digital. During their endless journey, they have often changed their bodies and their appearance but never lost their name. Homeric fiction called them “seirēnes”; and “sirens” they remain in recent television fiction. What makes them so resistant to the passage of time and cultural change? Does their bewildering charm lie in their body or in their song? Comparing myths and cultures, legends and pseudoscience, music and visual arts, cinema and serials, the author concludes that sirens literally embody an impossible union, in that their body is made of two halves that can be together only in our imaginations. From this standpoint, they are like riddles and metaphors.

Elisabetta Moro teaches Cultural Anthropology at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University in Naples.

Introduzione. La sirena e la mela
I. Sirene nel mito, sirene nella storia dell’Occidente
1. Le sirene omeriche e la resistenza di Ulisse
2. Resistere al canto, ovvero uccidere le sirene
3. Il suicidio delle sirene
4. Nelle Argonautiche: la resistenza di Orfeo
5. Partenope, la sirena che fondò Napoli
6. Partenope all’opera
7. Dal canto al corpo: sirene cristiane
II. Prima e dopo Omero: questioni sireniche, questioni d’ibridazione
1. Creature alate, nate dall’acqua
2. Dalle penne alle pinne
3. La prima donna-pesce viene dalla Siria
4. La dea Siria in Occidente: i suoi sacerdoti eunuchi
5. Tra canto e silenzio. Il corpo della voce
6. Sirene eversive
III. Sirene d’autore
1. La sirenetta di Andersen, eroina borghese
2. La sirenetta Disney, eroina cosmopolita
3. Tomasi di Lampedusa: fare l’amore con una sirena
4. Sulle orme di Kafka. Il silenzio delle sirene
5. Malaparte. Mangiare la sirena, romanzando su una parodia antica
IV. Le sirene nella società dello spettacolo
1. La sirena del circo Barnum
2. L’affermazione dell’esotico: gli ethno-shows
3. Web ed emotainment, nuovo mare del mito
Conclusioni. Le sirene sono significanti fluttuanti
Bibliografia

See also

copertina Moral Judgment
copertina Corso di psicologia dello sviluppo
copertina Homo dieteticus
copertina Tornare al mondo