Academic literature on the topic 'Hercules (roman mythology), drama'

Introduction. In ancient mythology, the image of Hercules is one of the most popular, and his heroic cult is one of the most common. Having emerged from the “conglomerate of folk tales”, the image of Hercules was actively assimilated by the Greek and then Roman literary tradition. Hercules was a very popular hero among Greek tragic and especially comic poets. In Roman times, the final systematization of the image took place. The key role in this process was played by the works of Apollodorus “The Mythological Library” (2nd century BC), “Pictures” by Philostratus the Younger (2nd century BC) and “Description of Hellas” by Pausanias (2nd century BC). Within the framework of the classical tradition, the image of Hercules in Roman times was finally formed and unambiguous. Hercules is a hero, a demigod, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, who possessed amazing strength, who killed his children (and the children of his brother Iphicles) in an act of madness. He performed 12 labours at the request of Eurystheus. Hercules lived with the Lydian queen Omphale dressing in a woman’s dress. He was poisoned by his wife Deianira, burned at the stake on Mount Eta and ascended to Olympus, where he became the spouse of Hebe. Methods. The hermeneutic methodology, which ensured the correct understanding and interpretation of the text of the Suda dictionary and the ancient texts, on which this “antique” dictionary was based, is used in the article. The toolkit of the hermeneutic circle (pre-understanding and understanding of the text, interpretation of the whole based on knowledge of its parts) made it possible to highlight key elements (plots, signs and symbols) of the philosophical image of Hercules in the entries of the dictionary. Results. We can see a kind of “muscular Christianity”, when the strength of the body still corresponds to moral perfection and the withdrawal from the world does not contradict the active entry into the still polis institutions of urban life in Byzantine cities, among which the most important was the hippodrome and sports competitions. Christian authors actively used traditional sports metaphors and images of wrestling, but filled them with new Christian content. In the dictionary of the Suda, there is a kind of replacement of images that embody the samples of virtue. Hercules always loses to Job. It is indicative that the Christian rhetoric, relying on the philosophical symbolism of the apotheosis of Hercules, using the “sports” terminology of struggle, ignores the developed philosophical symbolism of Hercules, and fights against the mythological “fables” about Hercules. Using cynical and stoic terminology, Christian rhetoric opposes the comedic and dramatic image of Hercules, as Herodore of Heracles did in the 5th century BC. That is, the enemy is borrowed from Christian rhetoric along with philosophical symbols and terminology describing a difficult life full of trials as a virtue.

AbstractMadness presents Herakles/Hercules in an unprecedented state of extreme vulnerability and becomes an apt device for dramatizing the fragility of life and the responses to tragic reversals of fortune. The present article compares the dramatic treatments of this theme by Euripides and Seneca not in terms of a strict adaptation of a source/model but in terms of the dramatic purposes underlying and determining both similarities and differences. It investigates the connotations of madness and explores the ways in which the associations of themes such as the reversal of fortune, the nature of violence or the political overtones may have guided the reception of each drama by a Greek and a Roman audience respectively.

Abstract The “Twelve Labours” of Hercules are among the topics most often associated with the illustrious half-god of Graeco-Roman mythology. This series of heroic deeds includes the defeat of a monstrous lion that ravaged the countryside of Nemea in southern Greece, an episode from the life of ancient Hercules that was handed down to medieval Europe through the works of classical authors, such as Virgil, Ovid and Statius, and their commentators. As is often the case, this process of textual transmission gave rise to variation and multiple interpretations: the sole Nemean lion is, in some instances, replaced by a pair of two felines or even a leonine trio, a phenomenon that can be observed both in text and iconography. The present contribution aims to elucidate the history of a particular variational pattern involving three Nemean lions, as seen in Raoul Lefèvre’s 15th century Recoeil des Histoires de Troyes. By tracing the evolution of this particular version of the episode, we will consider commentaries, mythographic treatises and historiographical compilations.

The paper is focused on the adaptation of the image of Cerberus in Russian culture of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times. Fragmentary information about some characters of the Greco-Roman mythology penetrated into Russian medieval literature from the Byzantine. Christians often borrowed and reinterpreted those images in the traditions of Christian symbolism. One of these characters, Cerberus, the dog of Hades, became an infernal character: a guard or a demon of the Christian Hell. As a dog it turned into an Evil animal, executioner of sinners. Аs a three-headed creature it resembled dragons and other legendary monsters. Perhaps, the story about Hercules, who tamed Cerberus, became the basis of novel in the Sinai Patericon (story about Saint John Kolobos and graveyard hyena). At the beginning of the 18th century Russia experienced a secondary influence of Ancient symbolism through Western European emblematic collections and similar translated works. A lot of exotic images were rediscovered and aquired new meanings. Under the influence of the Jesuit theatre, the mouth of Cerberus became a variation of a well-known in Russia iconographic image of Hellmouth. In the plays by Dimitri of Rostov, the characters sent to the underworld found themselves in the mouth of a monstrous dog – inside an ingenious stage device. Toward the end of the 18th century Hell as a dog’s head appeared also in Russian popular prints, lubok.

Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circumstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circumstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.

Orientador : Joaquim Brasil Fortes Junior
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação
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Resumo: As primeiras adaptações de mitos gregos em obras destinadas a crianças e jovens, escritas e publicadas no Brasil, datam do início do século XX, em que Monteiro Lobato, autor considerado como um dos fundadores de nossa literatura infanto-juvenil, teve uma importante contribuição. Com a publicação de "O Minoutauro" (1939) e "Os doze trabalhos de Hércules" (1944), Lobato apresenta uma imagem da Grécia Antiga (em especial, do século V a. C., conhecido como "século de Péricles") e da Grécia Arcaica (que ele chama de "Heróica", por ser onde localiza os grandes feitos de heróis guerreiros, como Hércules). Nessas obras, chamanos a atenção a maneira como o autor se apropria da chamada "mitologia grega" - subvertendo, muitas vezes, a versão canônica, re-inventando narrativas, adaptando-as ao público mirim e apresentando uma imagem idealizada da cultura grega antiga e arcaica. Nesse sentido, Lobato revela suas influências de autores franceses, como Ernest Renan e Anatole France, e do filósofo e historiador Will Durant, ao reforçar, em suas obras, a idéia do "milagre grego". Além disso, constrói singularmente a figura do herói Hércules, como um homem bruto em modos e inteligência, mas dotado de grande sentimentalidade. Isso nos faz refletir sobre os diversos modelos de narrativa heróica, em especial, dos heróis grego arcaico (típico da narrativa épica) e europeu moderno (típico da narrativa romanesca)
Abstract: The first adaptations of Greek myths in books for children and young readers, written and published in Brazil, are dated back to the beginning of 20th century. Monteiro Lobato, writer known as one of the founders of our literature for young people, had an important contribution to these first adaptations. By publishing O Minotauro (The Minotaur), in 1939, and Os doze trabalhos de Hércules (The twelve trials of Hercules) in 1944, Lobato portraits na image of Ancient Greece (especially of the 5th century B. C., called â?¿Age of Periclesâ??) as well as Archaic Greece (which was called "Heroic" by Lobato, for being the period in which the great acts of heroes, like Hercules, took place). In these books, the way in which the writer makes use of the so-called Greek mythology attracts our attention â?¿ sometimes subverting the canonical version, reinventing narratives, adapting them to the young public and presenting na idealized image of the ancient and archaic Greek culture. In this way, Lobato reveals his influences of French writers, like Ernest Renan and Anatole France, and the philosopher and historian Will Durant, by reinforcing in his books, the idea of the "Greek miracle". Moreover, he singularly constructs the image of the hero Hercules, as a rude man, not only in his manners, but also in his intelligence, but endowed with great sentimentality. This causes us to reflect upon the various models of heroic narratives, especially of the archaic Greek heroes (typical in epic narratives) and modern European (typical in roman narratives) ones
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Educação, Conhecimento, Linguagem e Arte
Mestre em Educação

Challenging the common notion that mythological comedies simply burlesque stories found in epic and tragedy, this dissertation shows that comic poets were active participants in creating and transmitting myths and argues that their mythical innovations influenced accounts found in tragedy and prose mythography. Although no complete Greek mythological comedy survives, hundreds of fragments and titles reveal that this type of drama was extremely popular; they were staged in Greece, Sicily, and Southern Italy and make up about one-half of all comedies produced in some periods. These fragments, supplemented by Plautus' Amphitruo (the only nearly complete mythological comedy), vase-paintings, and ancient testimonia, shed light on the vibrant tradition of comic mythology. In chapter one, I argue that ancient scholars' and prose mythographers' citations of comedies invite us to view comedians as authoritative myth-makers. I then survey the development of mythological comedy throughout the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The plays' titles reveal common mythical topics as well as a number of comic myths that survived independent of the tragic tradition. In chapter two, I argue that Cratinus' Dionysalexandros and Epicharmus' Odysseus the Deserter are wildly innovative comedies that challenge previous accounts for mythological authority. In chapter three, Epicharmus' Pyrrha and Prometheus, Pherecrates' Antmen, and Cratinus' Wealth Gods are studied to show how comedians created new stories by fusing myths together and by combining myth and historical reality. In chapter four, I look at the affairs of Zeus to show the dramatists' different approaches to the same mythical material. While tragedians tend to focus on the suffering of Zeus' victims, comedians feature Zeus' humorously outlandish and usually harmless seductions. In chapter five, on the Amphitruo, I show how Plautus has transformed a myth about the birth of Heracles into a story about Jupiter's long-term affair with a pregnant woman. In chapter six, I enter the debate about comedy's influence on tragedy and argue that mythical variants invented by the comic poet Cratinus have been incorporated into Euripides' Trojan Women and Helen, which demonstrates that, as early as the fifth century, comic poets were seen as mythological authorities.
2017-06-30T00:00:00Z