This course aims to analyze a recurring theme in twentieth-century literature: that of the intellectual who degrades himself through love. This theme can be conceived as a very late declension of that of the hero who - during the course of his mission - is led astray and led astray, misled both ethically and erotically, by the seductions of an agent, almost always female, who exerts a perverse and dissipative fascination on him. The outcomes of this misdirection are the most varied: from final redemption after a path of descent and self-annulment to outright moral and physical destruction.
The theme has some great precursors, which will be briefly traced in the initial part of the course: Odysseus, who on his long and arduous journey home encounters the seductions of Circe, Calypso and the Sirens; Heracles forgetting his mission and allowing himself to be seduced by Onphale; Aeneas being held in Carthage by Dido; Rinaldo in Armida's garden. Some more specific precursors to our theme are found in early 19th-century literature, with particular reference to the French area: think of V. Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and P. Mérimée's Carmen (1845). All of these situations refer more generally to the macro-theme of the danger and fascination that amorous strays exert on those who in principle would be expected to be immune to them. In the early twentieth century of the femme fatale-it begins to take on the specific connotation that we will analyze: that of an intellectual who, for love of an object of desire placed lower than himself, abandons his rigorous life discipline and goes astray, often irreversibly. We will follow the trajectory of this theme through an extremely unified series of texts from the late nineteenth century to the early 2000s, highlighting the consonances but also the divergences and evolutions among the different declinations of the theme.