The lessons will be aimed at analyzing – through the reading and commentary of some key passages borrowed from canonical texts (Barthes, Benjamin, Herder, Jung, Kafka, Nietzsche) – the construction of the mythological dimension, in all its potential and in its most internal contradictions. On this basis we can examine some typical examples of cultural icons: from the figures of the angels in Raphael's “Madonna Sistina” (Bloch) to the Nordic mythology of eternal youth (Herder); from the rebirth of Dionysus to the literary transposition of some socio-political figures (e. g. from the sorcerer to the populist leader); from the description of the Nymph in Renaissance paintings (in Warburg) to the literary transposition of grace represented by Jacquelin Kennedy (in the novels of Jelinek) or the beauty of Marilyn Monroe (in pop-art); from the Nietzschean “Übermensch” to the figure of Superman; from the rats that populate Kafka's tales (but even before the Grimm brothers' tales) to the Mickey Mouse that Benjamin talks about, or that represent the drama of the Shoah in the Graphic-novel entitled “Maus” by Spiegelmann, or that (even in their hybridisms) we find in some cinematic examples (e.g., the "Kafka", the "Kafka", the "Kafka", the "Grimm", the "Kafka", the "Grimm", the "Grimm"). Mon oncle d'Amerique by Resnais).
In the exploration of the re-elaborations of myths and parameters (in a cross step of memory and oblivion) we discover unsuspected “elective affinities” between apparently distant environments. This happens because mythological icons, adopting an "aesthetic disposition", have been able to emancipate themselves from their original "pedestal" to contaminate themselves with other cultural forms, thus gaining their own important field of action in that symbolic heritage from which both the journalistic register and the collective imagination draw.