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Il genere romanzo ha potuto esplorare, con le sue possibilità specifiche, i dinamici spostamenti di senso e le aspettative che la figura di Cristo, un “personaggio” strettamente codificato dai Vangeli, ha di volta in volta ispirato in contesti diversi. Il punto di partenza è l’esame di costanti e varianti nella rappresentazione della figura di Gesù nel discorso sviluppatosi in un arco di tempo che va dagli ultimi decenni dell’Ottocento sino alla fine del secolo scorso (Renan, Wallace, Papini, Mauriac, D. H. Lawrence, Moore, Graves, Kazantzakis, Artaud, Moorcock, Bulgakov, Endō, Saramago), riscritture che hanno reinterpretato i dati storici e religiosi per trasformarli in qualcos’altro: epitome, metafora, correlativo oggettivo, capro espiatorio.L’intento è qui quello di prendere in esame alcuni testi letterari e film anglo-americani degli ultimi decenni, che hanno fatto dell’ironia o dell’esplicito riso gli strumenti per riscrivere in maniera eterodossa, ma solo apparentemente blasfema, la vita di Gesù, tra Vangeli canonici e apocrifi, rendendola materia nuova, ipostasi euforica e vitale, dopo l’anticristo nietzschiano, dopo che la sua figura è diventata, nell’Ottocento, hegeliana (Strauss), proto-comunista (Sauriac e Lynn Linton), positivista (Renan). In particolare, si prenderanno in esame i due romanzi The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002), di Christopher Moore, e The Second Coming (2011) di John Niven, e si farà riferimento ai classici del cinema di genere, Life of Brian (1979) dei Monty Python, e Dogma (1999), diretto da Kevin Smith. In queste opere degli anni duemila Cristo è ancora un personaggio che deve compiere, in un modo o nell’altro, il suo destino; questi testi rappresentano vere e proprie theological fictions, costruzioni complesse che mirano a disegnarsi, in un modo efficace, una via di salvezza tranquillizzante, un paradiso su misura., The novel genre has explored – with its peculiar possibilities – the dynamic changes, in significance and expectations, that the figure of Christ, a “character” strictly codified in the Gospels, has inspired again and again in different contexts. The starting point is the examination of constants and variants in the representation of Christ in the discourse developed in the period that stretches from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the end of the last century (Renan, Wallace, Papini, Mauriac, D. H. Lawrence, Moore, Graves, Kazantzakis, Artaud, Moorcock, Bulgakov, Endō, Saramago) – rewritings that have reinterpreted historical and religious facts in order to transform them into something else: epitome, metaphor, objective correlative, scapegoat.The aim of this paper is to analyse a number of British and Anglo-American literary texts and films of the last decades which have used irony or explicit laughter as instruments for retelling in heterodox – but only apparently blasphemous – ways the life of Jesus, between canonical and apocryphal Gospels, making it new material, euphoric and vital hypostasis. This was possible only after the appearance of Nietzsche’s antichrist, after the figure of Christ had become, in the nineteenth century, Hegelian (Strauss), proto-communist (Sauriac and Lynn Linton) and positivist (Renan). In particular, two texts will be analyzed: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002), by Christopher Moore, and The Second Coming (2011) by John Niven, and also classic films such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), and Dogma (1999), directed by Kevin Smith. In these works of the twenty-first century, Christ is still a character who has to fulfil his destiny, in one way or another; these texts represent real theological fictions, complex constructions that want to draw, in an effective way, a reassuring road to salvation, a customised paradise.

The purpose of this article has been the analysis of a few novels written right after the Second World War and during the following decade; novels that bring the stain of the short-circuit between what is legally judged and what the indomitable conscience imputes to itself. In these works, rather than objective guilt – as Freud and many others intended it – we can find subjective guilt. This guilt is almost ancestral, inalienable to the human being, and, in those historical contingencies, increased by much more. In fact, the war and postwar literature had to reckon with a new historical situation: the collective psychosis of the Bomb fear, but also, more deeply, of the war guilt, felt both individually and collectively. Survivor guilt and postwar guilt are variants of the same feeling that became universal under the push of what had been existential in the previous century.In particular, attention has been paid to an English novel of the ’40, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), and to a German one, Der Tod in Rom (Death in Rome, 1954) by Wolfgang Koeppen, a novel written in one of the nations that had probably been the most touched by the postwar guilt.One of the most interesting aspects emerging in this research is the paradox that this short-circuit creates in the texts: those who feels ‘guilty’ are frequently without any retraceable fault, and, on the contrary, those who are guilty before the eyes of the collective tribunal do not bring any sense of guilt. Through a ‘middle-distance reading’ of the works, it has been tried to demonstrate how international law, in certain moments more than in others, does not have any authority on the dramatic power of the narrative judgement. Here literature is to deconstruct the judiciary power, in disproving it, criticising it, and deriding it explicitly or implicitly, playing with the roles of judge and criminal – who is, in most cases, self-condemned., Lo scopo di questo lavoro è l’analisi di alcuni romanzi scritti a cavallo della seconda guerra mondiale e nel decennio successivo, romanzi che recano le macchie del cortocircuito tra ciò che è legalmente giudicato e ciò che la coscienza, indomita, si attribuisce. In queste opere, più che colpa oggettiva – come la intese Freud e molti altri dopo di lui – si tratta di colpa soggettiva, quasi atavica, inalienabile all’essere umano, ma che in queste contingenze storiche è gravata da molto altro. La letteratura della seconda guerra mondiale e del dopoguerra dovette infatti fare i conti con una situazione storica nuova: la psicosi collettiva della paura della bomba, ma anche, più in profondità, della colpa della guerra, la war guilt, avvertita nell’individualità come nella collettività. Survivor guilt e postwar guilt sono varianti dello stesso sentimento, divenuto universale sotto la spinta di quello che già era stato, nei decenni precedenti, esistenziale.Sono stati presi in esame, in particolare, un romanzo inglese degli anni ’40, Under the Volcano (Sotto il vulcano, 1947), di Malcolm Lowry, e Der Tod in Rom (La morte a Roma, 1954) di Wolfgang Koeppen, un romanzo scritto in una di quelle che furono probabilmente le nazioni più coinvolte dal senso di colpa del dopoguerra: la Germania.Ciò che è risultato particolarmente interessante è stato l’emergere dei paradossi che questo cortocircuito crea nei testi: molto spesso, coloro che si sentono “colpevoli” sono privi di colpe rintracciabili, e viceversa, coloro che agli occhi del tribunale collettivo sono colpevoli non recano nessun senso di colpa. Attraverso un’analisi a ‘media distanza’ delle opere si è cercato di dimostrare come il diritto internazionale, in alcuni momenti più che in altri, non ha alcun potere sulla potenza drammatica dell’atto del giudizio narrativo. Qui la letteratura si trova a decostruire il potere giudiziario, smentendolo, criticandolo, sbeffeggiandolo in modo esplicito o implicito, giocando con i ruoli di giudice e criminale – il quale è, quasi sempre, autocondannato.

2009 - 2010 “The literary fortune of the Cain-Abel couple seems to prove that the divine mark has worked”. It is around this quotation by Cécile Hussherr that my thesis revolves; that is, how a story that in the original text is just a few pages long – although we are talking about that Text, the Bible – has been able to give origin not only to a tradition, but also to a real literary myth whose germination in Western literatures is almost endless. However, what is particularly urgent in this study is to demonstrate how this myth did not originate from biblical sources, or rather, not only; but how it is actually just one of the most influent forms taken by what is, in my opinion, a virtually universal archetype. This research aims, therefore, to go beyond the “explicit” rewriting of the myth of Cain; I aspire instead to uncover the myth where it has penetrated more or less secretly and consciously. In my opinion, Cain’s story can be considered, together with that of Ulysses or Faust, a kind of monomyth. It is this consideration that moves the predilection for the archetypal criticism, as it was principally theorized by Northrop Frye in the second half of the last century. As it is rooted in psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology, this method can be considered “middle distanced” – not exclusively structured on close reading nor on a socio-historical or psychoanalytical analysis, but using all these instruments in concert. This dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part is dedicated to the definition of the fundamental characteristics of the paradigm I am analysing, guilt and wandering, from a socio-historical, religious, and psychoanalytical point of view. In the second part the examination of the texts under review begins; they are all novels written between 1940 and 1960. Here I take into consideration two English works of the ’40s, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), both characterized by the incarnation in the two protagonists of historical but also universal guilt; both of them are drunken outcasts, burdened by a sense of guilt and metaphysical and existential uncertainty, and they are destined to death. The third and last part is centred instead on novels written in the two countries which are perhaps the most “marked” by the Second World War: the German Der Tod in Rom (Death in Rome, 1954) by Wolfgang Koeppen, and Nobi (Fires on the Plain, 1951), a novel by the Japanese Ōoka Shōhei. In these works the paradox that can arise between guilt and sense of guilt is brought to its extreme manifestations, as it is between history and personal experience. [edited by author] IX n.s.