Coordinatore: prof. Flavio Sarni
Oscar Wilde was a writer of the late nineteenth century: a poet (The Ballad of Reading Gaol), a short story writer (The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince), a dramatist (An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest), an essayst (The Decay of Lying), a novelist with only one book: The Picture of Dorian Gray, based on the legend of Faust who sells his soul to the devil to have knowledge. Instead, the handsome young man Dorian sells his soul to have eternal beauty and youth. The only signs of his physical change are to be seen in a portrait which a painter (his friend Basil) makes when Dorian is very young.
In the book (1891) there is only one protagonist, that is Wilde himself, acting both as Dorian and as Lord Wotton (the man who corrupts him). The author fills the novel with his irony, his witticism, his humour, his love for beauty, his rejection of any political commitment or moral creed, and with the musical rhythm of his language.
Wilde lived a short, troubled life, marked by his trial for homosexuality, which sentenced him to two years of imprisonment and to the separation from his wife, his family, his friends, his reviewers, his previous milieu. A staunch anti-Victorian, he best represented the aestheticism of the decadent fin de siècle. The law against homosexuality was repealed only in 1967, therefore destroying the lives of many other famous men, like Alan Turing, the great English mathematician.
Apart from the novel, information will be given about Wilde’s life and the age in which he lived. The movie of 2009 will be shown.
