Myth Reading Group
Thursday 08 February
12.00-1.30pm in Room 3.411
We are very pleased to announce that Eirini Apanomeritaki continues our discussion of Trees & Forests with a session on Herman Hesse’s Pictor’s Metamorphoses
Illustration from the series of watercolours produced by Hermann Hesse to accompany his tale “Pictor’s Metamorphoses” (1923), from the Italian edition of the collection: Hermann Hesse. Le metamorfosi di Piktor – Una fiaba d’amore, trans. Carmen Margherita Di Giglio. Kindle Edition.
The two stories selected this week are taken from Herman Hesse’s Pictor’s Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies (1981 [1922]), a collection of fantasy tales which portrays varied degrees of engagement with the natural landscape.
In “The Man of the Forests” which echoes the fall of man and exile from Eden, Hesse describes a tribe of men who live in the darkness of a forest and have never seen the sun, “the white Void beyond”, until one of them disobeys the priest and is exiled to live outside the protection of the trees. In “Pictor’s Metamorphoses”, however, the protagonist is stepping into Paradise wishing to become part of the natural landscape through metamorphosis. In this session we will look at the symbolic and allegorical imagery of trees and forests and discuss how mythical, spiritual, and religious elements find their way into Hesse’s storytelling.
References
Hermann Hesse. Pictor’s Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies. Ed. Theodore Ziolkowski, trans. Rika Lesser. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1981.
Extracts from the collection: “The Man of the Forests” (pp. 83-92), “Pictor’s Metamorphoses” (pp. 114-120).
ALL WELCOME
