Giuliano Scabia’s fantastic vision: from Faust to the New Weird

Abstract

This paper analyses Giuliano Scabia's Fantastica visione, a drama written in 1973. The text will be studied in two directions. Initially, elements will be identified that allow it to be defined as a rewriting of the myth of Faust, according to the criteria of Brunel’s Mitocritica. Two aspects of the myth will be highlighted: its being potentially a text of the fantastic genre (as in other rewritings of the same years by Buzzati, Landolfi and Calvino) and a critique of capitalism (as in Marxist readings by Lukács and Cases). After that, the hypothesis that drama is an antecedent of the contemporary New Weird, characterised precisely by the fantastic and the critique of reality, will be supported. To conclude, these two readings will be placed in dialogue.