Thinking Like Medea

What do mythical women teach us about our lives?

What are the ancient fables if not a lens through which to observe ourselves?

Victims and warriors, mothers and daughters, sovereigns and citizens, the women of the ancient world, show us how the feminine perspective manages to broaden horizons of universality, inviting us to reach an inter-permeation between masculine and feminine.

Interrogating the feminine figures of myth that often compete against each other or against an invisible enemy that steers their destiny, and observing them from the point of view of the contemporary, Sorrentino restores the immortal heroines to their role as symbols in which to see our reflections or from which to distance ourselves.

The roles that our “mythological ancestors” perfomed are still valid in the present, and they help us to interrogate ourselves on that subtle boundary between the legitimate claim of recognition and the risk that any clear-cut definition becomes limiting. Every woman of myth- Hecuba, Antigone, Dido, Medea, Electra and all the others- ideally dialogues with her counterparts about current events, literature, cinema, and science, raising themes that, though deriving from feminine experience, transversally concenr every individual and the living colective.