I 'tria corda' di Elettra : memoria letteraria e crisi dell'io in 'Elektra' di Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1903)

Electra’s tria corda. Literary memory and identity crisis in Hugo von Hofmanns-thal’s Elektra (1903) · The article provides further insight into the intertextual relationship between Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra and the Greek tragic versions of Electra’s myth (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides). A possibly original interpretative model is provided on the basis of the psychoanalitic concept of hysteria. Specifically, Hofmannsthal’s Electra is seen as ‘haunted’ by her tragic pre-existences, whose contradictory interactions below the surface of the text result into those 'abnormal’ peculiarities of the character already examined by scholars (‘metaliterary hysteria’).