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“Archive” comes from the Ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον, “house of the ruler”: inside, we find what corresponds to the normative framework; outside, everything that dissents and is not conform. This occurs for the heteropatriarchal archive of intimate partner violence, as it is explored by Carmen Maria Machado in In the Dream House (2019), and for the archive of folklore, ruled by each (re-)teller’s framework. What if we regain the oral dimension of the tale tradition in a diffractive perspective? What if the reader entangles with the text, co-creating a new meaning? In this paper, I propose to shed a light on the possibilities of diffracting the folkloric archive, to shift the archival-ruled narratives in the direction of self-representation and empoderamiento for the subjectivities expelled from the archival narratives. Two are the paths proposed: firstly, situated literary retellings, with a focus on Machado’s memoir; and secondly, wild pedagogy and slow scholarship methodologies and practices, enabling the experience of the reader to entangle with and diffract the tales’ narratives.

The Night Pieces (Nachtstücke) by E.T.A. Hoffmann have been read under many, different interpretative lenses. The most relevant is probably the freudian-psychoanalytic interpretation, but other readers, such as Luca Crescenzi, insist on the historical and political undertext of the tales: according to Crescenzi, the Pieces deal with the crisis of the relationship between man and technology in modern age, a man haunted by demiurgical ambitions. Neither of the two interpretations, however, reaches the deep meanings at the roots of the literary text, which are indeed of mythological nature: Crescenzi is right about the crisis of the demiurge, represented by the antagonist characters of the Pieces, but his anti-technicist critic doesn't show the myths that seem to be Hoffmann's obsession in the writing process of the Nachtstücke. The following article therefore means to investigate the myth of the 'bad demiurge' - the devil as a smith, a well known mytheme that often occurs in fairytales and legends - upon which the Night Pieces are apparently based on. More importantly, the devil depicted by Hoffmann doesn't correspond to the 'titanist' (as in Titanism, the aesthetics of the romantic hero) characterization of Satan, but is 'titanic' (as in Titan, like Prometheus, trickster of the Olympian Gods)and therefore faithful to the original mythology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are numerous female characters in fairy tales who do not smile. In their stories we can recognize variations of the myth of Demeter, in which laughter and obscenity are productive of life and fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]