Little Red Riding Hood and Postmodern rewriting: the way to anagnorisis

Abstract

By revisiting and rewriting texts, Postmodernism goes back to and deconstructs traditional genres, stereotypes, and distorted meanings, questioning and hybridizing them. Considered as a game of visitors and guests, rewriting questions, among others, the way of considering canonized and established genres. In El archipiélago (The Archipelago) (1999) Massimo Caccari points out, when explaining the thesis of his book: "In hospes there always lives hostis, and in hostis, hospes. They are not two different states but interwoven dynamics". We will try to pay attention to these two dynamics, understanding the selected texts as a subversion of the hostis, that one which, located in the Logos, had to identify itself with it for centuries (the whole history of culture) and, until present postmodernism, could not take enough distance as to reach a state of "differentiation".
The characters of fairy tales (in this article we will only focus into "Little Red Riding Hood") stereotyped figures that carry a symbolic-imaginary load, are immersed in a deconstructive game which demolishes the limits of the fixed meaning that myth has imposed them. In that sense, they go from a modern perspective to a postmodern one. The consequence is that some postmodern works deconstruct the characters created by Medieval (and/or legendary) discourses, which carry a univocal mythical meaning. So, they will be revisited, which means that they will be introduced into a non-logical space.