2011 / 16 Prospero. Rivista di Letterature Straniere, Comparatistica e Studi Culturali

Chuck Palahniuk’s "Fight club" (1996) is a novel about security and vulnerability both on the personal and the political sphere, where the boundary between the two is considered to be very thin, and the vulnerability is seen as a consequence of a world-spread crisis of responsibility. In the essay, the author considers "Fight Club"’s construction of a fictional world grounded on a generalised sense of shared vulnerability, and explores how this sense results in a problematic re-appropriation of violence and the creation of a liminal community that challenges the mainstream globalised American community from the inside. The analysis then moves on to explore the ‘sociology of knowledge’ behind the construction of "Fight Club"’s oppositional community, reflected in the novel’s narrative strategies and structure, and speculates on degrees of responsibility corresponding to various levels of embeddedness and awareness on the part of the members of the group. By constructing fight club as a liminal community, the novel offers a possibility to break the cycle of appropriation, turning a scenario of vulnerability into a reflection on the political constituencies that endorse protection for certain subjects and exclude others from it.

The literature of mediation is not merely confined to the creation of a bridge between two cultures or epochs, but it also suggests new interpretations, offers new readings and makes the supposedly known new. Starting from the outlook of some famous mediators like Diderot, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Predrag Matvejevitch, Jean Starobinski, Milan Kundera, Octavio Paz among others, the article reflects on the evolution of the aesthetics of the gaze and on the different possible points of view: the synoptic gaze of rationalistic aesthetics, the close-up and therefore fragmented gaze of empiric aesthetics and finally the nomadic gaze of contemporary aesthetics, divided between panoramic and close-up view.

In "La Coscienza di Zeno", Svevo inscribes himself within the Habsburg literary tradition: A Habsburg subject writing in Italian more than an exclusively Italian national. Zeno’s behaviour towards Italian nationalism could be read as indifferent, while his allegiance is towards Trieste’s metropolitan identity under the Austrian empire. Svevo’s own pen name was culturally hybrid: it placed a strong emphasis on his identification with both Italian and German communities, seen as a merging of two equal cultures and their literary traditions. The essay focuses on the fact that Zeno challenges the Italian cultural nationalism of Irredentist Trieste by means of an epistemology of the vernacular, thus it discusses the tension between Italian standard and dialect in Svevo’s earlier novels. The analysis then concerns "La Coscienza", where the protagonist’s autobiographical account springs from a seminal Ur-memory: the clandestine smoking of an Austrian brand of cigarettes that displayed the Habsburg coat of arms. Finally the author proposes a closer reading of the confessions presented as a diary. This last study might reveal a set of rhetorical strategies that aim at undermining the very cultural politics of Italian nationalists to which Zeno allegedly subscribes.

Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere è una rivista annuale a stampa e online ad accesso aperto del Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici dell’Università di Trieste (DiSU), pubblicata dal 1994 presso la casa editrice EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste. È apparsa in precedenza con il complemento di titolo Rivista di letterature e civiltà Anglo-germaniche e, dal 2005 al 2011, con quello di Rivista di Letterature straniere, Comparatistica e Studi culturali. La rivista pubblica contributi originali dedicati alle letterature di lingua inglese, tedesca e francese. Prospero ospita contributi inediti di studiosi italiani e stranieri che pongono il testo letterario e l’analisi testuale al centro di più ampie riflessioni di carattere ermeneutico, filologico e storico-culturale. In particolare, si apre alle convergenze di carattere interdisciplinare e transdisciplinare tra la letteratura e gli altri saperi. Numeri monografici curati da guest editors italiani e stranieri su temi specifici si alternano a numeri miscellanei.

Our culture is based on a principle of symmetry that allows us to recognise the orderly relationship among objects: every story must have a beginning and an end, and the path joining those extremes has to follow a strict logic. Acknowledging the absurdity in everyday life appears then to be challenging; absurdity cannot be explained, but only lived or staged. The essay focuses on the relationship between the absurd text (or reality) and its user. The attempt to investigate the meaning of absurdity is described as a presumptuous operation. Neither text nor user can accept to adapt to each other, since the Absurd asks for its absurdity to be respected, while the user wants to bring back symmetry, harmony, and logic. As it avoids to recognise the reality of absurdity (by trying to rationalise and order it), criticism is constantly rejected by the Absurd. The Absurd does not aspire to produce any effect of familiarisation and acknowledgment, beside the acknowledgement of folly which, alone, associates text and user in a lived experience and not in the activity of interpretation.

Elizabethan readers read poems both with their eyes and with their ears, and this is the reason behind the fortune of shaped poems and emblems at the time. Shakespeare was interested in the competition between verbal and visual modalities, rather than in their collaboration. The images used in the Sonnets are illuminating only if the possibility to ‘imagine them’ is perceived. It is from this capacity to imagine and the capacity of poetry to picture the mind, that Shakespeare’s Sonnets re-elaborate the attempt of the hypostasis between word and image. The Sonnets (especially the first ones) abound of conventional images, which are almost emblems. The essay discusses in particular the images of the rose and that of the monument, both featured in the Sonnets. In the compositions, the text becomes a real image. In this progression, the reader can follow the passages from the illustrated poem, to the poem added to the image (emblem), to the poem on the image and finally to the poem as image; to the text as symbol of the written, verbal, and aural invention of the Poet.