2017 / 22 Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere

An extensive secondary literature on the literary work of Heinrich Böll has rightly emphasized the weight and role of this engaged writer in the period stretching from the Second World War to the 1980s. Böll’s work has traditionally been examined in the light of his realistic writing style and the critical representation of the present, which made him famous as the “critical conscience” and militant author of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the last decades, literary criticism with relatively few exceptions (Badewien and Schmidt-Bergmann 2014, Schubert 2017) has paid little attention to the author even though his utopian and especially dystopian discourse certainly warrants further analysis. Over the years, Boll’s critical discourse of society developed along utopian and dystopian lines in much of his work, in his short stories, in his more mature prose works and even in his plays. Utopia and dystopia (Bernhard 1970, Tomko 2014) act as an optical instrument in the literary work, as a magnifying and distorting mirror of reality that transcends the limits of the engaged writer’s “prophetic” role and critically presents the origins of social contradictions and evils. Böll’s typical heroes are endowed with the characteristics of dystopian characters, since they are problematic outsiders in society who exercise a disobedient resistance against upper instances and demiurgical figures. The aim of this contribution is to pursue the utopian and, above all, dystopian Leitmotiv in Heinrich Böll’s first play "Ein Schluck Erde" (1962), in order to discuss the effect of his works in the new millennium. In fact, his reversed and distorted images offer an opposing utopian view of human pietas, as a means in the struggle against capitalist greed, technological ambition and warlike hybris.

Caught between his loyalty to Gottsched’s school and a genuine interest for an aesthetics of affects close to that of the Zurich circle, Johann Elias Schlegel’s ambivalent stand shows in both his theoretical and comedy writing. Specifically as a comedy writer, Schlegel identifies the ultimate goal of comedy in the representation of the inborn ambiguity of human behaviour, rather than in the censorship of vice. His work ridicules both the ipercultivated courts and those new-born classes’ attempts to adopt courtly modes of interaction. A canonical piece of 18th-century German literary history, "Die stumme Schönheit" stages the characters’ wish of distinction together with an absolute cult of reason. Social change shows in its link with a new understanding of human nature grounded on a poise between intellect and sensitivity. Such balance appears already tied to that same paradigm of totality which is gaining the stage in mid-18th-century philosophical and aesthetical discussion.

Raymond Guérin (1905-1955) is a mordant author who at first disappeared to resurface again later on, thanks to an enlightened academic critique and by the word-of-mouth of his fond readers. A successful author in the years before the war, and a scandalous one after the war ("L’apprenti"), each and every book he published offers us a new writer, and a different style. His career comes to an end quite briskly, alas, with his masterpiece "Les Poulpes", which is today almost impossible to find. A friend of Henri Calet, Jean Grenier, Marcel Arland, Curzio Malaparte but of Jean Paulhan too, he is a writer endowed with a great style, capable of mixing linguistic registers, making use of an acrid sarcasm at its extreme. In a small book, published in 1948 (and republished in 1997), "Un romancier dit son mot", Guérin offers us a personal, intimate, unapologizing view on his work and on novel in general. Such a view is intentionally critical, explicative, and decidedly outside the rules. Guérin was a caustic, provocative, anti-conformist spirit, a sort of Girondist Alceste, truthful to his friends and ready to use his venom in his dialectic attack against his foes. He represents nonetheless a figure of a tormented artist, conscious of his talent, intolerant to criticism and yet open to discussion. The project will build its investigation from this book, in order to reconstruct the atmosphere of the period of its writing, and the points of view of a rather important - however undervalued - epoch as far as the novel goes. His grievances against a certain type of critique, which he deems as close-minded, will allow us to better grasp his vision about writing. Such a perspective will moreover turn this book into a sort of ‘anti-systemic’ pamphlet, which may shed light on the reasons why some 1950’s authors (that the research will also address) had disappeared from the literary scene to reappear once again only in the 1980s.

Peter Weiss’s play "Marat/Sade" can be considered as the most important outcome of an aesthetic reflection based not only on an ideological conflict but on a medial experimentation as well. The Marquis de Sade and the dramaturgical “translation” of his philosophy are part of Weiss’s complex considerations about the relationship between word and image, particularly as they are developed in the essay "Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Sprache" (1965). A sphere where word and visual representation merge, theatre thus becomes the crucial element of an aesthetics based on an articulate dialectical structure: de Sade’s “bildhafte[s] Denken” ("Anmerkungen zum geschichtlichen Hintergrund unseres Stückes" [1963]) finds its tangible fulfillment on the stage. Pasolini’s confrontation with de Sade occurs in a late phase of his artistic production in which the “visual representation” of the latter’s nihilistic ideology is part of his aesthetical experiment through cinema ("Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma" [1975]). The paths they trace as multimedia artists – Weiss from cinema to literature, Pasolini from literature to cinema – evolve along a common line: Sade’s literary work and philosophy are for them a congenial ground to exercise, by way of innovative medial formats, a radical critique of western ideology and culture.

This article begins with the analysis of an anonymous review of a new book published in Paris in 1885: “Les Complaintes par Monsieur Jules Laforgue”: in fact, the first poetical collection by Laforgue. The anonymous reviewer is indeed the poet himself, whose first aim is to distinguish his work from the grotesque collection "Les Déliquescences" d’Adoré Floupette, edited at the same time by the same Parisian publisher: Léon Vanier. Why does Laforgue insist on using the word humour? Isn’t he the first French Poet who introduces this English word not only in his prose writings but also in his poems, what’s more in a collection of complaints? Why has he changed the title of his ancient poem “Litanies de mon triste coeur” in “Complainte-litanies de mon Sacré-Coeur”? Is it only a question of humour? Here are some of the questions answered in the present article.

The question of love - its manifestations, practices and social institutions - is at the heart of 19th-century thinking. Industrial progress, urbanization and the secularization of French society have contributed to the development of a pornocracy because the paradigm of prostitution is spreading as a social model in a system dominated by capital. Such is the analysis leaded by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon convinced that mystical Platonism gives way to the school of peripatetic, “the ladies of night”. Also, it is particularly alarming to see that the race for the honors of the political leaders is diverted by the economic interests, perverting by the way the exercise of the democracy. Proudhon thus develops a reflection of political theology and reconnecting with libertarian and anarchist evangelism.

Che rilevanza può avere la categorizzazione del genere rispetto alla funzione sociale dei romanzi e come può riscrivere la relazione tra estetica e socialità? In una linea di analisi che legge la comunicazione estetica in chiave pragmatica, il presente saggio si interrogherà su tale questione a partire dalla querelle che la pubblicazione della Maddaddam Trilogy di Margaret Atwood ha innescato. "Oryx and Crake" (2003), "The Year of the Flood" (2009) e "MaddAddam" (2013) definiscono una critica alla realtà contemporanea, concentrandosi sugli azzardi dell’ingegneria genetica e sul problema dell’inquinamento, ed esprimendo istanze che nel dibattito attuale sull’ecologia possono senza dubbio essere definite ecocritiche. Tuttavia, a una inequivocabile decodificazione tematica non ha fatto riscontro una altrettanto chiara decodificazione del genere cui la trilogia vada ricondotta. Le rivendicazioni della scrittrice sull’appartenenza dei tre romanzi alla speculative fiction – interessata alle possibili e plausibili degenerazioni della realtà condivisa da autrice e lettore – piuttosto che alla fantascienza – incentrata sul racconto di mondi lontani e impossibili – hanno provocato una polemica con Ursula Le Guin, che a una prima lettura sembra ripresentare antichi ma non superati pregiudizi sulla letterarietà di generi ipercodificati come la fantascienza. Eppure, inquadrando la questione in una griglia metodologica ispirata alla Pragmatica, sia il problema della ipercodificazione, sia l’operazione di riformulazione e aggiornamento dei codici di genere operata da Atwood, possono assumere una diversa rilevanza. Dopo aver ripercorso le tappe della querelle e aver illustrato le principali linee pragmatiche sul genere, il presente studio discuterà anche il modo in cui le specificità tematiche e formali della trilogia la rendano una delle più recenti tappe evolutive del filone distopico occidentale. L’ultima sezione sarà dedicata all’analisi di "The Year of the Flood", in relazione al particolare uso del/i genere/i.

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.

This paper deals with the topic of reconciliation and nation building in postapartheid South Africa by focusing on James Gregory’s memoir "Goodbye Bafana: Nelson Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend". Written in collaboration with British journalist Bob Graham and strategically published in 1995, when Mandela’s iconic status as ‘Father of the Nation’ was at its highest, this book tells the exemplary conversion story of one of Madiba’s prison guards during his long years of incarceration. It shows how the racist Afrikaner warder turned into a sympathetic confidant and friend through the epiphanic discovery of the moral stature and commendable humanity of the ‘black terrorist’. While considering the vexed question of "Goodbye Bafana"’s historical reliability and controversial reception, especially in South Africa, my aim is to better investigate the discursive policy, semantic layers, and identity-construction strategies in a work that has been so far largely neglected by critics. Via his self-portrayal as a ‘redeemed Afrikaner’ (and Graham’s mediating voice), Gregory appears to promote solidarity, social repair, and a new sense of community belonging.

This article studies gender construction in George Eliot’s "Romola" and Lord Leighton’s illustrations in the novel. In offering new insights into the collaboration between a writer and a painter from the Victorian era, this work draws substantially on a crucible of feminist scholarly responses to demonstrate how Eliot encrypted her resistance to and rejection of Victorian misogynist discourse on gender and women’s inferiority. Both works bond together despite the discrepancies, which prefigure significantly in the novel’s discourse on gender, and when considered in conjunction with the illustrations, "Romola" lays itself open to new readings and in so doing, challenges no more now than before pigeonholing and reductionism. Notwithstanding the asymmetrical nature of the relationship between the text and the illustrations, this essay contends that Lord Leighton’s radical construction of gender is triggered by Eliot’s narrative agenda and the subversive use of the myth of the Madonna. The novel’s narrative path as a bildungsroman imposes on the illustrations a rather radical “feminist” agenda, despite the aesthete’s visible antifeminism in his paintings, and the resulting subversive nature of the titular heroine in Leighton’s and Eliot’s work takes the debate on the Woman Question further afield. This article will argue that "Romola" foregrounds the protagonist’s grandeur and her ethical supremacy as opposed to all male characters. Her crossing over the dividing lines of the domestic into the public sphere is a serious endeavor on the part of Leighton and Eliot towards a more radical and forward thinking.