2021 / 26 Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere
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CONTENTS / SOMMARIO
Gefter Wondrich Roberta, Foi Maria Carolina
Pageaux Daniel-Henri
“Soudaine sera la fin/comme il en a été du commencement” (Meddeb 141) - In Memoriam Anna Zoppellari
Todesco Francesca
“Pour tous ceux dont l’esprit se promène”: in memoriam Anna Zoppellari
Selbmann Rolf
Paleari Moira
Erzählen und Reisen als Bildungskategorien: Felicitas Hoppes Johanna und Hoppe
Squeo Alessandra
Mending Fragments of the Self. The Bildungsroman as Kintsugi in Jack Maggs and Mister Pip
Sciarrino Chiara
Monaco Angelo
A Vulnerable Heroine?: Trauma and Self-Begetting in William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault
Pierini Francesca
“Sharing the Same Soil:” Sally Rooney’s Normal People and the Coming-of-Age Romance
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- PublicationA Vulnerable Heroine?: Trauma and Self-Begetting in William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2021)Monaco, AngeloWilliam Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) depicts, in contemporary Bildungsroman fashion, the life and quest for self-identity of the eponymous heroine. The third and last volume of Trevor’s Big House trilogy, including Fools of Fortune (1983) and The Silence in the Garden (1988), The Story of Lucy Gault is set in Trevor’s native Ireland, specifically in Lahardane, a mansion along the coast of County Cork. Irish history impacts adversely on Lucy’s story, as readers follow the heroine from her childhood years during the Troubles in the 1920s to World War II and Ireland’s economic miracle at the dawn of the second millennium. As usual in Trevor’s fiction, The Story of Lucy Gault can be read as a trauma story where individual and collective grief experiences are intertwined. The only child of a Protestant family, Lucy refuses to leave Lahardane in the aftermath of a failed arson attack by three Catholics from the local village. Trevor’s heroine resigns herself to a sort of self- imposed exile from the world. Lahardane, which works as a symbolic site of colonial heritage and religious conflicts, becomes a healing and contemplative place for Lucy. Here, while reading Victorian novels, keeping bees and gardening, the heroine espouses her wounds which turn out to be “paradoxically productive” (Butler 2003). The victim of familial and historical forces she is unable to control, Lucy embraces loss as a position of strength rather than weakness. Like a modern Saint Cecilia, whose martyrdom is metaphorically associated with the heroine’s suffering, Lucy reconciles with one of the arsonists, who has eventually been interned at a mental asylum. Moving from these claims, my paper aims to address Lucy’s painful coming-of-age as trauma and selfbegetting fiction. Following the recent critical debate on the nature of the Bildungsroman (Esty 2012; Golban 2018; Graham 2019), I will first argue that Trevor exploits the conventions of the genre to illuminate the mystery of human mind, juxtaposing realism with other non-realist genres such as the gothic and the elegiac. Then, I will discuss the influence that trauma exercises on the growth of the protagonist. Lucy’s self-quest is conveyed through silences, secrets and temporal disarray, thus showcasing the unspeakable nature of trauma. Unlike the physical journey undertaken by the male protagonists of the classical Bildungsroman, Lucy’s psychological quest is instead predicated upon suffering and contemplation. Finally, I will examine how the wounded heroine’s exile from the world can be read as a deliberate declaration of autonomy. As in a self-begetting novel (Kellman 1980), Lucy’s story begets both a self and itself. Self-reflexivity and retrospectivity are at the core of Trevor’s Bildungsroman, thereby lending a self-begetting quality since the heroine is both the object of the narrative and the producer. In The Story of Lucy Gault, exposure to vulnerability may be then seen in terms of dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou), thus promoting an ethical openness to the self and the other.
216 312 - PublicationAnna Zoppellari: un ricordo(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2021)
;Gefter Wondrich, RobertaFoi, Maria Carolina163 174 - PublicationCome resistere alla narrazione e deformare il romanzo di formazione: The Hard Life di Flann O’Brien (1911-1966)(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2021)Sciarrino, ChiaraThe Hard Life, Flann O'Brien’s fourth novel, is,very much like his prose, difficult to be categorized. Generally and simplistically defined as an all-Irish example of Bildungsroman, the novel is striking for the presentation of an environment in which comic transgressions seek to invalidate the social occasions on which the protagonist finds himself. While the conventions of the genre itself invoke a possible but distant progression and acquired maturity for the ‘unhero’, a story of failure and despair, an “exegesis of squalor” takes over, with attacks to the Roman Catholic Church and the education received at its schools as a constant motif. The aim of my contribution would be to analyse the way in which language is used as a source of humour to give voice to the story of an orphaned distanced narrator named Finbarr and evaluate how the text draws inspiration and distances itself from another canonical Irish Bildungroman, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man.
168 176 - PublicationDer Bildungsroman ist tot – es lebe der Bildungsroman? Überlegungen zur Begriffsbestimmung einer bedrohten Gattung(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2021)Selbmann, RolfAs foregrounded by the title, the article traces back the definitions of German Bildungsroman, pleading for a narrower concept while writing a “history of youth.” The article also takes into consideration issues like “female Bildungsroman,” “international Bildungsroman,” “Colonial” and “Postcolonial Bildungsroman,” but it rejects them. The “German Bildungroman” is a genuine German narrative genre with roots in the history of the 18 th century. Unfortunately, the Bildungsroman cannot be transposed and applied on a one-to-one relationship to other national literatures.
318 947 - PublicationErzählen und Reisen als Bildungskategorien: Felicitas Hoppes Johanna und Hoppe(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2021)Paleari, MoiraHoppe’s literary work is based on themes such as travelling and storytelling. The characters of her fiction represent a struggle between attitudes of self-development and refusal of traditional patterns of behaviour, constantly questioning the concept of Bildung as a process of self-fulfilment. Both Johanna (2006), a novel about the French national heroine Joan of Arc, and Hoppe (2012) are not Bildungsromane in the traditional sense of the genre, but rather narrative texts that, focusing on a hybridization of genres (travel novel, historical novel, female Bildungsroman, autofiction), deal with the theme of individual development, reflect on the possibilities of human becoming and repeatedly consider storytelling as an opportunity for one’s own determination. Hoppe’s dealing with the concept of Bildung and with the genre of Bildungsroman comes through mainly in three ways: 1) in the thematization of the journey as a path to education and identity; 2) in the attempt to activate the reader again and again and also to reconceptualize the notion of education through an intertextual dialogical structure and an episodic composition; 3) in the examination of female characters, especially young women, and their phases of development. This paper aims, on the one hand, at considering the different modalities of the representation of Bildung based on the protagonists of both novels and, on the other hand, at exploring the (im)possibilities of ascribing Hoppe’s works to the genre “Bildungsroman”.
211 716 - PublicationMending Fragments of the Self. The Bildungsroman as Kintsugi in Jack Maggs and Mister Pip(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2021)Squeo, AlessandraWith a view to illustrating how the Bildungsroman paradigm has been assimilated, reshaped and creatively adapted to new ‘narratives of self-formation’ in the contemporary novel (Armstrong 2020), this paper focuses on Jack Maggs (1997) by the Australian novelist Peter Carey and Mister Pip (2007) by the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones. In different ways, both novels imaginatively engage with what has been regarded as one of the most canonical instances of the English Bildungsroman: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Bearing witness to the last few decades’ fascination with neo- Victorianism and cultural “appropriations of the Victorians”, both works have been extensively explored from a postcolonial perspective (Hassal 1997; Jordan 2000; Thieme 2001; Maak 2005; Taylor 2009; Latham 2011, Walker 2011; Butter 2014; Colomba 2017) and they have been shown to embody different approaches to individual and collective experiences of shock and suffering in the light of trauma studies (Ho 2003; Sadoff 2010). Without disregarding the multiple themes and issues woven into the two novels’ intricate narrative textures, this paper aims to illustrate how they specifically address the Bildungsroman model in Dickens’ masterpiece from their own distinct, but complementary standpoints. In different ways, Jack Maggs and Mister Pip mark a shift, as I will argue, from the idea of ‘Bildung’ to an evocative process of ‘mending fragments’, the metaphorical and metafictional implications of which deserve more attention than they have received thus far. In this sense, the Japanese technique of Kintsugi – that ‘exhibits the scars’ between the broken parts of repaired pottery by means of gold lines – provides a powerful metaphorical equivalent, as the paper will argue, for the new model of self-formation/self-narration illustrated by the two novels. Besides calling attention to the wholeness vs. fragmentation paradigm that has been shown to be constitutive of the postmodern “Protean Self” (Lifton 1993; McCracken 2008; Belamghari 2020), the Kintsugi technique brings into sharper focus the individual search for balance between weakness and strength, loss and resilience, between the ephemerality and the permanence of existence, never hiding the traces of its frailty. As the paper will eventually illustrate, the Kintsugi metaphor underpinning the ‘narratives of the self’ in Mack Maggs and Mister Pip may help us re- examine Dickens’s novel in a new light, and reconsider how, and to what extent, Great Expectations also “broke from the critical position articulated by Franco Moretti” (Taft 2020).
342 719 - Publication“Pour tous ceux dont l’esprit se promène”: in memoriam Anna Zoppellari(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2021)Todesco, Francesca
146 132 - PublicationProspero: rivista di letterature e culture straniere 26 (2021)(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2021)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.
182 4432 - Publication“Sharing the Same Soil:” Sally Rooney’s Normal People and the Coming-of-Age Romance(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2021)Pierini, FrancescaSally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) is a refined, touching, and quintessentially current coming- of-age narrative that explores the romantic encounter and its effects upon the psyches and aspirations of two young people, Marianne and Connell, who experience the extraordinary luck (and misfortune?) of finding one another before becoming adults. Featuring a persistent subtheme of inequality among social classes, and the effects of such disparity on the lives of young generations, the narrative weaves together ‘the personal’ and ‘the structural’ in an elegantly told portrayal of young love. The novel does not only signal a welcome return of the topic of politics to a context – the contemporary construction of love and literary representation of romantic relationships – often dominated by a logic of purely individual responsibility, but it also portrays the specific burden, most achingly felt by the young, that comes with having one’s possibilities for love (and disappointment) multiplied in the current era. By discussing the novel as a romance narrative, this essay will argue for the importance and validity of a genre and the field of expertise attached to it – scholarship of the (popular) romance – that has developed, during the last decades, and especially since the beginning of the current century, important analytical tools for reading and understanding the representation of love in literary as well as popular narratives. Despite the undeniable revitalisation generic forms of literature are currently undergoing, the romance – and its critics – tend to remain excluded from academic debates concerning such revival.
1080 2116 - Publication“Soudaine sera la fin/comme il en a été du commencement” (Meddeb 141) - In Memoriam Anna Zoppellari(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2021)Pageaux, Daniel-Henri
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