2025 / 30 Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere

This article explores the literary strategies that operate in Richard Flanagan, Tim Winton, David Malouf and Christos Tsiolkias’s stories and that reconfigure Australian fiction as a central discursive space. It seeks to analyse the ambivalent discourses that operate when retelling Australia’s settler past and how the act of writing may construct a space for an alter discourse, a space that exceeds the “post” of postcolonialism. The article thus shows that 20th and 21st Australian literature has designed a performative discourse that re-constructs issues of home, belonging and identity through multiple realities and counter spaces of discourse

Franz Grillparzer’s Das goldene Vließ (The Golden Fleece, 1821) may be interpreted as a meditation on the structures and implications of love. Composed during a period marked by profound historical upheavals that reshaped cultural and ideological paradigms, the trilogy engages with the emergent bourgeois conception of “romantic love”—that is, the affective bond between a man and a woman culminating in a love-based marriage and the establishment of an independent household. This ideological framework simultaneously presupposed and reinforced sharply differentiated social roles for men and women. Within this context, the figures of Jason and Medea appear to interrogate, and ultimately destabilize, the very premises of this bourgeois ideal

The essay examines Robert Menasse’s literary and theoretical exploration of the European project through his major works Der europäische Landbote, Die Hauptstadt, and Die Erweiterung. Menasse conceives Europe as a “post-national utopia” founded on the moral legacy of Auschwitz and the Enlightenment ideals of solidarity and peace. In Die Hauptstadt, the European Commission becomes both stage and metaphor for the contradictions of a union torn between bureaucratic pragmatism and ethical purpose. By linking Brussels and Auschwitz, Menasse exposes Europe’s amnesia toward its founding principle – “Never again” – and its transformation from a peace project into an economic mechanism. Der europäische Landbote reinterprets Büchner’s revolutionary pamphlet to call for a renewed European democracy beyond national frameworks, while Die Erweiterung tests these ideals within the realpolitik of EU enlargement and the instrumentalization of historical memory. Through irony, polyphony, and intertextual dialogue, Menasse constructs a moral and literary space where Europe’s failures and hopes are confronted. His vision, as the article shows, remains both critical and utopian: a defense of a Europe capable of remembering its past while imagining a future of shared responsibility and transnational justice.

This study examines the application of AI in literary analysis, focusing on Shakespeare's characters Ophelia and Miranda. I explore two approaches: Zero-Shot and Co-Intelligence. The Zero-Shot method, which operates without direct training, provides quick but superficial insights, often lacking depth and nuance. It struggles with recognizing complex rhetorical devices and fails to capture the unique trajectories of the characters. In contrast, the Co-Intelligence approach excels through structured interaction and collaboration between human and AI, effectively highlighting the divergent paths of Ophelia and Miranda. This method uncovers Ophelia's emotional turmoil and descent into madness, as well as Miranda's growth and discovery. The study suggests that while Zero-Shot may suffice for a quick overview, Co-Intelligence offers a richer, more detailed analysis that is well-suited for complex literary studies. This collaborative approach holds promise for integrating AI into humanities research, providing new directions for exploration. The debate continues on AI's role in capturing literary nuances compared to human analysis. While some remain skeptical, the potential for AI to enhance literary interpretation is promising.

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.

Margaret Atwood, one of Canada's most celebrated and iconic writers, has shown an interest in exploring issues relevant to contemporary audiences in her fiction since the publication of her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969). Atwood's diverse body of literary work addresses important current concerns such as gender inequality, technology, consumerism, and the climate crisis. In her more recent dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last (2015), Atwood imagines the US as a wasteland devastated by economic crisis. Within this fictional landscape, a social experiment emerges as a seemingly ideal social model, while the survivors must navigate new and complex circumstances. The novel contains several instances of parody and satirical commentary on contemporary consumerist practices and the obsession with technology and artificiality. Sex dolls, referred to as prostibots in The Heart Goes Last, play a pivotal role in Atwood's exploration of technological progress and its implications for humanity. Drawing on theories of posthumanism, bioethics, and narratology, this paper aims to analyse Atwood's inherently parodic construction of sex dolls as Gothic embodiments of artificial others. These prostibots not only redefine what it means to be human but also draw attention to the anxieties associated with the emergence of posthuman replicas, which, in turn, raise various biological and ethical issues.

This article discusses the visual interpretation of a key off-scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet within nineteenth-century illustrated editions. An off-scene is a pivotal event, such as Old King Hamlet's poisoning, which is narrated by a character—the Ghost—but not performed on stage. The Ghost’s narrative explicitly identifies Claudius as "the serpent that did sting thy father's life / Now wears his crown," providing both gory details and a powerful metaphor. Nineteenth-century illustrated editions played a crucial role in making Shakespeare accessible to a rapidly stratifying readership and allowed artists freedom to provide imaginative visual interpretations that the theatre could not easily achieve. Illustrations of the poisoning scene generally oscillated between two approaches: a realistic depiction of the murder itself and a symbolic interpretation of the "serpent" imagery. Early examples include John Thurston’s emblematic frontispiece (1825), and Frank Howard’s outline engravings (1827–1833). The Works of Shakspere (1840–1843), edited by Barry Cornwall and illustrated by Kenny Meadows, integrated character-focused engravings directly within the text, achieving a striking harmonization of image and word. Other editions, such as Charles Knight’s (1838-1843) and Howard Staunton’s 1856 edition of the Plays of Shakespeare, illustrated by John Gilbert (1856) highlighted the staged reenactment of the poison off-scene, The Murder of Gonzago, as the visual representation of the crime. These illustrations, blending text and image, significantly shaped popular understanding of the play before the market shifted toward scholarly, unillustrated editions.

In Germany Shakespeare’s Hamlet became a socio-cultural catalyst that decisively contributed to shaping the nation’s identity. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, “Hamletology” relied on idealising constructs that progressively alienated the “spirit” (Geist) of Hamlet, that is its textual authority, from the “body” (Leib) of performance. In the 1960s and 1970s the productions by Adolf Dresen and Benno Besson in East Germany and by Peter Zadek and George Tabori in West Germany challenged the long-standing German tradition of sacralising the Shakespearean text. Taking Robert Weimann’s distinction between locus and platea and his notion of the “dual authority” of text and performance as a point of departure, this essay shows how these stagings restored the centrality of the performer’s physical presence and histrionic skills. Working with new stage-oriented translations, Dresen and Besson foreground the tensions between thought and action, idealism and material reality, language and gesture as acts of resistance against official ideology and the generational authority of the fathers. By contrast, Zadek and Tabori develop postmodern and psychoanalytic interpretations centred on an eroticised, wounded or diseased actorial body to expose, through theatrical artifices, cross-dressing, improvisation and the disruption of scenic illusion, the brutality of political power and post-war society’s persistent inability to confront its past. The statement “The play’s the thing” thus emerges not as an abstract maxim but as a definition of theatrical materiality, implying the dependence of the spectral Shakespearean text on the actor’s body in order to renew itself in the interplay between actor and spectator.