2012 / 17 Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere

The myth of Antigone has endured a great success all over the world and we can find representations which are geographically delocalized from the original context. This change is adopted by Félix Morisseau-Leroy in his play "Antigone en créole"(1953), set in Haiti, with Thebes as a rural village. As a result, Sophocles’ original message is connected with ethnic, religious and linguistic Haitian identity, such as voodoo ceremonies. On the other hand, the Malian director Sotigui Kouyaté chooses an African perspective for his "Antigone" (1998) and establishes some links with African cultural and religious identity: he focusses on the analogies between classical Greek tragedies and the African ritual atmosphere. The decontextualisation of Antigone is connected to a re-interpretation of European culture in other geographical contexts and, even though the message remains universal, the myth is enriched by new meanings coming from other anthropological traditions.

In his main work of the Twenties, the baroque tragedy "Der Turm", Hugo von Hofmannsthal broaches the topic of a very “singular” place: a tower as the jail of an innocent prince in the Kingdom of Poland in the 17th Century. Unlike his literary source, "La vida es sueño" by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and as the title suggests, Hofmannsthal’s Turm centres on this “singular” place as well as on prince Sigismund’s destiny as an allegory of the political issues of the 20th Century. Hofmannsthal’s answers to these issues in his late literary writings and essays focus on a cultural utopia based on the concept of a plural Europe, a concept which refers to the past of the Habsburg monarchy but at the same time is projected towards an ideal future. This article dwells on the tension between the singular place mentioned in the title of Hofmannsthal’s "Turm" and the plural idea of Europe which constitutes the theoretical background of this drama, with regard to Hofmannsthal’s cultural-political projects in his late work from the 1st World War onwards.

Focussing on descriptions of the land, this article examines the production of space in "Les Voyages aux Isles de l’Amérique (1693-1705)" by J. B Labat, a Dominican missionary. In Labat’s travel writing the narrated journey offers a double construction of a colonial space and of the self as master of the world. By privileging the traveling missionary’s direct experience through various spatial representations and practices, Labat organizes the Caribbean landscape according to a European model and domesticates nature. However, whereas such spatial construction allows for the self to emerge, it is based on the exclusion of the Other. In Labat’s travel account the Caribbean is constructed as a utopian space for experimentation, resembling a French garden where the colonial engineer-hero may bloom.

The article analyzes the construction of space and the relations between identity and space in some novels by two Finnish writers representing religious and ethnic minorities. Daniel Katz (born in 1938) is considered as the first Jewish author writing in Finnish. He was rapidly spotted out as a writer with an original voice and an atypical perception of the world. Veijo Baltzar (born in 1942) is the first Finnish gypsy writer who managed to get published by a leading publishing house and to gain a large public outside of his own ethnic group. Drawing on Marc Augé’s theory of nonplaces, the article examines how Jewish and Gypsy identities in Katz’s and Baltzar’s works are questioned in relation to the major geopolitical transformations of the 20th century and the modernization of Finnish society in the 1950s and 60s, showing how sub-and transnational networks connect individuals with traditional communities engaged in a difficult process of redefinition and adaptation. The analysis contextualizes the novels within the tradition of Finnish literature and includes an overview of the construction of Finnish culture in the 19th century and the codifications of space and nation it produced.

The following essay consists of a comparative study of a selection of novels by francophone writers Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Malika Mokeddem. It is based on the way the space context is rendered in literary modes, aiming at producing a cultural paradox that puts the two authors into a socio-cultural entre-deux. The need of expressing themselves through images that are different from the assimilated culture stands out through the centrality of the native landscape, that has an active role. The rewritten space becomes a chronologically connoted place where identity is sought, sometimes marked by ambivalent characteristics.

According to Matte Blanco’s theory, the symmetrical logic denies the difference between the whole and its parts and determines the absence of time and space. An axiology based on the category of space requires on the contrary an asymmetrical thought. The article tries to demonstrate how both Tasso’s epics, "Liberata" and "Conquistata", containing an asymmetrical point of view (that of Goffredo, the commander-in-chief) and a symmetrical one (that of Rinaldo/Riccardo, the hero), affirm and negate the concept of space. Moreover, the hero can’t recognize the way of thinking by which the commander considers him (as errant) wrong. Since Homer’s "Iliad" is the model for this dualism between “the hero and the king” (Jackson), the text cannot place Goffredo on the right side and Rinaldo on the wrong one. This means that the ambiguity between the absence and presence of space cannot be solved: thus, the epic poem isn’t able to achieve an evaluation system that assures a fully coherent axiology.

Western Europe has often considered its eastern counterpart as a suspicious place populated by vampires, child-eaters and other monsters; in other words, part and parcel of Europe but at the same time a totally alien neighbour which still remains a fecund field of imaginary places. Plenty of examples support this cliché: one may think of Ruritania, where Anthony Hope’s novel is set, or of Allan Mellet’s Poldévie in "The Prisoner of Zenda", which appeared in the late 1920s on the right-wing newspaper "L’Action Française" and was later drawn on by less disputable writers. Also, other examples are provided by Hergé’s Tintin’s travels to Bordurie and Syldavie, and by the more recent travel guide Molvania: a land untouched by modern dentistry by the Australian trio, Santo Cialuro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch, which was published few years ago. All of these imaginary places raise some questions about the reasons underlying the success of these imaginary geographies, about why this part of Europe produces such a considerable amount of imaginary lands and the mutual influence existing between these places and “reality”.

As Phaswane Mpe’s novel "Welcome to our Hillbrow" (2001) convincingly shows, the crisis suffered by post-apartheid ideological discourses is intimately related to a crisis in the representation of spaces. As a matter of fact, the demise of the apartheid regime of racial segregation has not led to a completely new spatial organization, producing, rather, a multiplicity of boundaries which range from the apartheid model of the township to newly constituted “migrant ghettos” such as Hillbrow, in the heart of Johannesburg. While South African spatiality is interrogated by Mpe’s novel though issues such as inter-African migration, AIDS and persisting forms of prejudice and racism, a comparison between Mpe’s novel and Neill Bloemkamp’s blockbuster movie "District 9" (2009) hints at the permanence of corporate violence as a major cause for this political and economic failure, by connecting it to a global scenario.

How did historical societies handle, arrange and imagine the environmental space they lived in both narrative and pragmatic literature provide abundant references on ways of structuring spatial knowledge in medieval and early modern occident. Besides supporting elements like the geographical map (Lestringant) the text itself has the capacity to represent, to speak about and even to produce “spaces”. As a medium of reflection on spatial concerns, texts offer a “place” for narrative imagination, progress of action and literary experience. A significant example of treating environment by producing narrative realm of experience is a treaty on the stag hunt ('vénerie') of Renaissance France. Originally written in Latin by the humanist Guillaume Budé in 1529 and dedicated to Francis I the “Traité de la vénerie” shows how literature can combine the discourse about space and space producing strategies. Hunting as traditional pastime of noble elites is not thinkable without the crucial link to two different dimensions of space. It unifies concrete geographical space – the royal forest – and abstract performative space − the ritual action. The present study deals with the question how the “Traité de la vénerie” produces and thinks both natural and cultural “spaces”: because in the act of hunting the original function of the forest is transformed into the confrontation place between huntsman und prey. By describing the gradual intersection of wooded space on the track of the deer Budé evokes not only a knowledge based space of action but a transformation of physical space in a plural area of action.

James Joyce’s "Ulysses" features a large number of the spaces that Michel Foucault refers to as heterotopias, places which are said to exist in reality, but which are somehow outside of all space, such as the library, the cemetery, and the brothel. However, despite much critical attention, the heterotopia remains notoriously ill-defined. This essay looks to explain some of the inconsistencies that exist in Foucault’s writings on the subject by restoring the concept to its literary origins, and to subsequently address the importance of these sites to Joyce’s understanding of the Irish nation, and the concept of nationhood in general. It is my contention that the heterotopia is primarily a textual concept, and that by employing it Joyce manages to undermine the seemingly well-defined topography of his novel, as well as the notion of a united Ireland.

This paper examines how the key 20th Century, Irish public intellectual, Sean O’Faolain, elaborates what we can term an “imaginative geography” in relation to the problematic issue of religious identity and its relationship to the universities in Ireland in the decades following independence. Using particularly the critical vocabulary of Edward Said around the tropes of exile and counterpoint, I will examine how O’Faolain deals with sectarian clashes in order to map a public space of democratic engagement in which strategies akin to Said’s idea of secularity, and appropriate to his “unhoused” model of intellectual participation in society, are employed to negotiate shifting, interconnected paths between the universities and religions. From such strategies we can adduce suggestive “secular,” spatial paradigms of consciousness which are neither moulded to fit in with the stasis of rural “authenticity” nor perpetually in desperate and always urgent pursuit of “mature,” non-contradictory and ultimately metropolitan identity.

Dublin is a complex, multi-faceted city-region which has in turn generated a complex, multi-faceted culture traversing a wide array of genres and narratives. Literary Dublin is widely known and celebrated; but the popular arts – cinema and music, for example – are likewise implicated in the imaginative representation of the city. Of these, the latter possesses an especially rich genealogy: a reservoir of images and associations accumulated over an extended period of time, itself based on an older ballad tradition in which the city functioned as an imaginative spatial resource for a diverse array of discourses (class, gender, nation, community, profession, etc.). Given the city’s continuing centrality to the economic, cultural and political organisation of Ireland as a whole, it is likely that Dublin’s significance will only grow as the country endeavours to come to terms with the extinction of the Celtic Tiger.

“A land where people and books used to live”: this is Paul Celan’s description of Czernowitz. A plural space par excellence, which bears witness to diversity in its many names, Czernowitz is an accretion of stories in itself. Especially in the Austro-Hungarian years, Czernowitz is a place where languages and cultures meet, where the various constituents – the German, the Jewish, the Yiddish, the Ukrainian, the Rumanian – turn the town into a mirror of Austro-Hungarian multiculturalism. The various definitions of Czernowitz as “little Vienna” “Babel of south-eastern Europe”, “Jerusalem upon the river Pruth”, “European Alexandria” date back to these years. The article begins with an introduction on the spatial dimension of the town, within the borders of the Bukovina region. This first section is followed by a description of its most relevant component: the Jewish German group. Having probed into the physical and symbolic space of Czernowitz, the article moves on to consider the literary testimonies of the kaleidoscope Czernowitz was. Among the many voices of Jewish-German intellectuality, it analyzes the images of the town in the works of Karl Emil Franzos, Rose Ausländer, Alfred Margul-Sperber and finally the public speeches given by Paul Celan.

W.G. Sebald’s description of the French Bibliothèque National as a “Babylonian library” in his last book Austerlitz displays a deep cultural pessimism that is comparable to Franz Kafka’s tower-of-Babel-parable "Das Stadtwappen". In both texts, acts of hubris lead to society’s self-destruction. Therein, we can analyze a transformation of myth into a critical approach to the modern era; an approach that has been theoretically substantiated by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, whose texts were well known to Sebald. The space that is examined in this essay is recognisable as a modern heterotopia, although Michel Foucault’s more positive concept is contaminated by Elias Canetti’s notion of deathly architecture. The multiple subtexts that are evoked by Sebald point to his own idea of “melancholic resistance”. Instead of a sincere resistance, however, the text builds an oversimplified and fatalistic critique of modernism by invoking various pictures of decay.