1995 / 2 Prospero. Rivista di culture anglo-germaniche

This paper looks at the phenomenon of “passing”, the movement from one race to another, as it is seen in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s novel "Plum Bun". Documenting this journey by employing some of the headings black feminist critic bell hooks suggests in her essay “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination”, the author wants to show how Fauset, an African American woman writer of the Harlem Renaissance, used the conventional theme of “passing” in order to problematize issues of national identity and expatriation. According to the author of this article the protagonist’s journey from the black community to the white world and back again can, then, be seen in the terms that bell hooks suggests for the creation of an alternative theory of travel. Thus, what the reader of the novel learns from Angela Murray’s experience is, most of all, the importance of perspective in judging both people and events.

This paper analyses the construction of National Identity in James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘The Wing-and-Wing’. The novel, published in 1842, is largely about the identification of foreignness, of typical – or supposedly typical – national traits. The main characters are repeatedly under the scrutiny of inquisitive eyes, trying to detect their origins and their customs. What is more, because of the historical moment depicted in the novel, because of the situation of hostility between nations, some of the characters are forced to hide their national identity and put on a mask. Therefore the theme of disguise, the necessity to pass for someone else, is central of Cooper’s work. For the hero, in particular, the ability to pass for an Englishman, in the first part of the novel, and later, for an Italian, is – quite literally – a matter of life and death. What Cooper does in his work can thus be seen as an attempt at defining national identity in opposition, in conflict and contrast.

This paper talks about how Updike Underhill, the protagonist-narrator of Royall Tyler’s novel 'The Algerine Captive', seeks a full understanding of his own country by removing the beloved object of his analysis from himself. Through a long journey that takes him elsewhere, he grasps the rich complexity of reality and finally comes to accept the totality of his country in its positive and negative aspects. Thus Royall Tyler indicates expatriation and the comparison with the elsewhere as appropriate means to know the United States better. This nationalist feeling is the underlying key-note of the whole book and one of its main themes. Explicitly or implicitly Tyler speaks of America even if he is describing British or Algerian realities and his narration sometimes wavers between praising and criticizing his native land. With the last sentence of the book, “By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall”, Tyler underlines the necessity for a voluntaristic rather than naturalistic nationalism for the United States and gives his main contribution to the developing American thought and fiction writing.

This paper talks about the problem of Thomas Paine’s (1737-1809) American Citizenship. English by birth, American by adoption, French by decree, a self-proclaimed “citizen of the world”, Paine was one of those few eighteenth-century writers who have shaped modern political thought. Banished from England for “high treason”, jailed in France during the Terror, hated in America for his religious views, he sailed back to the United States in 1802, where he was deprived of his voting rights. A number of letters and other documents testify Paine’s attempts to gather evidence for his American citizenship, collecting affidavits. These, however, would not have been admitted in evidence. Paine lost his case and, as a result, spent the last two years of his life without any formal citizenship or voting rights.

The initial impetus behind this study was the question of how to most accurately describe Gertrude Stein’s physical separation from the United States. Labeling that separation as expatriation means a tangle of definitions and counter-definitions and popular impressions, all of which the author of this article considers as inappropriate in describing Stein. The purpose of the study, therefore, is to explore the notion, in light of what we know about Stein’s experience, that expatriation for Americans represents a rejection of the United States in favour of a more amenable and foreign culture. After giving the reasons for Stein’s expatriation, the focus is set on the changes this essential event caused in her life as well as in her personal development. Far from being a rejection of her native land, Stein’s expatriation can be seen as an embracing of that land and as an opportunity for her to move closer to it by moving away from it. Finally we see how this absence of her homeland inspired Stein to write.

Quest’articolo mostra l’influsso del Petrarca in Germania fino all’anno 1600, che può essere diviso in tre fasi. Nella prima fase, dal 1333 al 1460 circa, avviene un’introduzione preumanistica del poeta Petrarca. Il Petrarca stesso, nel corso della sua vita, aveva già instaurato rapporti diretti con la Germania, ma la sua fama fra gli autori italiani apprezzati in Germania si estese soprattutto nei cento anni che seguirono alla sua morte. I chierici e gli studenti tedeschi portarono con sé, tornando in patria, le sue opere in lingua latina. Nella seconda fase, dal 1461 al 1541, si assiste a un’intensa ricezione del Petrarca Latinus da parte degli umanisti tedeschi e a un consolidamento nella letteratura tedesca. A partire dal 1550 inizia poi una terza fase, quella della ricezione del Petrarca volgare, in cui la fama del Petrarca filosofo si conserva e si accresce e si comincia a fare la conoscenza del Petrarca ‘italiano’, e così a scoprire anche il ‘poeta’ vero e proprio.

The purpose of this paper is to question the issues concerning the effects of expatriation, exile and migrancy on literary texts written by “transitional subjects”. As the author goes deeper into a reading of the works written by exiled writers or books on human geography, psychology of migration, linguistics and literature, it seems clear to her that it is impossible to draw general conclusions about the effects of exile on literature. Above all, the subject that she is dealing with has to do with problems of cultural self-representation which take into account both the place from where the exile writer speaks, and the place from where the reader criticizes.

The author’s purpose is to explore the traditional stance of critical literature on the experience of exile, and to juxtapose it with an alternative critical approach, based on a theory of exile-and-expulsion literature as a literature of trauma. Beforehand, however, the term “exile” and its distinction from related concepts such as “emigration/émigré” are defined. Citations taken out of biographies and interviews of concerned Austrian Jews give us an image of the situation these exiles found themselves in: the obstacles encountered when trying to get out of Nazi-Austria and into another country, the difficulties in the relation with the host country, its language and culture, and later on, the consideration of a possible return to Austria. Finally the focus is on the problems faced by those who, trying to overcome their trauma, wrote down their stories.

This paper shows the surprising and imaginative way in which Yiddish American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer conveyed the experience of travelling from the Old World to the New one and the following exile adventure. We see how he described the transition between two cultures and man’s metamorphosis in that process – an experience of passing, conflicts and transformation which is at the very heart of American culture as a whole. In 1945, ten years after his arrival in the US, Singer published a short story, “Die kleyne shusterleck” (“The Little Shoemakers”), about the crossing from the Old World to the New one, where for the first time he dealt with the American experience from the point of view of a refugee. This work, which was a real turning point in Singer’s writing career, is at the centre of this article.

The topic of this paper is the first major exodus of American women artists from their fatherland, which took place in the mid-nineteenth century. These women, who were active in Rome for varying periods of time from 1848 until 1887, were ostensibly in search of educational and economic benefits for their careers as artists across boundaries of language, culture, and gender. After giving a list with the names of some of these women artists as well as some examples of the works produced during and after their foreign sojourns, the author illustrates four reasons why it would be too simplistic to say that they expatriated to escape attitudes towards women in their own countries. These American women artists in Rome were tourists and as such effectively positioned as masculine subjects. The result of which is an arguable “double dose” of identification of these women sculptors who functioned as masculine hero-tourists, journeying to prove themselves in a male dominated profession.