2024 / 29 Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere

Based on the homology she finds between the evolution of literary forms in the system of culture and that of biological forms in the system of nature, Linda Hutcheon writes in A Theory of Adaptation: “Stories do get retold in different ways in new material and cultural environments; like genes, they adapt to those new environments by virtue of mutation – in their ‘offspring’ or their adaptations. And the fittest do more than survive. They flourish” (32). If, in choosing Prospero’s name for The Tempest’s protagonist, Shakespeare may have meant to emphasise the flourishing implied in its etymon, its most immediate association would be with the power of the magician-artist to fruitfully generate stories by waking the dead and ‘letting them forth’ by his “potent art” and “rough magic” (V,1,49-50). As well, it is fascinating to see it as a foreshadowing of the extraordinary ability of Shakespeare’s character to adapt to new cultural and medial environments, re-appearing, like a revenant, in ever new forms of retellings. In a volume of essays in which she makes multiple references to The Tempest, Margaret Atwood writes that any writer wants his story “to grow and change and have offspring” (126); yet, if he/she does not engage at all with the social world he/she risks being simply “a recluse” who spends time “figuring out how many angels can prance on the head of a pen” (104). In fact, “Prospero uses his arts – magic arts, arts of illusion – not just for entertainment […], but for the purposes of moral and social improvement” (102). It is also, or maybe mostly, in this sense that both he and his story ‘flourish’ in a famous retelling of The Tempest: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Within the framework of cognitive psychology and philosophy, the paper aims to discuss how this narrative adaptation focuses on the empathetic and ethical power of Shakespeare’s art, albeit in an inverted perspective: it cautiously shows us how its elimination can cause the waning of values in a motionless world in which everybody’s happiness is not pursued through the cultivation of ‘eudaimonistic’ emotions but through full time experiences of ‘hedonistic’ pleasure, devoid of meaning and purpose.

“Denn Gott macht die Welt und denkt dabei, es könnte ebensogut anders sein”: In this famous passage from Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930), the Austrian writer, allegedly following Leibniz, parodies the lesser-known scholastic distinction between God’s ordained power (potentia Dei ordinata) – the sum of God’s chosen actions in creating the world – and God’s absolute power (potentia Dei absoluta) – the sum of all divine possibilities excluded from the history of salvation. In the scholastic tradition, God’s totality emerges only from the combined vision of both potentiae: It’s the organic whole of what has happened and what could have happened. After a thorough comparison of the various sources, which go back far before Leibniz and culminate in Thomas of Aquin, this paper aims to reconstruct Musil’s re-appropriation of this earlier theological Denkfigur in Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Die Schwärmer, considering the attributes of divine absolute power as the conditio sine qua non of Musil’s famous sense of possibility.

The article analyses the style of the First Canto of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Der Untergang der Titanic. Eine Komödie in order to determine what effects the stylistic devices have on the reception of the text by the reader. The style of the poem is seen as the result of Enzensberger’s writing process that is reconstructed on the basis of the unpublished drafts. Furthermore the paper explores whether and to what extent the style of the text is in accord with the author’s poetics.

The essay interrogates the rise of women’s debate on a better access to knowledge in seventeenth century England by focusing on Margaret Cavendish’s A Female Academy (1662) and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part 1 (1694). I argue that both texts show that Astell and Cavendish perceived education as the means whereby equality between the two sexes, though hard to obtain, could be achieved, also suggesting that women’s critical thinking could better improve only when women are liberated from the influence and presence of men, thus literally separated in an all-female setting. In Cavendish’s and in Mary Astell’s works, despite the evident differences – a female academy for Cavendish and, as we will see, a religious retirement for Astell –, the role of space is of paramount importance since both writers perceive and represent it as physical and symbolic at the same time. I contend that they both understood that to improve women’s education, it was essential not only to envisage the existence of an intellectual all-female community, but to imagine this community located in a specific, thus visible and real, place.

This contribution discusses the preliminary findings of an investigation into the intricate history of MS/S54g, a little-known notebook written in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s hand, which is currently preserved at the University of Iowa. Dating from around 1820-22, when the Shelleys resided in Pisa, the manuscript includes translations from Homer’s Odyssey and, most notably, an incomplete transcription of the story of Ginevra degli Amieri in Italian, as Wollstonecraft Shelley read it in L’osservatore fiorentino (“The Florentine Observer”). This journal combines descriptions of Florence’s cultural landmarks with anecdotes and legends which are often drawn from ancient and authoritative histories of the city. Wollstonecraft Shelley’s engagement with L’osservatore unveils a network of multiple borrowings, as she disseminated some of its excerpts and shared the fruit of her labour among her peers in the Pisan circle. In particular, the annotations on Ginevra’s story were likely re-used by Percy Bysshe Shelley for his unfinished and posthumously published narrative poem “Ginevra” (1824) and reportedly served as a source of inspiration for Leigh Hunt’s A Legend of Florence (1840). Consequently, this notebook sheds light on the political and poetical attitude of the Shelleys and the whole Pisan circle regarding the transmission of manuscripts, the concept of authorship, and the latter’s entanglement in gender-related issues.

“Our way of speaking and telling is changing [...] reading has become three-dimensional, nothing that happens is satisfied with a written text to be told”, Elena Stancanelli noted in 2020 about the growing success of the graphic novel. The high number of literary and graphic ‘translations’ of Franz Kafka’s works internationally shows that the intermedial and multimodal transposition of the Prague author’s texts constitutes a new key to accessing the literary heritage in the German language. In Kafka's case, “the deft and sophisticated dance between words and images” (McCloud, 2007) is also justified by the author’s graphic activity, whose drawings have been renowned following the discovery in 2019 of 100 unpublished sketches. This contribution intends to compare two non-German graphic novels of The Metamorphosis to highlight the peculiarities of the two adaptations and the non-Mitteleuropean reception modes of Kafka’s tale: the Italian volume by Sergio Vanello (2021) and the French one by Corbeyran and Horne (2009). The analysis focuses on several particularly significant aspects of form and content; on the one hand, the resumption or ‘distortion’ of graphic elements typical of the comic strip, the perspective of the narration, the drawing style compared with Kafka’s writing and the relationship between word and image; on the other hand, the rendering of fundamental thematic nuclei, such as space, eros and the city of Prague. In terms of the image, the identification of intertextual (from Kafka’s other works or the comic) and intermedial (film) citations brings out a different stratification of reading levels and a diverse degree of understanding and rendering of The Metamorphosis and Kafka’s literary production as a whole, clarifying why Corbeyran and Horn’s volume was later translated by Kai Wilkensen and marketed in the German market. Both adaptations, in their diversity and autonomy with respect to the Kafkaesque hypotext, nevertheless attract, surprise and make contemporary readers reflect, emphasising the graphic novel’s capacity to "reinvent itself and invent" (Fofi, 2012).

This article investigates Elizabeth von Arnim’s construction of an Italian ‘garden of Eden’ in The Enchanted April (1922) as a space essentially characterized by magic and timelessness. It sets itself the goal of shedding light on the Anglophone cultural and literary construction of Italy as a time-capsule in partial discontinuity with the modern world. It will be argued that The Enchanted April re-articulates the tropes of such a notion in a distinctively brilliant and light-hearted key. The multi-coloured, abundantly luxuriant, and anarchic character of the flora in the gardens of Villa San Salvatore, where most of the drama takes place, mirrors the casual, unexpected, but fortunate encounter of four different women at the centre of the novel’s narration. This space, plentiful, sunny, and animated by a benevolent atmosphere towards its visitors, will serve as the main stage for the heroines’ much needed rest, voluntary exile, introspection, falling in love, restoration, and healing. Despite their distinct social statuses, personalities, and age, the ladies will connect with one another leaving behind initial reluctancies, personal idiosyncrasies, and mutual distrust. By placing the protagonists within a bounded space of natural beauty, blissfully chaotic but still manageable and cultivated, von Arnim aptly illustrates England’s relationship to Italy as an imagined connection to a ‘faintly oriental’ and ‘other’ domain frequently functioning, in Anglophone narratives of the time, as the privileged context for a (mild) challenging and subsequent restoration of the (British normative) self and the rediscovery of natural and unaffected existential values.

The article deals with three aspects of literary and artistic representations of flies and their connection to questions of violence and power. The first part analyses the changes in the perception of flies which added a completely new dimension to painterly techniques through technical enlarging devices and photography. A monumentalisation of the fly went hand in hand with its increasing individualisation. In the second section, relevant texts by Elias Canetti and Robert Musil are used to show that huge catastrophes such as war and genocide can be depicted through the imagery of the fly. The insect proves to be a diversion through which it is possible to speak analogically of the most terrible things. In the third part, an anti-chronological extension of the analysis of political power constellations takes place, specifically with regard to the Tse-Tse fly and its significance for Europe's colonial claim to power.