1998 / 5 Prospero. Rivista di culture anglo-germaniche

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.

The work of Mechthild von Magdeburg is characterised by a carefully structured configuration of the otherworldly. In particular, this essay provides an attentive scrutiny of the vision of hell, which is organised according to the sins committed (symbolically linked to the archetypical figures of the great original sinners), the punishments inflicted, and the demons in charge of each infernal circle. This composition of hell makes use of an articulated system of contrastive relationships with paradise that in the essay are reconstructed in detail, thereby revealing the author's elements of originality with respect to the codified tradition.

The principle of ambivalence that, according to Goethe, expresses the essence of the demonic, controls the elemental dimension in "Wahlverwandtschaften". Man ought to face the physiological unpredictability of the elements that interests the totality of the natural forces by opposing it with a pragmatic conduct based on prudence and discretion, so as to absorb the ambivalence within a balanced design of humanity. While in "Wahlverwandtschaften" the characters reveal their incapability to dominate the ambiguity implied in the language of love (that dooms them to perish from the pervasiveness of the elements), in the short novel 'Der Mann von fünfzig Jahren' the elemental constitutes precisely the necessary context for the accomplishment of their relationship.

Starting from the analysis of the metaphorology linked to the thematic field of the conflict, as it is revealed in the fight between the two protagonists of "Im Dickicht der Städte", the author highlights how in Brechtian drama determinate processes of linguistic construction tend towards the recovery, on a formal level, of the civilisation divide which is evident, on a thematic level, in the inhumanity of the fight that the two protagonists engage. Particular attention is paid to the incidence that these aspects have on interlinguistic and intralinguistic translation strategies, on the basis of the staging directed in 1997 by Roberto Ciulli (in Müllheim an der Rühr) and by Federico Tiezzi (in Florence).

Between the staging of 'Die Zauberflöte' by Mozart-Schikaneder and 'Der Diamant des Geisteskönigs' by Raimund a period of 33 years passed. According to the author, the permanence of the story presented by the plays could become exemplary and therefore worthy of study as far as its unchanging elements and its variables are concerned. Following the similarities in the 'bildung' of the two protagonists (Tamino in 'Zauberflöte' and Edouard in 'Der Diamant') and signalling the points in which their paths differ, the author tries to answer the question that stands at the core of her reflections: How could the same fabula of three decades previously (after years which saw ‘everything happen’, from the diffusion of the ideas of the French Revolution, to the Napoleonic Wars, the re-definitions of the European social and political situation at the Vienna Congress, the death of Napoleon and the Restoration) be performed again exactly during the Restoration, and another time on the stage of an out-of-town theatre of the Capital of the Empire?