2000 / 7 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 image of the Italian language emerging from Joyce’s works is rougher than the smooth, polite and gentile one used in the opera and in the Dantean tradition, but mirrors the experience Joyce had with Italian during his stays in Trieste. Having studied languages at University College and being well-versed in French, Joyce had to get accustomed to the different registers of Italian that were in use in contemporary Trieste, where Italian was spoken in formal and literary settings, but everyday conversation in the family and on the streets was conducted in Triestine dialect. Disproving the traditional image of Italian – the language of love and poetry – Joyce shows, by drawing on the more lively sources of the language (the spoken one and dialect), the great sensibility of its creative, innovative potential. In "Finnegans Wake", readers can find some distortions due to overlappings between Italian and other Latin-based languages, along with irreverent quotations from the Roman Catholic liturgy, possibly aimed at creating comic effects, although they could also be considered a means used by the author to wider cultural intercourse. Sometimes, the presence of Italian is due to Joyce’s determination to bring forth plurilingual variations.

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966. The play belongs to the post Osborne and Beckett theatrical generation in which authors could no longer be pigeonholed neither from the political nor from the stylistic point of view. Stoppard later transformed the play into a film script which won the Golden Lion at the XLVIII Venice International Film Festival in 1990. The reason behind the success of this tragedy is the popularity of "Hamlet". Written during the last years of the Elizabethan era, it shows the gradual dissolving of its core values: the fact that nothing seems to have sense any more is deeply rooted into the Shakespearean tragic hero, and his dilemma mirrors the fear of the modern man of losing his own role and, with it, his own identity. Stoppard re-writes the Shakespearian drama not by altering the plot, but by presenting it through the eyes of two minor characters, thus by performing a ‘poetical misunderstanding’ of Hamlet – a device that, with its discussion, parody, ridicule, and, sometimes, celebration of the typical values of traditional culture, belongs to the common practices of postmodern authors in their depiction of reality.

The representation of the feminine in the works by Evelyn Schlag is intertwined with two of the leading themes of her writing: couple relationships and the experience of illness. At the basis of this narrative there surely is a poetological interest for the word as bearer of vitality and authenticity aimed at the expression of affectivity and of the life in a relationship.