2024 / 29 Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere

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.

“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justified by the author’s graphic activity, whose drawings have been renowned following the discovery in 2019 of 100 unpublished sketches.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).

“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.

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.

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.