2001 / 8 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.

Henry James was the quintessential expatriate writer, although his travels did not follow the classical itinerary of the famous Grand Tour, but were rather characterised by an emotional intensity which render him a unique case. His tourism took the form of an interior adventure, a peregrinatio animae which accompanied his travels in the real world. Born to a privileged American family, son of a philosopher that deemed travelling indispensable to form his children’s character and education, James was a pioneer of the re-discovering of Europe and pursuit of European culture, often writing about European culture from the point of view of the American moral consciousness. In March 1871 James published “A Passionate Pilgrim”, a short story of particular importance because it shows how travel was regarded as a spiritual, quasi-religious experience that was meant to enrich, enlighten and change the young, impressionable Americans who found themselves immersed for the first time in the more sophisticated European culture. The essay follows James’s pilgrimage through his works, a voyage which followed a deliberate itinerary, attended by rites and rituals. What emerges is a view on travel not as the mere crossing of physical space, but as recognition of his own inner self, and the exploration of his own geography of the soul.

The prevalence of a topographic interest in the work of Ilse Aichinger stands in a very close relationship with the poetological interests of the writer. The sounding of space incorporates within a tangible perimeter the questioning on the possibilities and limits of language as a form of perception, and on the representation of reality. The predilection for thresholds and boundaries corresponds to the tension towards a radical resemantisation of the literary language, to which Aichinger confers the function of a bridge projected towards those areas of human affectivity that are less representable.

The prologue and the digressions of Tristan hold a metapoetic function that aims at assimilating the reader in the process of text construction. While the prologue is developed according to the codes that are proper of the captatio benevolentiae, thereby also retaining a strong pedagogic component close to the ecclesiastic sermon, the digressions have the function to situate the subject matter within the history of its tradition and of clarify for the reader the allegoric meaning of the plot as well as the cultural and ideological relevance of the values at the basis of the work.