2017 / 22 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.

An extensive secondary literature on the literary work of Heinrich Böll has rightly emphasized the weight and role of this engaged writer in the period stretching from the Second World War to the 1980s. Böll’s work has traditionally been examined in the light of his realistic writing style and the critical representation of the present, which made him famous as the “critical conscience” and militant author of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the last decades, literary criticism with relatively few exceptions (Badewien and Schmidt-Bergmann 2014, Schubert 2017) has paid little attention to the author even though his utopian and especially dystopian discourse certainly warrants further analysis. Over the years, Boll’s critical discourse of society developed along utopian and dystopian lines in much of his work, in his short stories, in his more mature prose works and even in his plays. Utopia and dystopia (Bernhard 1970, Tomko 2014) act as an optical instrument in the literary work, as a magnifying and distorting mirror of reality that transcends the limits of the engaged writer’s “prophetic” role and critically presents the origins of social contradictions and evils. Böll’s typical heroes are endowed with the characteristics of dystopian characters, since they are problematic outsiders in society who exercise a disobedient resistance against upper instances and demiurgical figures. The aim of this contribution is to pursue the utopian and, above all, dystopian Leitmotiv in Heinrich Böll’s first play "Ein Schluck Erde" (1962), in order to discuss the effect of his works in the new millennium. In fact, his reversed and distorted images offer an opposing utopian view of human pietas, as a means in the struggle against capitalist greed, technological ambition and warlike hybris.

This article begins with the analysis of an anonymous review of a new book published in Paris in 1885: “Les Complaintes par Monsieur Jules Laforgue”: in fact, the first poetical collection by Laforgue. The anonymous reviewer is indeed the poet himself, whose first aim is to distinguish his work from the grotesque collection "Les Déliquescences" d’Adoré Floupette, edited at the same time by the same Parisian publisher: Léon Vanier. Why does Laforgue insist on using the word humour? Isn’t he the first French Poet who introduces this English word not only in his prose writings but also in his poems, what’s more in a collection of complaints? Why has he changed the title of his ancient poem “Litanies de mon triste coeur” in “Complainte-litanies de mon Sacré-Coeur”? Is it only a question of humour? Here are some of the questions answered in the present article.

Raymond Guérin (1905-1955) is a mordant author who at first disappeared to resurface again later on, thanks to an enlightened academic critique and by the word-of-mouth of his fond readers. A successful author in the years before the war, and a scandalous one after the war ("L’apprenti"), each and every book he published offers us a new writer, and a different style. His career comes to an end quite briskly, alas, with his masterpiece "Les Poulpes", which is today almost impossible to find. A friend of Henri Calet, Jean Grenier, Marcel Arland, Curzio Malaparte but of Jean Paulhan too, he is a writer endowed with a great style, capable of mixing linguistic registers, making use of an acrid sarcasm at its extreme. In a small book, published in 1948 (and republished in 1997), "Un romancier dit son mot", Guérin offers us a personal, intimate, unapologizing view on his work and on novel in general. Such a view is intentionally critical, explicative, and decidedly outside the rules. Guérin was a caustic, provocative, anti-conformist spirit, a sort of Girondist Alceste, truthful to his friends and ready to use his venom in his dialectic attack against his foes. He represents nonetheless a figure of a tormented artist, conscious of his talent, intolerant to criticism and yet open to discussion. The project will build its investigation from this book, in order to reconstruct the atmosphere of the period of its writing, and the points of view of a rather important - however undervalued - epoch as far as the novel goes. His grievances against a certain type of critique, which he deems as close-minded, will allow us to better grasp his vision about writing. Such a perspective will moreover turn this book into a sort of ‘anti-systemic’ pamphlet, which may shed light on the reasons why some 1950’s authors (that the research will also address) had disappeared from the literary scene to reappear once again only in the 1980s.