Elenco dei Revisori

MEROPE

Elenco dei Revisori

aggiornato al 20 dicembre 2016

Rosario Arias (Universidad de Málaga, Spain)
Stefano Bronzini (Università di Bari)
Ivan Callus (University of Malta)
Ian Campbell (University of Edinburgh)
Allan C. Christensen (John Cabot University, Rome)
Renzo D’Agnillo (Università di Chieti-Pescara)
Elio Di Piazza (Università di Palermo)
Cristina Giorcelli (Università di Roma III)
Andrew King (University of Greenwich, UK)
Rama Kundu (Kurdwan University, West Bengal, India)
Gloria Lauri-Lucente (University of Malta)
Phillip V. Mallett (University of St Andrews, UK)
Mitsuharu Matsuoka (Nagoya University, Japan)
Jude V. Nixon (Salem State University, USA)
Francesca Orestano (Università di Milano)
Angelo Righetti (Università di Verona)
Antonella Riem (Università di Udine)
Alan Shelston (University of Manchester)
Enrico Terrinoni (Università di Perugia)
Philip Tew (Brunel University, London)

Persida Lazareviæ Di Giacomo: L’etimologia toponomastica (Merope n. 64 - pp. 79-98)

Persida Lazareviæ Di Giacomo
L’etimologia toponomastica anhaltino-servestana secondo Temler

Abstract — The first part of this paper deals with various interpretations (Mickiewicz, Nugent, Kollar, Beckmann, Büsching, etc.) of the etymology of name for Zerbst, a town in the district of Anhalt-Bitterfeld, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. In the past, as it was part of the border region together with the neighboring Saxon region around Magdeburg in the west, Zerbst was incorporated into the Gau Ciervisti of the Saxon Eastern March (Marca Geronis). The etymology of the name Zerbst is linked to its Slavic origins. The second part of the paper consists of an analysis of how the Danish Secretary of State, Christian Friedrich Temler (1717-1780) approached the subject. Temler was originally from Zerbst and in his notebook, but even more importantly in his “Illyrian dictionary” (both manuscripts are conserved in the Royal Library in Copenhagen) he offers a set of etymologies related to the toponyms of the Zerbst/Anhalt district, including the very city of Zerbst itself. In so doing, Temler demonstrates the connection between the toponyms of northern and eastern Germany, Poland and the Pomeranian region with the Slavic language spoken in Dalmatia, on the eastern coast of the Adriatic sea.

Keywords: Ch.F. Temler, etymology, Illirian dictionary, Zerbst

Francesca D’Alfonso: “The Dying Animal” (Merope n. 64 - pp. 55-77)

Francesca D’Alfonso
Philip Roth, The Dying Animal e la lezione dei maestri

Abstract — This article analyses The Dying Animal by emphasising the central opposition between Eros and Thanatos, as well as examining the intertextual elements that direct the author’s creative process. In this novel, more than any other of his works, Philip Roth makes use of literary and pictorial references to create an intense and constantly lively dialogism. The importance of these references for the textual organisation of the novel lies in the fact that every writer or artist mentioned has a functional bearing on its narrative structures and themes. Consequently, the paradigm of mortality (Yeats, Kafka, ecc.) is connected to the subject of the nude and flesh in painting. (Modigliani, Spencer, ecc.) which are seen as a metamorphosis that leads to death. In the end, the awareness of human finitude becomes the lesson which the main protagonist, David Kepesh, will learn from the great masters of literature and art.

Keywords: The Dying Animal, Philip Roth, intertextuality, painting, eroticism.

Aldo Marroni, La “persuasione” erotica (Merope n. 64 - pp. 43-54)

Aldo Marroni
La “persuasione” erotica.
Carlo Michelstaedter e il desiderio di “far di se stesso fiamma”

Abstract — The purpose of this essay is to trace the origin of the notion of “persuasion” in connection with the strong passions which possessed Michelstaedter, especially during his brief erotic experience with his chosen muse, Nadia Baraden. The Russian woman was considered by the young philosopher as “persuaded” ante litteram and he attempted to give rise to a singular “lovers community” to raise as an alternative to the “communities of the wicked”. But Nadia’s suicide destroyed all his hopes. Michelstaedter wrote his most important work, La persuasione e la rettoricca, under her influence. With the image of Nadia constantly before him, he would, almost in a spirit of emulation, take his own final and definitive decision.

Keywords: eroticism, “persuasion”, passion, desire, flame.

Renzo D’Agnillo, “The Return of the Native” (Merope n. 64 - pp. 27-41)

Renzo D’Agnillo
High Knowledge Into Empty Minds: Clym Yeobright’s Distracted Didactics in The Return of the Native

Abstract — This article explores the question of education in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native from the point of view of the didactic aspirations of the novel’s main protagonist, Clym Yeobright. Written before the advent of the Education Act, Hardy’s novel provides an underlying critique of compulsory education of the masses as well as a questioning of the nature of education through the dramatisation of a range of differing attitudes, from the jealous guarding of traditional rural values to the quest for self-betterment and the romantic desire for escape. In spite of the autobiographical features that went into the creation of Clym, Hardy’s avoidance of self-identification with his hero is apparent in his implicit criticism of the pretentiousness of his didactic aims and his representation of his ambivalent character traits. However, an alternative sense resides in the text whereby Clym finally acquires the spiritual awareness and human sympathy he previously lacked through his re-appropriation of the natural values transmitted to him by the natural world of the heath which, in the final analysis, may be considered the real educational force of his life.

Keywords: Hardy, education, didactics, community, humanism

Saviour Catania: “The Bad Sleep Well” (Merope n. 64 - pp. 5-25)

Saviour Catania
The Dreaming Dead: Noirish Spectres of Hamlet in Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well

Abstract — This paper dissects Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well as a Hamlet offshoot in terms of Shakespeare’s metaphysical concern with what Lewis labels “being dead”. For Nishi is Hamlet’s incarnation as Bloom conceives him, “a walking mousetrap” whose avenging dream of Iwabuchi’s (Claudius’) bureaucratic end transmutes him into what Knight calls Shakespeare’s “ambassador of death”. In fact, Nishi dissolves the zaibatsu, or Japanese realm of corrupt business conglomerates, into a sickening insubstantiality that parallels Hamlet’s vision of Nature as “a foul and pestilential contagion of vapours”. Shades of Hamlet, the “chameleon” thriving on stale courtly air, permeate Nishi’s noirish fate — for what Nishi shares with almost all the rest is a cigarette addiction that distils their soul to dissipating smoke. The result is Shakespearean spectral noir. Significantly, when Nishi emerges, wraithlike from the volcanic mist, he embroils the ‘ghost’ of the presumed suicide Wada (Rosencrantz) in his murdered father’s revenge tragedy, thereby transforming him into a phantom of his own phantom-being. For only by appropriating Hamlet’s “antic disposition”, through his exchange of identity with Itakura (Horatio), does Nishi marry Iwabuchi’s daughter Keiko (Ophelia). But Nishi’s is a mousetrap marriage whereby Ophelia, Laertes’ cankered rosebud, manifests in terms of Keiko as a rose of death adorning the ‘murder’ window of her building-shaped wedding cake. Iwabuchi still sleeps well, yet as Richie contends, “the dead sleep best” — for they are spectres of Hamlet’s profound dread: “To die, to sleep; /To sleep, perchance to dream”. Thus the dead Nishi’s dream resurges in Iwabuchi’s grief. Kurosawa’s revisioning of Hamlet corroborates Derrida’s intuition that “a masterpiece moves, by definition, in the manner of a ghost”. For what haunts The Bad Sleep Well is Hamlet’s dreaming dead.

Keywords: Adaptation, Hybridity, Noirism, Fragmentation, Spectrality, Nihilism

Indice MEROPE ANNO XXV - N. 64 – Luglio 2016

Merope n. 64

Francesca Crisante: «“Classicità” da Byron a Swinburne» (Merope n. 63 - pp. 129-144)

Francesca Crisante
Paradigmi della “Classicità”:
presenza catulliana da Byron a Swinburne

Abstract — The influence of ancient Rome on Victorian culture and society deserves particular attention since the myth of Romanitas contains the idea of a state of perfection which, to a significant degree, inspired numerous imitations and emulations on the part of Victorian authors. This article examines the extraordinary influence Catullus exerted on both romantic and Victorian literary figures alike as a consequence of Byron’s admiration of his works. In particular, Catullus’s interpretation of the female world, his conception of sexuality as well as other aspects of Latin hedonism are revived in the poetry of Swinburne who never concealed the fact that he regarded Catullus as one of the founding models for his own poetry. An analysis of Catullus’s poetry confirms the extent to which his themes pervade both Victorian verse and the visual arts which not only draw inspiration from the Latin poet but also share his axiological vision.

Keywords: Catullus, Romanitas, Victorian poetry, imitation, Swinburne, sexuality

Maria Luigia Di Nisio: «Amy Levy» (Merope n. 63 - pp. 109-128)

Maria Luigia Di Nisio
Acquiescenza o ribellione: l’antica Grecia di Amy Levy

Abstract — In the course of the 1870s universities began to admit women, reluctantly allowing them a scholarly education: the first Jewish woman to attend Newnham College, Cambridge, Amy Levy had the opportunity to study Latin and Greek and be part of a lively female intellectual society, increasingly interested in classical culture. Women’s classicism in the last decades of the nineteenth century has been defined “heretical”, for it challenged male hegemony over the “sweetness and light” of the Ancient World, dramatizing oppression, desperation, violence and murderous passions. Levy’s revision of myth is no exception: the heroines of her Ancient Greece are thought-provoking figures, who debunk the Victorian ideal of womanhood, while addressing broader issues of cultural inclusion as well as the notions of history, canonicity and myth. This essay focuses on three poems, A Greek Girl, Xantippe and Medea, all written between 1879 and 1882, exploring how Levy defies cultural, sexual and ethnical categories, and further experiments with formal strategies, moving from the dramatic monologue to the more complex closet drama. 

Keywords: Levy, women poets, feminism, classicism, dramatic monologue

Maria Giovanna Petrillo: «Jean-Philippe Toussaint» (Merope n. 63 - pp.87-108)

Maria Giovanna Petrillo 
La città italiana nell’opera di Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Abstract — From Malot’s to Benjamin’s Paris, through Dickens’ London up to  Calvin’s invisible cities  or the long-debated Ballard’s “Ultimate  City”, the city has taken on, within the all-time literary landscape,  a crucial importance for the novel’s framework, becoming “un lieu  scénique” intended as a space, latu sensu, of the “modern” linguistic  and literary geography, “hyperbole de la grande opposition dialectique  culture versus nature”. Within these dynamics, the Italian city has  enchanted, with its unusual and unique details, French and Francophone  writers that, starting from Stendhal and George Sand, have  fictionalized it in cameos with recognizable features in works in  which, as pointed out by Jean -Yves Tadié “la carte de la ville  organise la narration; l’éclatement de la mégapole la multiplie la  pulverize”. On the contrary, as this paper will attempt to show, the  Italian city in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s work is presented to the  reader in two ways: on the one hand, in the first part of his literary  production, as a city “sans qualities”, a “non-lieux” where “rien ne  bouge” and in which the non-personality of the first person narrator  sees his reflection in a narcissistic Lacanian mirror game; on the  other hand, in the second part of his literary production, the Italian city is a kind of topical landmark, milestone, implying both a  narrative turning point and a substantial change in the first person  narrator’s personality.

Keywords: city, Italy, first-person narrator, stillness, sea

Raffaella Sciarra: «Jane Austen» (Merope n. 63 - pp. 61-85)

Raffaella Sciarra
“In trade”: commercio, profitti e snobismo di casta in Emma
di Jane Austen

Abstract — Through an in-depth analysis of Emma and its main and secondary characters, I aim to demonstrate how Austen’s work increasingly engage in a complex relationship to the economy, moving through an examination of it as measure of social morality but also as agent of social disruption. Throughout the eighteenth century, commerce and trade were viewed on the one hand as necessary to the well-being of the nation and on the other as a threat to the social order. In this context, the man of commerce was figured as a cause of disorder in English culture. The fearsome personal mobility of social status was becoming more achievable as Austen wrote: in the circumscribed social context of Highbury, one of the recurring themes thus pivots on rank and its defence from attacks of a changing world. In particular, I will examine the role of all characters “in trade” or related to commerce, and the opinionated way they are depicted by the author. The stigma of commerce is indeed evident throughout the novel and it reflects the reaction of the time to the emerging commercial and consumer culture. In a time when the general order and stability of society and the “rights of property” were inseparably linked, the emerging of the new upstarts, i.e., the broad category of moneyed and professional families that struggle to conquer a place in society, becomes a terrifying menace to the old ranked “landed gentry”. However, social acceptance proves harder to achieve than material wealth.

Keywords: commerce, economy, rank, order, mobility

Angelo Riccioni: «Frederic Prokosch» (Merope n. 63 - pp. 39-60)

Angelo Riccioni
Frederic Prokosch e il mito di Lord Byron

Abstract — This essay provides an analysis of a long-forgotten novel about Lord Byron, The Missolonghi Manuscript (1968), written by the American author Frederic Prokosch (1906-1989). Born in a cosmopolitan and well educated family in Madison, Wisconsin, Prokosch travelled widely for much of his life through Europe, writing books that aroused the admiration of Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Thornton Wilder and of his long-dated friend Gore Vidal. At first sight a reconstruction of the lost memoirs of Lord Byron, The Missolonghi Manuscript actually is, in his author’s words, ‘a study of the romantic artist’. As a consequence, the novel seems to transcends Byron’s life involving reflections on the way Romantic art changed the history of ideas. Focusing on the reasons that led Prokosch to write his imaginary portrait of the ‘Wicked Lord’ and examining the modalities of his literary depiction of Byron, this work explores how history and biography blend together in The Missolonghi Manuscript in order to depict the Zeitgeist of the Romantic Era. Finally, this essay aims to revaluate the position of Frederic Prokosch in XX century literature, stressing the importance of The Missolonghi Manuscript as a precursor to that kind of postmodernist historical fiction notably practised by Anthony Burgess, A.S Byatt and Umberto Eco.

Keywords: Frederic Prokosch, Lord Byron, The Missolonghi Manuscript, Romanticism, imaginary portrait

Francesco Marroni: «Beckett» (Merope n. 63 - pp. 5-37)

Francesco Marroni
Beckett, le arti visive e gli antimodelli estetici

Abstract — In his search for an aesthetics which would liberate him from the influence of Joyce and allow him to discover a new literary approach, Beckett found important suggestions as well as a working method in the visual arts. What he learnt initially from Dutch art and, later, from David Caspar Friedrich would lead to the minimalist valence of his writing which was not unconnected with an interpretation of humanity as an insignificant presence within the vast dimension of the cosmos. As a result of his continual dialogue with the visual arts, Beckett would measure himself against Paul Cézanne from whom, as suggested by the watercolour Mont Sainte-Victoire, he derived the image of a deanthropomorphised world. In both his plays and narrative works, Beckett translates this idea by representing human beings in the face of nothingness as derelict creatures whose only sense of destiny is their own misery and fragmented survival.

Keywords: Beckett, visual arts, aesthetics, antimodels, deanthropomorphisation, nothingness

Indice MEROPE ANNO XXV - N. 63 – Gennaio 2016

Merope n. 63