«Studi Germanici», 28 (2025)

Leggi l’intero fascicolo / Das ganze Heft lesen

• Frontespizio e indice, pp. 1-6

Saggi

• On Human-Plant Encounters and Interactions. Phytographical Narration in Henrik Stangerup’s Vejen til Lagoa Santa, pp. 9-27
  Camilla Storskog
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.01

  On Human-Plant Encounters and Interactions. Phytographical Narration in Henrik Stangerup’s Vejen til Lagoa Santa
  Henrik Stangerup’s novel Vejen til Lagoa Santa (1981; The Road to Lagoa Santa, 1988) offers topical perspectives on issues of interest in contemporary debates on science, ecology, indigenous knowledge, and (post)colonialism. This article positions the novel within the so-called ‘vegetal turn’ and engages with the phytographical discourse in the text. Phytographical narratives focus on the writing on plants and the writing of plants (Patricia Vieira), as well as on the ‘intersubjectivity’, ‘interactivity’, and ‘relationality’ between humans and plants (John Charles Ryan). This reading examines the role of tropical flora in transforming the scientific mind of the literary figure P.W. Lund (1801-1880), an internationally renowned Danish naturalist. While sight is central to Lund’s efforts to establish order in the Linnaean tradition of scientific observation, his hierarchical and static ‘Western gaze’ gives way to a new, relational approach to botany, which involves other physical senses. The aim is to consider Lund’s ‘conversion’ as a phytographical turn through which the scientist develops an ecological thinking in line with indigenous ways of knowing and being, and to discuss Stangerup’s representational strategies when articulating a counter-gaze and a vegetal language.

• Allen gemein. Friedrich Hölderlin nel dibattito franco-italiano sulla comunità, pp. 29-49
  Chiara Caradonna
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.02
  

  Allen gemein. Friedrich Hölderlin in the French-Italian Debate on Community
  Starting from the 1980s, faced with the decline of the political perspectives linked to the communist project, an intense philosophical debate, aimed at rethinking the concept of community, emerged between France and Italy. Drawing on the thought of Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy initiated this reflection with The Inoperative Community (1983), followed in the same year by Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community and, in 1990, by Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community. At the turn of the millennium, Roberto Esposito’s Communitas (1998) and, later, Nancy’s The Disavowed Community (2014) marked a renewed engagement with the topic. Beyond their thematic focus, these works share a recurring – though seemingly marginal – reference to the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. My essay explores this persistent presence of Hölderlin in the Franco-Italian debate on community, clarifying the use and function of his quotations in relation to the poet’s own reflection on the subject. The analysis of Hölderlinian intertextuality in the works of Nancy, Blanchot, Agamben, and Esposito helps to trace the legacy of his thought – mediated by Heidegger – within contemporary philosophy. Moreover, it sheds new light on the relation between aesthetics and politics, between poetic word and civic action, which the essay also discusses in light of recent theoretical proposals such as Achille Mbembe’s The Earthly Community (2022).

• Die Ökonomie der Klassik. Goethes Italienische Reise, pp. 51-78
  Markus Steinmayr
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.03
  
  Economics Classicism in Goethe’s Italian Journey
  These reflections focus on the connection between classical economics and Weimar Classicism in Goethe’s Italian Journey. The focus is on the concepts of work, Bildung and productivity, all of which are elements of classical economics and of literature. This has consequences for the economics of the self, as is particularly evident in Goethe’s Italian Journey. The ‘rebirth’ as an artist, one of the central outcomes of Goethe’s Italian journey, develops a specific economy of Goethe’s career as an artist with regard to the reception of art and its production. In examining the well-known Naples passages, the assessment and presentation of economic knowledge in Goethe’s travelogue is taken into consideration. Finally, the thesis that the concept of Weimar Classicism cannot be understood without the emergence of economic theories is taken up once again. Building on classical economics, the essay shows that physiocratic theories in particular, which derive the productivity of an economy from a regulated relationship between nature and culture, provide an economic basis for Weimar Classicism.

Ricerche

• Corpo vocalico, dialoghi interspecie e partiture unsound: il mondo animale di Antonia Baehr, pp. 81-96
  Riccardo Fazi
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.04
  

  Vocal ensemble, interspecies dialogues and unsound scores: the animal world by Antonia Baehr
  The essay is built on the analysis of some of the fundamental works of director, performer, and choreographer Antonia Baehr (Berlin, 1970) – focusing in particular on the artist’s vocal and sound experimentation – in order to open up a broader reflection on strategies for overcoming the human-nature dualism within contemporary performing arts. Baehr’s work takes the form of a polyphonic territory of investigation, a field of relationships and alliances between voice, body, and animal otherness. This proves worth exploring not only for its intrinsic qualities, but also and above all as an example of a vaster trend in contemporary performing arts: that of tracing, in research on the dimension of sound and, in particular, corporeal and vocal techniques, a fertile ground for reflection and speculation on the nature of the human and performative self. Baehr’s figures have shifting, phantasmagorical, evanescent but at the same time deeply embodied voices that are worth listening to carefully today.

• «Il pianto silenzioso delle donne della casa del cioccolato». Legami intergenerazionali e identificazioni inconsce nel romanzo L’ottava vita (per Brilka) di Nino Haratischwili, pp. 97-116
  Elisa Destro
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.05
  

  Intergenerational Links and Unconscious Identifications in Nino Haratischwili’s Novel The Eighth Life (for Brilka)
  The article aims to investigate the representation of the transgenerational transmission of traumatic experiences in the novel Das achte Leben (für Brilka) (2014) by the Georgian-born author Nino Haratischwili, by drawing on psychoanalytic and epigenetic studies on the subject, as well as cultural studies on memory and post-memory. The article highlights psychic processes such as phantasmatic projections and telescopic identifications of the unconscious, which denote a disturbance in genealogy – ascribable to unprocessed grief and trauma – and transmitted from one generation to another on an unconscious level as a void. At the same time, the essay also examines the therapeutic journey that needs to be undertaken by the descendants of the family at the centre of the work in order to re engage with their past history. If, on the one hand, the narrative is full of gaps and circular structures (a symptom of an unspeakable trauma that cannot be expressed and always returns to itself), on the other hand, the blank pages at the end, as well as the circular structure of the frame, have a positive meaning – that of (post-)memory, which attempts to return to its origins in order to create a new, meaningful narrative and, with it, a new life.

• La Fessel come spazio di possibilità poetologica – Aichinger, Wittgenstein e l’agency linguistica nel racconto Der Gefesselte, pp. 117-138
  Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.06
  

  The Fessel (Constraint) As a Space of Poetological Possibility – Aichinger, Wittgenstein, and Linguistic Agency in the Short Story Der Gefesselte
  The article offers an original reading of Ilse Aichinger’s short story Der Gefesselte, redefining her literary project for writing after the Shoah. It introduces the concept of ‘linguistic guilt’ and shows how Aichinger reflects on the margins of manoeuvre left by a language – and a literary field – that participated, directly or indirectly, in Nazi crimes. The article places Aichinger in dialogue with Wittgenstein – a connection well-established in scholarship on the Austrian writer – but moves away from common mystical and hermetic interpretations, instead emphasizing the possibilities for agency within a linguistic Fessel, or constraint, imbued with guilt and memory. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘form of life’, which he identifies with language, the article highlights Aichinger’s insistence on continuity with the ‘language of the murderers’ and on the spaces of agency that such continuity both implies and permits.

• La biblioteca nascosta di Sigrid Undset. Una lettura genettiana di Fortællingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis (1909), pp. 139-164
  Ruben Gavilli – Anna Wegener
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.07

  The Hidden Library of Sigrid Undset. A Genettian Reading of Fortællingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis (1909)
  Sigrid Undset’s historical novella Fortællingen om Viga-Ljot and Vigdis (1909, Eng. trans. Gunnar’s Daughter) has received little academic attention. Scholars have generally tended to label it, somewhat condescendingly, as a pastiche. In this article, we shed light on the complex ways in which the novella relates to Old Icelandic literature, first and foremost the family sagas, thus showing that the prevailing critical view of the text – which condemns it to obscurity – is incorrect. Drawing on Genette’s famous theory of transtextuality, we explore the intertextual, paratexual and hypertextual relationships between the novella and the multiple texts that it incorporates, imitates and/or transforms. We show how Undset alluded to numerous historical sources with the aim of evoking the cultural and religious climate of the Viking Age in Norway; how her main source of inspiration was probably the groundbreaking 19th-century Danish translation of the family sagas by N.M. Petersen; and how, while partially imitating Petersen’s saga style, she also conducted a series of significant transformations of the genre to adapt it to her interest in the darker aspects of human psychology.

• Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Lebenslied (1896) – un’analisi intertestuale, pp. 165-191
  Mario Zanucchi
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.08

  Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Lebenslied (1896) – an Intertextual Analysis
  This essay aims to systematically investigate/explore/study the intertextual dimension of Lebenslied for the first time and to move beyond its interpretation as an Erlebnisgedicht. Instead, the essay develops a poetological reading that identifies in the text a programmatic act of emancipation from the canonized and stifling tradition of fin-de-siècle Vienna, represented primarily by the cult of Schiller. Following Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation, Hofmannsthal’s Lebenslied undertakes a poetological examination of the
  relationship between tradition and poetry. The text advocates for the squandering of inheritance as a gesture of liberation from the burden of ossified tradition. The relinquishment of the past is presented as an opportunity for the emergence of a new poetics – one rooted in the vital interconnectedness of all things. Hofmannsthal’s intertextual dialogue with the Romantic tradition (Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Friedrich Rückert) demonstrates, conversely, that Lebenslied remains tethered, nonetheless to literary inheritance through a process of complex re-elaboration.

• Un’Ellade kitsch. La Grecia come antidoto al presente nella lirica tedesca del tardo Ottocento, pp. 193-204
  Sergio Corrado
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.09
  

  Kitschy Hellas. Greece as an Antidote to the Present in German Poetry in Late 19th-Century
  In German poetry of the second half of 19th century, Greece – decades after the uprising (in Greek Epanàstasi, 1821) against Ottoman rule – remains a popular subject. However, in the style of poets such as Ernst Ziel, Emanuel Geibel, Theodor Altwasser, Franz Binhack or Adolf Friedrich von Schack, the real Greece is antiqued and transformed into a kitschy scenography, into a refuge for bourgeois idyllic fantasies. Greek antiquity has now lost all metamorphic potential. What remains is an artificial image that proves to be functional for the development of a conservative, apolitical, anti-realist aesthetic, in which the Greece that actually exists finds no place – as is mostly the case in the philhellenic discourse. Is such poetry still readable today? We can easily dismiss it as ‘epigonal poetry’, because the classicism it claims to embody is reduced to little more than a mannerist landscape full of ruins, olive trees, shepherds, and dancing women, and to the elegiac lament for irretrievably lost Hellas. But if we decontextualize them and look for their unintentionally frivolous effect, then – surprisingly – this fake Greece can be appreciated as a kind of stage for pop operettas.

• Vergils Grab – Petrarcas Haus. Zur Frühgeschichte der ‘literarischen Wallfahrt’, pp. 205-232
  Paul Kahl
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.10
  

  Virgil’s Tomb – Petrarch’s House. On the Early History of ‘Literary Pilgrimage’
  The history of visits to Virgil’s tomb in Naples dates back to antiquity (Statius), extends through the late Middle Ages (Petrarch, Boccaccio) and reaches into the early modern period. It is a forerunner of what is commonly termed ‘literary pilgrimage’, a phenomenon usually associated with the 19th-century religion of art and with sites linked to canonical poets – most notably, poets’ homes – and thus conventionally seen as a product of modernity. Alongside interpretations of literary worship as a modern and Romantic religion of art, replacing religious pilgrimages, there emerges a long-standing, cultural, and premodern prehistory that clearly reflects an anthropological model of the worship of individuals, particularly artists. In addition to the significant example of Virgil’s tomb, this prehistory also includes the early history of poets’ homes – most notably that of Francesco Petrarch – which, within a premodern context thoroughly permeated by Christian culture, became pilgrimage destinations. Discussing these two sites – the tomb of Virgil and the house of Petrarch – is especially relevant, since Petrarch had ties to both: a key figure in the cult of personality, he was a traveller following in Virgil’s footsteps and shortly thereafter, himself became a destination and object of literary pilgrimage.

• Et libri scripti sunt: la memoria del peccato nei registri del Diavolo, pp. 233-250
  Lidia Francesca Oliva
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.11
  

  Et libri scripti sunt: the Memory of Sin in the Devil’s Books
  This study examines the motif of the writing devil, a figure widely attested in medieval European culture and rooted in the eschatological vision of the Apocalypse, in which the dead are judged according to what is recorded in divine books. Building on this theological matrix, the medieval imagination developed the concept of demonic writing that preserves vain words, lapses, and human sins. In England, this theme unfolds across a variety of homiletic texts, collections of exempla, poetic works, and theatrical performances, and also appears in numerous iconographic representations, in which devils are depicted transcribing improper conversations, recording moments of distraction, or compiling full registers of the faithful’s transgressions. The figure of Titivillus, in particular, emerges as a symbol of the memory of sin and as a performative character endowed with considerable comic and theatrical potential. His role, oscillating between moral admonition, satire of human behaviour, and entertainment, demonstrates how the medieval period translated central theological concerns – judgment, responsibility, and spiritual discipline – into vivid images and narratives capable of combining fear and irony with Christian pedagogy.

Rassegne

• Lingua e sostenibilità: le prospettive nella ricerca linguistica, pp. 253-265
  Eriberto Russo
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.12   
  

  Language and Sustainability: Perspectives in Linguistic Research
  After framing the issue of the relationship between language and sustainability within the field of ecolinguistic studies, this paper examines some of the most recent publications on the relationship between linguistics and sustainability, highlighting theoretical, methodological, and applied approaches. The «Deutsche Sprache» special issue (2021) emphasizes the importance of considering sustainability as a discursive phenomenon, integrating discourse analysis, frame semantics, and multimodal perspectives. Issue 33/2023 of «metaphorik.de» explores the role of metaphors and narratives in shaping the ecological imaginary, drawing on Arran Stibbe’s ecolinguistic theories. The volume Exploring Eco-Discourses (2024) broadens the discussion by analysing rhetorical and multimodal strategies in ecological discourses, with particular attention to the boundary between authentic communication and greenwashing practices. «Linguistik online» 132 (2024) shifts the focus to social sustainability, addressing linguistic inclusion and equity through a comparative analysis of German and Italian. Finally, the monographic issue of «Linguistica» 64.1 (2024) investigates the conceptualization and negotiation of sustainability across different communicative contexts, ranging from institutional communication and advertising to language teaching.

• Due nuove edizioni critiche: le opere di Fischart e di Frischlin,  pp. 267-277
  Roberto De Pol
  DOI: 10.82007/SG.2025.28.13

  A Review of Two New Critical Editions: Fischart’s Works and Frischlin’s Works
  The paper proposes a review of two critical editions published by Frommann-Holzboog (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt), which are part of the «Berliner Ausgaben. Sektion Philologische Wissenschaften», co-ordinated by Hans-Gert Roloff.
  These new editions are as follows: the Works of Johann Fischart, focusing on Volume IV, published in 2024 and dedicated to the translation of Bodin’s Démonomanie (Paris 1580), and the Works of Nicodemus Frischlin, focusing on Volume V.1, also published last year and collecting the poems composed in the decade 1562-1572.

Hanno collaborato

• Le autrici e gli autori, pp. 279-282

Ultimo aggiornamento 15 Gennaio 2026 a cura di Luisa Giannandrea