Spirou’s Origin Myth and Family Romances

This article focuses on the narratives of Spirou’s origins and backstory from Rob-Vel to Feroumont and Bravo, examining his progressive departure from the Tintinesque adventure paradigm. The Freudian notion of family romance, developed by Marthe Robert into the figures of the foundling and the bastard, is key, as it thematises the hero’s origins and early life in a domestic sphere. This motif, absent in Tintin, occurs in Spirou as Rob-Vel’s artistic creation becomes origin myth, and post-Franquin ‘naturalised’ conceptions give the character a family, a childhood, and related memories. The article examines how Spirou’s family romances, however small and allusive, create a connection between adventure and the domestic sphere and how this contributes to reinventing the Tintinesque model of adventure in contemporary bande dessinée.

Translingual Affairs of World Literature

This essay explores a number of texts of the exophonic, or non-native literary production, respectively in Italian and German, of translingual authors Jhumpa Lahiri and Yoko Tawada. While the paper looks at how their dominant languages, respectively English and Japanese, continue to play a role in these writers’ non-native production, it focuses on the different approaches the two authors adopt to translingualism and the “linguistic family romance” metaphor, which they equally employ in highly imaginative ways in order to address both their condition of rootlessness and their attitudes to the notion of “mother tongue.” The essay argues that while Lahiri seems to remain a writer that does not contaminate languages (she is a writer in English, a writer in Italian, and a translator of Italian literature into English), Tawada brings German and Japanese together and dwells on the space of contamination between them in her production in German (and Japanese).

The Poetic Vision of Isaiah

This chapter is an attempt to meet Robert Carroll’s challenge to account for and imaginatively interpret the visionary quality of Isaiah’s poetry. It begins with a discussion of biblical poetry and eschews formalistic definitions, showing how parallelism, like other formal devices, is a technique for generating meaning. It then considers the visionary quality of the poetry, as a divine message, and the trajectory from the vision to the book. The book can be read and reread in many different ways, and it tells several intertwining stories, all centering on the aporia of the exile and the hope of restoration. The chapter focuses on one of these stories, that of the family romance, which concerns especially issues of gender, including the gender of God.