Watching the Great Sea of Beauty: Thinking the Ancient Greek Mediterranean
Constanze Güthenke
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: March (2006)
Abstract
This is a contribution to be published in a volume entitled Mediterranean Studies, edited by Roberto Dainotto and Eric Zakim for the Modern Language Association (MLA), as part of a new MLA series on Transnational Literatures. The editors had asked their contributors to respond to their introduction in which they encourage new ways of conceptualizing cultural contact, and to suggest new approaches to reading and writing the Mediterranean, creating a new epistemology of place, especially with a view to literature. Contributions span all geographic areas of the Mediterranean. While I was initially asked to look at modern travelers with a view to Greek antiquity and ancient travelers, the paper gradually turned into an essay on how to integrate some recent work on the ancient Mediterranean within the editors’ agenda.
The characters who in Alessandro Baricco’s poetic novel Oceano Mare (1993) have traveled to the in-between world of a little pensione on the edge of an unnamed, timeless seashore, are each challenged to encounter, come to know and somehow contain the ocean sea they find themselves facing. Those hold the promise of a future, who, like Elisewin, come to recognize, or at least accept, the life-saving limitation of the sea – if only in order to move on to different and new uncertainties. One of the other guests pacing the seashore is a scholar (a relative, it would appear, both of Barthes’ writer on holiday and of Calvino’s author in search of the single wave), whose life project is an Encyclopedia of Boundaries Visible in Nature, with a Separate Appendix on the Boundaries of Human Faculties.
Constanze Güthenke
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: March (2006)
Abstract
This is a contribution to be published in a volume entitled Mediterranean Studies, edited by Roberto Dainotto and Eric Zakim for the Modern Language Association (MLA), as part of a new MLA series on Transnational Literatures. The editors had asked their contributors to respond to their introduction in which they encourage new ways of conceptualizing cultural contact, and to suggest new approaches to reading and writing the Mediterranean, creating a new epistemology of place, especially with a view to literature. Contributions span all geographic areas of the Mediterranean. While I was initially asked to look at modern travelers with a view to Greek antiquity and ancient travelers, the paper gradually turned into an essay on how to integrate some recent work on the ancient Mediterranean within the editors’ agenda.
The characters who in Alessandro Baricco’s poetic novel Oceano Mare (1993) have traveled to the in-between world of a little pensione on the edge of an unnamed, timeless seashore, are each challenged to encounter, come to know and somehow contain the ocean sea they find themselves facing. Those hold the promise of a future, who, like Elisewin, come to recognize, or at least accept, the life-saving limitation of the sea – if only in order to move on to different and new uncertainties. One of the other guests pacing the seashore is a scholar (a relative, it would appear, both of Barthes’ writer on holiday and of Calvino’s author in search of the single wave), whose life project is an Encyclopedia of Boundaries Visible in Nature, with a Separate Appendix on the Boundaries of Human Faculties.
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