Comparative Literature & Italian

Abstract: In recent years, the declining importance of the nation-state and an increase in globalization have encouraged scholars to move towards the borderless world of seas and oceans, giving special attention to their diasporic movements of people and goods. Lately, ...

In recent years, the declining importance of the nation-state and an increase in globalization have encouraged scholars to move towards the borderless world of seas and oceans, giving special attention to their diasporic movements of people and goods. Lately, this “new thalassology” has witnessed an outburst of Mediterranean studies. Yet the resurgence of the Mediterranean in the postmodern, anti-nationalistic arena must be critically assessed. The risk in such studies is a reinforcing of old stereotypes, what the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld calls “Mediterraneism.” The present article highlights the work of two scholars and one writer who alert us to the manifold dangers of Mediterraneism and who offer standpoints for launching a serious interrogation of Mediterraneism. Roberto Dainotto points to the asymmetries couched in the alluring metaphors of liquidity and flows. Iain Chambers views the Mediterranean as a space of solid borders that entail the production and consumption of...

Requiem , the only narrative text written by Antonio Tabucchi in Portuguese, is also, as the author himself has confessed, his most autobiographical work. This text also presents its reader with an amazingly dense fabric of signification. An essentially plotless story, the narrative is cast as a dream and is as elusive and enigmatic as Tabucchi's other fictional works. The abundance of familiar topoi, along with references to the writer's own fiction and to his personal canon of literary and non-literary authors, would seem to invite the reader to provide an interpretation. Yet this invitation is itself a fiction, as several critics who have already engaged the text agree.