Journal of European Studies

Magris’s text addresses the circuitous and lengthy creative process that led to the conceptualization and writing of his latest novel Alla cieca (2005; Blindly, 2010). It offers, at same time, a reflection on the core dialectical binary of the work: the relation between inventing History and creating History and thus on the relationship between History and the contemporary novel. Magris sheds light on his own formal and stylistic approach to his text and on his ethical quest among the ideological utopias and individual tragedies of pre- and post-WWII Europe.

This essay explores Magris’s extensive reflection on the nature of homeland, dwellings and borders in the construction of individual and European identity. Through an analysis of Magris’s major works, the essay claims that it is in the tension between dissolution and the comfort of temporary housing that Magris locates the new possibilities of a European project and of the self’s home.

Claudio Magris is a writer of the frontier and of liminal places. This article explores the various dimensions that the border acquires in his work at a cultural, linguistic, philosophical and existential level. It focuses in particular on the image of the border as a barrier and a bridge, and on the poetics of ‘the other side’. Through an analysis of Magris’s major works of fiction and literary criticism, it individuates the relevance of geographical time, placed in dialogue and often in contrast to historical time, and investigates Magris’s geo-cultural, geo-literary, geo-historical and geo-linguistic approaches to his idea of culture. The last section of the article is devoted to the novel Un altro mare (1991; A Different Sea, 1993) and to the discussion of how the cultural heritage of the Hapsburg Empire reaches deeply, as a liminal cultural space, into the contemporary world.

This essay examines selected aspects of Claudio Magris’s life and work, his analysis of Mitteleuropean culture, his use of symbolic spaces and his reflection on borders, frontiers, territorialism and identity, as part of a broader set of relations between literature, values, identity, ethics, and the politics and policies of human interaction in more inclusive communities and networks.

Starting from his more local and regional northern Italian identity and Bildung, the essay traces some essential paths through his research into Mitteleuropean culture, centred especially around an examination of the ‘inner’ and individual dynamics of acculturation. It then proceeds to a comparison with the sense of intellectual, Italian and European identity of another famous Germanist, finally to arrive at some of his later works, both fictional and essayistic, placing them in the context of the current institutional dynamics shaping ‘European identity’, examining some the global/‘peripheral’ forces that are most responsible for this ‘shaping’.

This essay analyses Claudio Magris’s novel Alla cieca (2005; Blindly, 2010) vis-à-vis the crisis of the postmodern novel in the new millennium. It begins by emphasizing the sense of discontent with postmodern narrative practices as articulated by Franco Rella, Claudio Magris and Romano Luperini in various texts. The rest of the essay is a discussion of Magris’s complex novel in which, through the shattered voice of the protagonist, the author unveils the ideals, the compromises and the tragedies that have informed the last two hundred years of European history. Although the novel depicts the crisis and collapse of political ideals and strong ideologies, it does not yield to a weak nihilism, nor does it argue in favour of a levelling of every belief.