Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
What then are they looking for, our souls that travel/On rotting sea-timbers from one harbor to another?: the presence of classical mythology in contemporary literature of clandestine cross-Mediterranean migration
Department
English Department
College
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Date Range
2013-2014
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities
Abstract
Although the raw material on which it draws consists chiefly of urgent present-day realities, the corpus of contemporary Spanish, Moroccan, and Italian literature about cross-Mediterranean clandestine migration teems with allusions to the regions mythological past, and especially to The Odyssey. In this chapter, I focus on the ways in which two recurrent images in this literature and in its corresponding discourses the image of the Straits of Gibraltar and Sicily as cemeteries, and the motif of life-threatening landfall on an inhospitable shore resonate with two key passages from the ur-text of Mediterranean migration The Odyssey, Odysseuss journey to the underworld, and his arrival upon the shores of ScherÃa. In considering what is at stake in such intertextual resonance, I avail myself of Edgar Morins twofold notion that the Mediterranean must be demythologized and re-mythologized to argue that this literature can serve as a seedbed for new conceptions of Mediterranean identity.
Conference Name
17th Annual International Mediterranean Studies Association Congress
Conference Location
Malaga, Spain
ScholarWorks Citation
Álvarez, David, "What then are they looking for, our souls that travel/On rotting sea-timbers from one harbor to another?: the presence of classical mythology in contemporary literature of clandestine cross-Mediterranean migration" (2014). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 989.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/989
