Crossing borders: Claudio Magris and the aesthetic of the other side

Abstract

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.