Abstract
A scratch on the ground and a knock on a door. With these two elegant, but rather slight, gestures does this meditation begin. But few scratches on the ground and few knocks on a door have had more incisive effects in man’s literary history. They don’t belong to the realm of simple cause and effect, but that doesn’t matter. Where they take us does matter, and it is a maritime world of islands and boats, floating rocks and possibly sinking caravels. The scratch on the ground was done by Joana Carda, the knock on the palace door was performed by a nameless man. Both are literary characters, but their modest gestures have much broader implications than ‘just literature’ (whatever that may mean). They take us to the heights of some of philosophy’s most important political concepts, recent and ancient. And why not, let me name them from the very beginning, they are the concepts of utopia and heterotopia.
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Vanhoutte, K. (2023). Islands and Boats: (Lucid?) Meditations on a Stone Utopia and a Naval Heterotopia in the Work of José Saramago. In: Baltrusch, B., Salzani, C., Vanhoutte, K. (eds) A Responsibility to the World: Saramago, Politics, Philosophy. iBroLiT – Estudos Iberorrománicos de Literatura e Tradutoloxía. Ibero-Romance Studies in Literature and Translatology, vol 9. Frank & Timme, Berlin. https://doi.org/10.57088/978-3-7329-8985-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.57088/978-3-7329-8985-0_3
Publisher Name: Frank & Timme, Berlin
Online ISBN: 978-3-7329-8985-0
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