Thalassopoetics

Abstract

Citing Hugh of Saint Victor’s twelfth-century encyclopedic Didascalicon in “The Philology of World Literature,” Erich Auerbach describes two apparently contradictory phenomena, attachment to the nation and renunciation of the nation. Shedding light on the Ulyssean paradigm that underpins both Saint Victor’s phrase and Auerbach’s personal experience of exile, this essay attempts the following reformulation: The one for whom the fatherland is sweet is Ulysses; the one to whom every soil is as his native one is the cosmopolitan; the one to whom the entire world is as a foreign land is the sailor. The sailor is that being of radical strangeness—“There are three kinds of men, the living, the dead and those who are at sea,” the Greek saying goes—in exile everywhere, where the cosmopolitan is at home everywhere. How do the figures of Ulysses, the cosmopolitan, and the sailor—three possible avatars of the contemporary philologist—intersect, and can one propose variations on the relationship between nation and literature, as well as avenues for new thalassopoetic paradigms of “world literature”?