%0 Journal Article
%T The hybrids of Claudio Magris
%A Tamas Dobozy
%J Journal of European Studies
%@ 1740-2379
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0047244119830904
%X This essay argues that Claudio Magris¡¯s early novels, Inferences from a Sabre (1991), and A Different Sea (1993), deliberately mingle genres in order to disrupt systems of knowing, and the power they enforce. While both novels treat different subject matter, they have a shared concern with the application of texts to life, deploying a range of genres ¨C biography and autobiography, letters, the novel, the philosophical and scholarly essay and historiography ¨C in bringing their stories to the reader. The ruptures between these genres disclose Magris¡¯s interest in structures of knowing, the work of genre in enforcing a certain world view, and the importance of the capacity ¨C derived from his interest in the ¡®Habsburger Mythos¡¯ ¨C to accommodate intra-generic variance, multiplicity, even contradiction, instantiating an unsettled writing, somewhere on the border between certainty and doubt. Magris¡¯s work with genre is thus not only aesthetic, but political, recalling a lost vision of European organization and inter-working
%K Central Europe
%K genre
%K historiography
%K hybridity
%K Italian literature
%K Claudio Magris
%K memoir
%K twentieth-century literature
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0047244119830904