Smith ScholarWorks Italian Language and Literature: Faculty Publications Italian Language and Literature 2010 Predrag Matvejević’s Mediterranean Breviary: Nostalgia for an “Ex-World” or Breviary for a New Community? Anna Botta Smith College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/itl_facpubs Part of the Italian Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Botta, Anna, "Predrag Matvejević’s Mediterranean Breviary: Nostalgia for an “Ex-World” or Breviary for a New Community?" (2010). Italian Language and Literature: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA. https://scholarworks.smith.edu/itl_facpubs/3 This Article has been accepted for inclusion in Italian Language and Literature: Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Smith ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact
[email protected] UC Berkeley California Italian Studies Title Predrag Matvejević’s Mediterranean Breviary: Nostalgia for an “Ex-World” or Breviary for a New Community? Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7qs4x1v0 Journal California Italian Studies, 1(1) Author Botta, Anna Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Predrag Matvejevi ć’s Mediterranean Breviary : Nostalgia for an “Ex-World” or Breviary for a New Community? Anna Botta La tua legge rischiosa: essere vasto e diverso e insieme fisso: e svuotarmi cosí di ogni lordura come tu fai che sbatti sulle sponde tra sugheri alghe asterie le inutili macerie del tuo abisso. (Eugenio Montale) 1 I. Rethinking Mediterranean Studies It has been widely trumpeted that we live in the era of the postnational or the transnational. In particular, in academic circles, a sophisticated sense of the problems that arise when studying history through the prism of the nation-state has encouraged scholars to move towards new objects of study (or, to be more correct, to revisit and redefine old ones).