“I went aboard a ship and reached Byzantium”: The Motif of Travel in Edifying Stories
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2023 |
| Druh | Kapitola v knize |
| Citace | |
| Popis | This chapter examines the theme of travel and its role in the genre of edifying story. The introduction is devoted to the perception of space in the monastic edifying narrative literature more generally. Four levels of mirroring geographical reality in literature are presented: factual reality; cultural reality; personal reality; and textual reality. Subsequently, it points three spatial concepts important for this kind of literature: first, the contrast between oikoumene and eremos, the profane and the sacred world; second, the concept of liminality, and finally, the concept of heterotopias. In the second part of the chapter, the narrative space and the motif of travel in the genre are explored from the viewpoint of these three concepts with the help of the tools of narrative theory. It is proposed to distinguish two basic variations on the theme of travel: a journey which constitutes the frame of a story or a collection; and travel as a motif on the level of a single tale, where a special subcategory of the “transcendent” mode of travelling is pointed out. In the last part of the chapter, one “travel story” from the Daniel-Sketiotes-Dossier (end of the 6th century) is closely analysed as a case study. |