Ét sted, to topoi

Stranden som blindgyde og kontaktzone i græsk antik digtning

Resumé

This article explores the beach as literary topos in ancient Greek literature from Homer to the Greek novels of late antiquity. References to beaches are ubiquitous in Greek literature but their literary representation tends to come in two distinct topological groups. Either Greek writers present the beach as a liminal place, as an existential cul-de-sac, where heroes express their loneliness and loss with tragic pathos, or instead they present the beach as a contact zone of encounters and adventure. The article will demonstrate the continuity and variability of these two topoi by comparing a number of literary examples. In a broader theoretical perspective, the differences between the two topoi and their literary qualities correlate with two distinctly different conceptions of the literary topos: on the one hand the rhetorical topology of Ernst Robert Curtius and on the other hand Mihail Bachtin’s narratological theory of the chronotope.