This article analyses the central themes in the works of Claudio Magris through a critical reading of Danube, A Different Sea, Microcosms, Utopia e disincanto [Utopia and disenchantment], Blindly, Journeying, and Alfabeti [Alphabets]. Magris’s work, be it his fiction or essays, abounds with descriptions and narrations of spaces and places, which become central to his world-view as an author. These spaces and places, located primarily in Central Europe and in the surroundings of his own city, Trieste, inspired his turn to (...) Eastern Europe, including the Slavic countries. Conscious of the Western Europeans’ often condescending view of the East, Magris became a vocal critic of Western Eurocentrism, which he attributed to their insufficient familiarity with the cultures and histories of their Eastern neighbours. Magris’s primary interest has always been Europe’s ethnic and cultural coexistence, with a particular affinity with dissident, nationless, and exiled literary figures, in line with his notion of hybrid, fluid, and multiple identities. The works of Magris offer compelling reflections on a Europe viewed through the contradictory encounters between East and West. As such they have contributed to the gradual creation of hybrid identities, which, through their historical palimpsests, have become part of a broader cultural geography. (shrink)

Objects and events from the outside world are represented in our consciousness through the structure of time. Temporality and consciousness are closely related phenomena and in this paper, I intend to explore their relationship by referring to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. I will try to provide an adequate contemporary interpretation of Husserl’s understanding of temporality and the relationship between the internal structure of time and consciousness through the conceptual framework of dynamic systems theory and enactivist theory of cognition.. In (...) order to succeed in my intention, I will rely on a unique ability of the subject: activity. (shrink)